Brian Doherty, author of This is Burning Man, has an essay up on Reason about reactions to some of the changes taking place at this year's Burning Man (bottom line: the theme is "green," and related companies will be exhibiting products there):
People suspicious of markets and marketing bristle at the word "demographics," but it can mean something as innocent as "people who are into the same things."Emotionally, I don't understand why so many people get so upset at being marketed to, or at gleefully acknowledging the good that comes from crafting a social world that is dominated by people willingly exchanging skills, services, and goods. These types could be called Generation Dobler, after the famous quote from the sad sensitive man-child character, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack in the 1989 film Say Anything.
Dobler certified his soulfulness by announcing that "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed."
Which is lovely in its way, I guess, but the reason many people can indeed survive doing none of those things is because of the unprecedented wealth created by those who do. Most moderns, at least when pressed, recognize that commerce makes our lives richer in certain ways. What the Burning Man devotee wants is an opportunity to create temporary zones without it, for the entertainment value and for the (very real) additional (temporary) richness of social reality it creates.
But Burning Man is rife with the products of corporations, and always has been. And has always had to be. The prepared food items and bottled water we live on out there; the portajohns our wastes go in after eating that food and drinking that water; the tents we sleep in, the pipe and metal domes we lounge under, the clothes we wear, either exotic or normal–all sold to us not for fellow-feeling but by monied interests, usually corporate, who just want our cash. For Burning Man to be truly free of the products of corporate commerce, it would be a zone we could survive in for at most a few hours, and grimly at that.
Link to Brian's article.
Image: shot by Xeni Jardin, at Burning Man 2003.
Reader comment: Mike Estee says,
In the article you posted discussing Brian Doherty's thoughts on the left's hostility to market capitalism at Burningman there is a reference to John Mackey, one of the co-founders of FLOW (and CEO of Whole Foods), who's mission is to:
"articulate and animate an inspiring vision of a world with sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all, catalyzed and sustained by entrepreneurial initiative and conscious capitalism."
The very next post (not a coincidence I'm sure) on boingboing is "Whole Foods CEO caught bashing Wild Oats stock on Yahoo forums". I can't help but wonder if this is some of the "entrepreneurial initiative and conscious capitalism" which FLOW speaks so highly of. The two articles together are mostly just amusing, but they did get me thinking about something else:
Corporations are made of people, and tend to act like people, but there is a big difference which I feel is at the heart of the left's mistrust of them. Corporations, and by extension their leaders, have more power to enact change than a person does. That balance of power is where the mistrust lies.
As such, I think it's important to ask what kind of person a corporation will be, and weather or not they're someone you'd want to be friends with. Something we naturally do when we meet a person, but something I think few people spend time thinking about when they buy something. If we can find and build good corporations to be friends with, we can enact a great deal of social change around us. In that respect, I agree with the premise of Brian's article. I think the free market is the best place to change the world for the better, and I'm glad someone is preaching it as a tool for doing so.
