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Back in March, AfrikaBurn announced that the 2020 event was cancelled.

There was some serious pushback regarding the fact that tickets would largely not be refunded, which was addressed at length by organisers a few weeks later.

We suggest you enjoy this great video from AfrikaBurn 2019 to help ease the pain.

With the US death toll spiralling, and a government response best embodied by the buffoon at the helm, there was no way that 60 000 revellers could descend on the Nevada desert for this year’s event.

Rather than cancel the event outright, organisers have now said Burning Man will move from Nevada to the “multiverse”, which is a Burner’s way of saying online.

Over to VICE, which points out that planning is most certainly in the embryonic stages:

“We’re not sure how it’s going to come out,” the organizers wrote. “It will likely be messy and awkward with mistakes. It will also likely be engaging, connective, and fun.”

They haven’t released any details about what, exactly, a virtual Burning Man will look like, other than to say that they’re hoping to draw 100,000 participants, and that everyone will need “some kind of ‘ticket.'” Even without knowing what that ticket would be for, several longtime burners told VICE they’re already willing to buy one.

Burning Man organisers may well draw on the suggestions of Burners, who have flooded Reddit and blogs with suggestions.

Strap in:

…they’ve kicked around a number of ways they could build Black Rock City online using Second Life, Minecraft, or some kind of VR software. But the burners VICE spoke to said they’re most excited about the prospect of virtual Burning Man being, essentially, a directory of rooms on a video conference app like Zoom.

Instead of entering an IRL “theme camp” like the 7 Sirens Cove, “a pirate bohemia where merrymaking, gypsy lounging, dancing rhythms, and mischief run aground,” you’d join its video chat, put on an eyepatch, and drink a daiquiri—or log into one of hundreds of other themed rooms designed to replace traditional camps…

There are parts of Burning Man you can’t replicate on video chat—like, say, splitting a bag of mushrooms with a stranger. But burners are creative people; for better or worse, there are workarounds.

“Should we all get together on our screens and drop acid to have the Burning Man experience? I think people will take that approach,” Eamon Armstrong, who’s been to Burning Man ten years running, told VICE. “But we don’t really want it to be the type of thing where ‘we’re going to have a remote Burning Man’ means doing really large doses of drugs in your home, by yourself. Because that’s dangerous. Also, where are you going to get the drugs right now?”

Yes, these are among the most pressing questions at this time.

We’ve covered the ‘drugs’ part of the headline above, but what about the ‘sex’? Where there’s a will, there’s a way:

For about a month now, Ethan Cantil-Voorhees, who’s on the board of the Orgy Dome [ a literal orgy dome that burners looking for a safe, relatively clean place to have group sex], has been throwing “Zoom orgies” to replace the in-person meetups he used to organize in San Francisco. The first one had about 70 attendees.

In one side-room dedicated to food play, a woman slathered herself in caramel, and had her boyfriend smear cake on her body while she “got really intimate with a rolling pin,” Cantil-Vorhees said. Meanwhile, someone else in the chat “ate a fresh-cooked steak off of their partner’s ass.” He’d set up a whole slew of kink-specific rooms: One offered tantric sex; another featured a “12-person puppet orgy.”

He’s thrown a handful of other sex parties on Zoom, including one that drew around 400 people. He told VICE he could see something like that being incorporated into virtual Burning Man, though exactly what it would look like is up in the air.

Hey man, whatever a bunch of consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own homes, whilst sharing that experience with others via Zoom, isn’t any of my business.

More power to them.

Of course, just like everyone who comes back from a Burning Man / AfrikaBurn event will tell you (for days on end), it’s not just about getting jolly and off your trolly.

True Burners are looking for more:

…they’re hoping virtual Burning Man shapes up to be a legitimately transformative experience: one rooted in the festival’s “Ten Principles,” like “radical inclusion” and “communal effort,” and not just an excuse to put on a costume and get drunk in front of a computer screen.

No one seems to know exactly how to make that happen; no one really knows what “virtual Burning Man” even means yet. But for burners, that’s what makes it exciting.

Into the unknown, they venture.

Enjoy, you weird and wonderful humans.

[source:vice]