Lessons from the great Burning Man ticket fiasco debate

(Published in 2012 -- edited to correct typos and to improve clarity)

For those of you not affiliated with or remotely interested in the Black Rock Arts Festival (AKA "Burning Man"), the latest raging debate will be as much news to you as it will seem pointless squabbling in an internet back room :-)  However, engaging in the controversy was captivating and educational.  I'll try to tell the story in ways that highlight why.  Bottom line: event organizers massively screwed up, formally endangering the ability of many thousands of its most active contributors to attend.  The event will happen, but could be much damaged by a severe talent deficit.  When discussing the problem online, a common response was: shut up, what's done is done so make the best of the new reality.  This runs counter to everything I value about what the event tries to cultivate - so I picked a fight.
What: Burning Man (BM) is an art festival that happens the week before Labor Day in a high-elevation desert. That desert is empty for most of the year, becoming increasingly populated with temporary infrastructure as the event approaches, then lovingly restored afterwards to an empty desert. The event's focus is broader than making and admiring spectacular art. BM ethics also call participants to self-reliance: creating art, the event, one's community and ideally the world.  However, because the event is also a real celebration, that's led to it being viewed as little more than an excuse for a weeklong party.  That, combined with the fact that attendance is approaching 50,000, has made BM an irresistible target for scalpers.

A common refrain is that BM doesn't matter, nobody dies if they don't get to go, its not worth all the fuss, what's the big deal.  That's a fair point.  However, Burning Man (and to a large degree relationships at BM) helped me understand how much change I can create in my life and in my world. I don't participate in the event just to party.  I participate to create a better world.  That's not hyperbole; I think the event's influence extends far beyond that week in the desert.  For example, I've argued that as United States citizens we control a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth per capita and are obligated to live as responsibly as possible.  Minimizing waste, voting for people who will make positive changes in the world, etc.  So, BM creates positive changes in people who really can make the world a better place.  It creates participants and discourages spectating.  This is why it matters to me.

The players: As you can imagine, selling tickets for an event of this size is complicated business even without the damaging influence of ticket predation.  The BM organization ("the org")  wants to get tickets directly to actual participants, as well as to encourage those who come to take an active role in creating the experience.  Participants ("burners") also want this outcome, ideally as early as possible in order to facilitate creating large-scale, expensive art projects.  Those who view BM as a glorified party, put on for them by others in exchange for the ticket price they paid, are derisively called "tourists," "sparkle ponies," etc, often with strongly tribal and discriminatory undertones.  My limited experience has been that those who view BM as strictly recreation are perfectly happy to feed the scalpers.  And finally of course there are the scalpers themselves who presumably view the ticketing process as an opportunity to engage in radical self-enrichment.  How much of an issue is scalping?  I haven't seen any hard numbers, but given the amount of money involved and the fact that BM sold out for the first time last year...presumably it's common.  I think the org claims otherwise.

The issue: The org changed its ticketing system.  Previously, tickets were released in levels, from the earliest and cheapest (sold in January) to the most expensive and latest (sold after the early layers were exhausted).  The rationale, one I agree with, was that people very committed to creating the event would score tickets early in order to make sure they would be able to attend and bring their art.  The sliding scale was established as an incentive to commit early.  So, on a special day in January, the org's servers would jam and crash with the well-known issue of queueing a gazillion people in real time: a non-malicious denial of service attack made up of eager burners obsessively refreshing their browsers to secure a spot in virtual line.  This year, after a couple months of internal deliberation and no public calls for input, the org announced that it would change how tickets were awarded.  Instead of a queue in January, they said, would-be burners would instead register their credit cards, say how many tickets they wanted (up to 2 or 4 I think) and at what price level.  Then a lottery decided who got tickets and their cards would be charged.  80% of all the tickets to be sold were assigned in this way.

Recently the lottery was enacted.  The widely reported outcome among burners, predicted by many of us, was that very few burners got any tickets at all.  For example, many camps of 30 or more people have only a handful of tickets among them, whereas this time last year virtually all of them were ticketed (and beginning to plan their projects).  So where did all the tickets go?  It could be reporting.  Maybe most ticket-winners, not wanting to be jerks, are quieter than those who lost the lottery.  But this clearly is not the case among camps reporting severe shortages; they polled their members to estimate the damage.  And there are a lot of camps in this situation.  In order to win a lottery, you need numbers on your side.  The org told scalpers exactly how to win this: register lots of different names with different credit cards (or organize large groups of real individuals by promising to share scalping proceeds, or if trusted, hand them money outright to buy you a ticket).  Then sit back and wait for the tickets to roll in.  Unless a great reserve of "legitimately assigned" ticket purchases are sitting somewhere, it looks like scalpers gamed the hell out of the system.  That's speculation; I have no data.

