Yes. DGS is the organizers outsourcing acculturation to the camps because the event can't scale culturally in its modern state. For that reason, I'm on favor of DGS at roughly the current level and burners bringing burners. But we are seeing that certain camps, like the speeding ebike camp, are negligent in acculturation.Token wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 9:23 amWhich brings it back full circle to DGS being the deal with the Devil.
I can tell you first hand that BM was just as grand and awesome when theme camps ended on A-street.
Unfortunately, what started as an organic flow of ideas long ago has transformed to a corporate business model. Marion simply doesn’t have the ovaries to rip off the bandage and let the community find an organic solution that is inline with the ‘experiment in culture’.
What we need is the return of HellCo, the famed Playa opera, but actually live the parody out for realz.
There are about 100 legit theme camps out there every year, on average. Maybe a dozen or so create 80% of the vibe and allure.
The rest is just ticket grab shenanigans, bars, chill spaces, and a general creative void to meet a least common denominator.
But instead, we have thousands of theme camps pretending to do something memorable. Most fail pathetically at everything except the ticket grab.
Here’s an experiment for you:
Take the dozen or so them camps that deliver the goods, fund them with 30% of their DGS ask.
Take the rest of the 100 or so and fund them to a 20% ticket level.
The remaining couple-three thousand “theme camps” - 10% of their DGS ask.
Set up the HellCo Mergers and Acquisitions web page in Spark and let the people work it out, consolidate, fuse the big pile of garbage into something creative.
If the community doesn’t figure it out by June, you still have time to revert to the old DGS nonsense and save the corporate bacon, put out a good product- cringe.
Unlikely to happen since the BORG needs to do their big money grab early in the year …
What do I care, I got my fond memories all comfortably archived and cataloged of days gone by.
I have no idea what Larry and the inner board thought or think today. My theory is that the event could be sued out of existence by a single death or the non-zero chance of mass death, like a wildfire in the city. All the organizers have their retirement money safe, but none would want the event to flame out in a bad way. So likely the assets are fairly protected by the Byzantine legal structure.
Because they were limited in growth at BRC, they set their eye on overseas expansion, and of course, US and Canada expansion requiring flying-in, in order to keep the cult community growing, as burners got jobs, had kids, or aged out. They also needed the great professional middle class between hippie massage therapists who could take 2 weeks off and people wealthy enough to not work. They are fly-in, non-camp-builders and non-camp-strikers.
Then Larry got the messianic vision that the 10 Principles were going to change the world. Probably the great dusty hope would be if the BLM would sell the organizers Hualapai Flat, but it doesn't have the drainage of Quinn River to smooth it out every few years.
I looked into finding out what the 3% BLM take on Outside Services was, including by vendor, but was told it would be redacted to uselessness, so I didn't pursue it.
The organizers are trying to coax the concierge camp genie back into the bottle while not killing the goose laying the golden eggs. They need a flow of virgins, particularly young photogenic ones to sell the event like soap, but the virgins are coming unvetted from the mass media of sexy videos with dubbed music video soundtracks and no wind-o-vision or smell-o-vision of playa dust.
This was of course the great debate between John Law and Larry, and Larry won.
Fortunately, with the shortage of tickets, the organizers have opportunities to thin the BRC herd while not thinning the business model. We will see how it evolves.
