(This is a continuation of my earlier post First Two Days at Burning Man. The shoddy photo to the right is of illumination village where we stayed, our camp is just behind the big yellow shade structure at the front left. The thing on the right is the pink pleasure palace.)

Thursday

• Ice run with Serena
  • Stairway to Hairven girl in queue, taking a snip of everyone’s hair
  • Playa beautiful
• Trying to find people, fail and get lost
  • Suburban BRC, not the nicest place to be
  • Clara visits
• Greek salad, and emotionally overwhelmed while eating barbecued chicken
  

• Troll trip, set out looking for fancy dress clothes
  • Questionnaire in the dust storm at a table
  • Body sprayed (2 coats)
  • Post office, woman with stilts went inside it (didn’t really fit)
  • Delivered mail in dust storm, green post troll, went to three places:
  • – Bouncy Bouncy Club
  • – Heavenly something bar
  • – Wagasomething place, camp further round 7 o’clock
  • Took ages as given lots of drinks.
  • Back home, flag building
• Wondering neighbourhood
  • Climbing small scaffold
  • Talking to Kate by caravan, Geena in truck
  • Blacklight theatre
• Dinner
  • at Serena’s brothers, hippies
  • Back to illumination village propane music, firey hat etc.
  • Burning mini-temple, atmosphere felt like Nov 5th bonfire night
  • Cycling round playa, mad light view near man
  • Back to lost penguin

Friday

• Big breakfast and camp tidy
• Trip to the perimeter fence
• Tree of wisdom, philosophy, talking to Liz
• Temple
• Growing mushroom/egg things in the middle of the desert.
• Thunderdome (photo right)
• Scaffold viewing platform across village square, went out to climb
• Ended up invited to full Indian dinner with sides with town planning students from Berkeley
• Mission to Mars
  • A mad crazy maze thing with much trickery and a fireman’s pole
• Hitched lift really lame art vehicle bar, peddled it myself, really highly geared so it took forever to get anywhere. Great fun. Someone filming me wanted me to go back and do it again as they missed it for the cameras. Irritating.
• Chillout dome, lieing down in remote middle of Playa
• Rotoscope diver was working (powered by a moto)
• Space shuttle, got a lift back
• Went out round various places not recorded as I must have been knackered the next day
• Amazing robot
• (Animal capture anecdote)

Account of things degrades a bit from here.

The last week or two I’ve started working for mySociety, a new charity which builds websites which are civically useful. We’ve got funding indirectly from ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) to build five interesting projects.

First up is Fax Your Representative (working title) which is an updated version of FaxYourMP. You enter your postcode to find out who all your elected representatives are at different levels of government, and their areas of responsibility. Then you can easily send your District Councillor, Welsh Assembly Member, London Assembly Member, County Councillor or whoever an email or fax. And you have a clue for the first time who they all are, previously very hard information to find out.

What’s the point of all this? It’s partly to use the internet to engage people, to give us all information and resources to help us influence and improve government. It’s also to make new ingenious web services which aren’t profitable, so no company will make them, and which are too hard for an individual unpaid volunteer to make. For example, Pledge Bank is a clever system which lets you say “I’ll do something if all you lot do as well” and follow it through.

I’m spending a bit over half my time working for them at the moment.

It’s hard to give a good feel for what Burning Man was like, since so much happens so quickly. Every line below is just a passing incident. Yet if it happened to you on a normal day, it’d be worth ringing up your best friend to tell them about it.

Each morning, after breakfast, I tried to write down every notable thing I’d seen the day before. I’m posting them up largely unedited, so it may not make sense, but should give you an impression. Here are the first two days.

Tuesday

• View of pyramid lake on the way in
  • Long straight roads
  • Sky, massive landscapes like a fantasy world. Such scope
• Dust storm as entering immigration
• Assembling parachute and lights and tents in the dark
• View of night lights on art car adventure like tron (photo above right)
  • Massive panarama unvailing sitting on back of propane instrument car as you zoom back out from the esplenade
  • Things everywhere, glowing flashing lights, colours, madness
• Strobe thing you pedal (the rotoscope one with sculptures)
• Discos at 2 o’clock (street and time ;)
  • walking round nearby looking at weird glowing things out slightly from into the desert
• Temple at end of playa
  • Solar powered bike/wing thing with huge wheel parked outside