And now comes the topical issue.  Epic complaining began on the internet.  The org royally screwed up, made a decision without input, didn't listen when the terrible outcome was correctly predicted, etc.  Incidence of the annual passive-aggressive responses, e.g.,  "I'm never going to BM again!" reached epic and early levels.  In response, as I said above, were posted videos or statements claiming that the community needed something like the ticket disaster because it represented "chaos" and that we would all benefit from having our "expectations" unmet.  People needed to stop "whining" and adapt constructively to the new reality. 

I could not disagree more strongly.  Here's a posted facebook response to such calls where I pick a fight (strong language edited out):

"With respect to everyone's touted and requested participation in the event, the arguments here make no sense. 1) "Complaining solves nothing." Feedback from the community means nothing? Then WTF does the event mean by referring to me as a "participant?" A silent one who passively accepts decisions from on high? 2) [My energies are] "better spent on one's project" ... that may never make it out [to the desert] with me? Wait...what? 3) "Passively accept the chaos that other peple's decisions created for you because it's good for you." This is also known as "no really it's awesome that I'm [disrupting your ability to plan] as a result of my [terrible] behavior." OK, dude. When did we decide that this was a fundamentally authoritarian structure in which I adjust to your bad decisions and tell myself that I like it?"

"I'll also point out that the organization has taken the ability to choose to attend, based on intent and commitment, entirely out of our hands. 80% of the tickets were assigned at random. So the event they chose is one that accepts attendees based solely on the criteria of convenience to the event and not on any individual's investment in contributing to the event. The outcome of that strudture is - or should be - painfully obvious.
"[Folks] can try to hide behind calling participants "whiners" ... but it doesn't make them any less a promoter of unquestioning respect for borg [org] authority. "Accept the [huge ticketing mistake] by calling it healing chaos?" Exemplary self determination dude.
"For instance. Can [those saying we should not complain and accept the issue]  explain how democracy happens without "whining?" Were civil rights protesters "whiners?" How ...might we dissent from the planned creation of any event without "whining?" Do we politely queue somewhere?"

...and so on.  The argument was that we should silently accept this as reality and just deal with it rather than expressing dissatisfaction.  I obviously felt otherwise, and strongly.
This leads to to one of two lessons I took from the debate.  Some were immediately inclined to accept this outcome as irreversible.  As reality.  I was not.  This isn't bad weather, it's a system we agree to create. The price of my agreement to participate is debate and discussion. Otherwise, how are the ethics of participation and self-reliance being enacted? By passively and silently accepting the decisions other people made that affect my choices. No way.  This affects an event I value and therefore demanding change is appropriate.  In other words, this isn't complaining - it's political discourse.

The other lesson I drew came from some pushback against my position.  As several people pointed out, many people complain with no intention of creating improvement.  All this does is create noise without leading to better outcomes.  In response, I wrote:
"...that clarifies a lot for me. Thanks for translating. Like you, I don't value straight "whining" if by "whining" we mean "negative feedback not motivated by a desire to improve." And probably like you, I've been in lots of conversations where I'm trying to engage the issues but find I'm trying to hit a moving target because the complainer isn't really talking about the issues. They're upset and venting, or unwilling/unable to get at what's really bothering them. In that case I think the answer is to call out the behavior. [Pro-acceptance friend #1] does this by saying "shut the *&$! up," which [is] ... more direct than what I do, e.g., "I don't think you're upset about these specific issues. Can you identify what the core issue is?" When what I'm often thinking is "you're interacting like a child. Quit wasting my time.""
Bottom line: it's important to refuse passively accepting bad outcomes.  "Participating" means calling out bad behavior regardless of being characterized as a "whiner."  That said, it's probably appropriate to limit expressions of dissatisfaction that do nothing obvious to help create better outcomes.

So what now?  I think my wife Haley was exactly right: scrap it all and do it over.  No tickets have been distributed.  Refund the charges and do it all over, probably with stying conservative and using the system that was in place for many years.  I don't think the org will do this, so we are left with band-aid approaches like setting up aftermarket exchanges and a vague call to "report scalpers."  Maybe there will be better solutions proposed, and I will happily promote good ideas whenever I hear them.

This is a classic blunder of having too few, and possibly too arrogant, minds on a problem that affects many people.  So I would radically change the way the org conducts itself.  Decisions that affect the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of people need to be transparent.  Submit a "request for proposals."  Go open source and ask people for suggestions on the best and fairest ways to distribute tickets that adheres to the values we all signed on with.  There are a lot of smart people who are heavily invested in making BM a continuing success.  Use them!