...all you have to do is say yes

TL;DR: The Snarchitect is creating a new burning man camp focused on art and harm reduction. If you’re interested in any way, please submit an interest form here.

New Beginnings

The need to create always has mixed origins. Sometimes it comes from a place of frustration that the world isn’t better than it is. Sometimes it comes from inspiration from the beauty, goodness, and truth that would exist should a thing be born. And sometimes it comes from what we think we want only to discover in the process how our expectations were wrong. The best creations come from a deep knowing—an intuition—that a thing needs to exist even if we can’t fully explain why. When we follow this intuition we create something beautiful and unique.

I am announcing the creation of a new burning man camp. It’s called “The Sacred Yes.” The German philosopher Nietzsche describes the sacred yes as the yes you say to life. It’s the deep affirmation of life with all its nuance and complexity, highs and lows, joys and sorrows. This camp is a reflection of all the experiences I’ve had in 11 years of burning man and all that’s missing in what I’ve seen in this community over these years. It will focus on the most pure forms of self-expression and gifting. As I currently understand it, that means creating art and reducing risk through fentanyl testing and hydration.

Stated otherwise, it's been 11 years and I haven't created a Nietzsche-inspired burning man camp yet? To say this is an oversight is the biggest understatement in recorded history.

Here, I’ll walk you through the intuition of what’s to come.

The Intuition

So what is this intuition behind this new project? The truth is, I’m not sure. But what I know is that there’s something greater that needs to be built. My every success is based on when I intuited a better world, believed in it, and acted to make it a reality. And my deepest trust relationships have come from a shared respect for one another’s intuition through the process of co-creation. So my goal is to aggregate a bunch of intuitive and capable people and build something great focused on art and harm reduction.

More specifically, here’s the intuition, at least how I currently best understand it:

• First, burning man camps already have a blueprint of the ten principles. It’s as basic as following them. When camps succeed, they’re true to the principles. When they fall short, more often than not it’s because they’re misaligned to them. So this new camp is first and foremost about strong alignment with the spirit and intent of the 10 principles.
• Second, The Sacred Yes is about a deep affirmation of life. No nay-saying or spiritual bypassing. It’s about a profound yes to life, the universe, and everything. Its messiness, its beauty, its sorrows. It’s about profound spirituality and cavalier irreverence all in one. In a word: human. It’s agnostic to the details of who wears what, identifies as this or that, believes in such and such a god, or has a given process of understanding the world. To be aligned with the ethos, all you have to do is say yes. Embrace your sovereignty and that of others. Say yes to life.
• Third, it will be co-creative. This is a container to channel the collective intelligence of its members. I have certain things I want to build but it’s fundamentally about the emergent phenomena of the group. Want to collaborate on a given thing? Great. Want to do the minimum to make the camp run and then do your own thing? That’s cool too.
• Fourth, it’s iterative. We’ll start with a small core group of aligned individuals and we’ll slowly build from there. This will set the foundation for years to come. The first year could just be as simple as open camping.
• Fifth, it’ll grow at the right pace. Camps get over their skis when they take on too much. Then they burn people out or have to hire help because they don’t have enough people aligned to the vision. Simplicity is sophistication and slow is fast. This is the optimal balance between giving our gifts and respecting the sovereignty of our own needs. This means minimal infrastructure necessary for the vision to exist that doesn’t over-optimize the camp experience at the expense of that vision.
• Sixth, my initial intention is to build art. I view art as the most pure self-expression at burning man. If others want to build other things, such as a public offering, experiences, or their own art, that’s great. But my goal is to focus on art.
• Seventh, in addition to art, the vision will focus on the gift of grounding. That can be providing a calm place to restore with water and food or other forms of harm reduction. I feel particularly called to education and testing for fentanyl but this is an implementation detail.
• Eighth, it’s always about the people. People above process. Deep care. Rules only insofar as they’re needed for the vision to exist and respect for one another’s process beyond that. It needs world-class conflict mediation for the tensions that inevitably arise.
• Nineth, the best idea wins and the best person leads. I’ll take lead for year one, foster the vision, and then we reevaluate who should lead and what the camp should do. Good leadership is a combination of intuition, care, and the raw horsepower needed to create a thing.
• Tenth, there is a focus on sustainability. There should be absolutely minimal disposability of all camp items. Need zip ties to set something up? Re-engineer it. Can you only use carpets for two years before needing new ones? Find something used or get another plan in place. Long term ideas and commitments are key.
• Eleventh, it balances commitment to the vision with our external commitments. This primarily means that we can expand and contract our commitments relative to our desires to have children, build our careers, and practice self care.
• Twelfth, it will be kid friendly. We need to be sure that families have a home on playa as we continue to be engaged with the burning man community.
• Thirteenth, it will be motivated by love for the stranger. Do we live in a benevolent universe? I believe we do. So embodying that love of the people we will never meet and looking for ways that the goodness from our self-expression will trickle through the world is a mainstay of this project’s ethos.
• Fourteenth, it will balance our sovereignty and gifting. This is the polarity at the core of burning man. Focus too much on gifting and you’ll burn out. Focus too much on yourself and you’re a spectator. This camp is about finding the middle way between these extremes.

I’ll continue to improve upon the points above. But this constellation of insights provide an initial map of a possibility space to create something more true to vision than I’ve ever witnessed at the burn before.

Closing Remarks

When one creates a thing, they must ask themselves whether that thing is the highest expression of the Platonic ideal of that thing. For some time the various camps I’ve been involved with have allowed me to express in the highest most true form given the circumstances. However, intellectual honesty when a given thing no longer serves you is key. It has become apparent that despite the good from these various projects, they’re no longer enabling my highest expression or the highest expression of their participants. And if that thing does not exist in the world then the onus is on me to create it. Hence, the creation of The Sacred Yes.

I wrote one of my masters theses on the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In it he talks about the evolution of needs from the need to be, to the need to have, and finally to the need to have the appearance of having. You can think of this as the movement from existential being to material possessions to status symbols. Eventually this turns into the “simulacra,” or a copy without an original. In a word, things get increasingly removed from their original meaning until you wind up in the dizzying simulated space of instagram, misplaced expectations, external validation-seeking, unconscious activities, doing what you think you should be doing, etc. Burning man culture–like most cultures–is in some twisted turn of a simulacra. I believe that there is so much good and value to burning man. I also believe that there are many ways in which the culture needs to be reset back to the core values it has forgotten. That’s true of my past camps and true of the burn more widely. Instead of taking my toys and going home, I’m committed in one way or another to continue to show up as an active participant and fully self-express in the context of burning man to help realize that vision. The Sacred Yes is the next incarnation of these efforts.

Burning man is the thing I’ve done most consistently in my life. Every year is a new iteration with similarities to the past and elements that are completely new. It’s the differentiation and integration cycle or peak states followed by integration to baseline states on repeat. This next turn of the cycle will be a continuation of this process: a deeper, more pure expression of intuition. It will be imperfect yet aligned with a deeper knowing.

If this resonates with you, let me know here and we’ll build something great.

And if you're interested in the full backstory, here's the 11 year history of how this came to be. Feel free to peruse this site from time to time for updates on how this project is evolving.