Wednesday

• Making the kitchen
• Securing tent centre on ladder
• Beer wander (set out to get a beer from the next tent, and ended up:)
  • Dust storm while approaching the man, sheletered in the dome under him
  • Hiding from dust inside someone’s thesis
  • Lost penguin cabaret club, eating ice cream
• (Missed pizza and cocktails!)
• Ice mission
  • Unvolunteered from the centre camp cafe
  • Went to post office to volunteer, I think told to come back another time
  • Wheel that rolls with three people pedling inside it, thought it was static fairground ride to start with (picture right)
  • Sunset spectacular from sitting on a big swing platform thing in the process of being built by people speaking in Hebrew
• Flaming lotus girls perimeter duty
• Permiter partying, walked the whole circumference with Bob and James I think
  • Happy New Day party (with countdown, champagne and auld lang syne)
  • Tower at 3 o’clock plaza you could climb up
  • Maze of cardboard box walls, with a party inside it at the end
  • Spinning fluorescent tubes, in alien semaphore pattern

It’s clearly an arts festival. Crazy large scale modern art, sitting on the beautiful stark canvas of the Nevada desert. Grant funded mechanical theatre. On the first evening, we were taken to these twenty-odd sculpted divers hanging from a mechanical wheel (photo right). James and I raced round to the powering cycles on the other side, and managed to get it spinning, a strobe light flashing every frame. Not fast enough. A few days later someone had hooked a motorbike up, it rotated smoothly and the diving-man sculptures leapt one after another into the desert. Walking round the playa and the camps, you’d stumble upon things this good everywhere.

Actually it’s for personal art. Improvised theatre, dressing up, experimenting with new rules. Make that social art, a test-tube community. There’s no money at Burning Man (except to buy ice or illegal drugs), which made it the most refreshing holiday I’ve ever had. People give and share and help, making you want to do the same. There’s no “attitude”, no pointless altercations. Sounds like a bunch of hippies? Of course this community is partly an illusion. No money when we’ve all spent thousands in dollars to be there. Kindness, when it’s a yearly festival, we’re on holiday, not working, striving, competing. Yet still the experiment is worthwhile, and you come out instinctively “gifting” more in the real world.

Did I mention drugs? Obviously Burning Man is just a big rave in the desert. Some German newspapers are apparently insistent that it’s an electronic music festival. I’m sure it was a cocktail festival, but that’s circumstances peculiar to my camp. In reality, drugs were there, but frankly unnecessary when it was trippy just looking at peoples costumes. Much as I enjoy trance after having listened to Digitally Imported quite a lot last year, there was a bit too much of it. Much more fun was this person (photo left) from Illumination Village (where I stayed) who played percussion with burning propane.

But also it’s a spritual festival. Quite reasonably accused of paganism, we do build a big wooden statue of a man and burn him on the last day, after all. It’s a festival like any religion has, in the ancient sense of being a yearly holy day, a break from normal life. Some veterans I met there measure there years from the burning of the man, remembering what they did and what happened relative to each festival. Lurking behind it all was a surprisingly coherent philosophy.

You could deduce it from the messages people wrote on the temple (photo right) before it was burnt on the day after the last day. Most of the messages were to help deal with the end of relationships, and the death of parents. But some were more general, reminding each other to live in the now, that everything changes. To deal with life’s difficulties in an accepting way, also strong and resilient through understanding how small we are, how amazing we are. Yes it was a temple of trite phrases, but all true, and together forming something a little bit larger, which needs more description than this paragraph. A calmness.

So that’s where I was last week. That’s Burning Man.

Tomorrow I’m going to the US for the first time. I’ve saved it up, mainly because I’ve been more interested in going to countries which contrast more with my own. Many who have been tell me I’ll be unnerved, confused, by American culture. Shocked. But somehow I can’t quite believe them, I expect it to feel a bit like home.

There’s an interesting bit in the introduction to Lonely Planet guides to Britain. It says that for Australian/American/Canadian (and even Malaysian/Indian/Burmese) backpackers, a trip to what was once their imperial mother (or slave-driver) is always an emotional occasion. Like it or not, I’m part of imperial America, and it’s no surprise that I partly have the same feeling.

I can’t quite believe America really exists. I’ve seen the movies, I know who the last few premiers are, I can name many of the provinces, I’m fluent in the language, highly conscious about the politics. Normally I have to read a bit about a country I’m visiting to have any chance of knowing what is going on. Not here. I think I know it well, which is perhaps why people tell me I’ll be shocked by what it’s really like.

A few things I’ve stumbled on the last day or two by way of accidental research:

I’ve finally settled into my new house, which means I’ve cleaned my bedroom window so I can see peoples feet more clearly as they walk past. After living for five years in a pre-gentrified old-industrial area of Cambridge, Portugal Place where I am now seems very busy.

Although many tourists do walk past, not many find this narrow pedestrian place. Unfortunately, if you head up to the main road it doesn’t feel very real and full of community. More like Cambridge the theme park. But going the other way there are quiet streets, Jesus Green park, and easy access to the cafes on King Street.

If you would like my new address or home phone number, then email me. It is very convenient for popping in while you’re in the centre of town. Or perhaps after you have been clubbing (what am I doing, encouraging people to visit me in that state!). Luckily, and to my surprise, my mobile works fine in my basement room.

Did you know, you can make completely new people? Extra special people. They have super powers. They can split apart into multiple new people, or fuse together back into one. You can destroy them and nobody feels any pain, but sometimes they can live almost forever. All without the hard work of having a baby.

Most importantly, in many circumstances, you can use them as super shields. If you’re about to get sued, you can hold up one of these magic people, and let them get obliterated on your behalf. You emerge unscathed, and the person won’t complain or even exist any more. All perfectly legal, and you won’t even feel guilty.

Of course, I’m talking about “incorporating”, which means to put in bodily form (like a corpse). It’s to make a legal entity that looks to the law like a person. This can be a company, a charity, or your stamp collecting club. At the moment I’m self-employed, but I’m thinking about incorporating mainly to avoid legal liability in certain cases.

I thought I may as well incorporate as some sort of co-operative, since I spent so much time researching them a while ago. While looking into this again, I found an excellent quote which actually defines “non-profit” as I would mean it. It’s about ownership and getting your employees and customers on side. Not at all about not making profit.

So what is a not for profit organisation?

Not for profit is a descriptive term and should never be allowed to become a management culture. In the end there are only too types of enterprises – profitable or insolvent. Not for profit has become short hand for organisations that do not distribute earnings to owners. They do, of course, distribute earnings to stakeholders as employees and suppliers.

(from the cat’s pyjamas)

ICOM, the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, which I mentioned back then, has changed its name. They’re now part of Co-operatives UK. They still provided legal services and off the shelf rules for co-operative style companies. There are some fancy new things called Limited Liability Partnerships which I hadn’t spotted before. They came into existence in 2001 following an act of parliament. You get the structure of a partnership, as a firm of lawyers might use, but with the limited liability that you could previously only get from a company.

Even if a website isn’t yet as useful as it should be, sometimes it attracts attention and excitement. On Thursday, Julian and I were presented with an award for The Public Whip. It’s the winner of the “Civic Renewal” category for the New Statesman New Media awards. There are photos. Partly this was a good excuse for the New Statesman to get sponsorship for their summer party, which was great fun.

The week before, a few of us involved in Downing Street Says went to visit Number 10. Again, there is a photo. 10 Downing Street is much less like a home and much more like an office block than I expected. Albeit, an office block with beautiful paintings, carpets and furniture that you normally find in the Victoria and Albert museum. No, we didn’t meet the Prime Minister, lots of other people work at Number 10. We were meeting those who make the PM’s website.

Political engagement, it’s a struggle. It’s summer, the beer is fine, and house prices haven’t fallen for over ten years. Too busy being taught how to decorate by the latest television programme, why should anyone be bothered with politics?

Imagine a manager who never came into work. A boss who never even rang you up to ask you what you were doing. How hard would you slave away if he was always off walking in the countryside? If he still paid you your salary no matter what you did?

Well, you are that manager. Yes you. There’s someone who works for you and, be honest, you have no idea what they are up to. You’ve probably even forgotten that they work for you, which is strange since you pay them quite well.

Yesterday we launched TheyWorkForYou.com, a project which a few of us have been working on for the last nine months. Head on over there, type in your postcode. Find out who is working for you, statistics on how well they are doing, and a record of what they’ve said recently in their place of work.

There’s an article in today’s Guardian which explains it all.