ePlaya

Burning Man’s Black Rock City culture is formed by telling stories, and participant-to-participant interactions, in-person, and on social media.

A strong vector has been discouraging mobile phones out and about in Black Rock City. I believe it is time to revisit and adapt the cultural place of mobile phones in Black Rock City.

I hope this proposal is the start of a discussion in the Black Rock City and Regional community.

In summary. the suggestion is for more social use rather than individual use of mobile phones, individual reflection on mobile phone habits to inform them in Black Rock City, balancing accidental findings and seeking on playa, reducing MOOP and lost bicycles, and not burdening lost & found.

I am an engineer and a burner since 1999 to current with gaps, and now carry a mobile phone in Black Rock City. I have an ethnography (anthropology) background I have applied to many projects, and have worked in mobile device studies. That said, every reader of this knows their own mobile use in depth.

First, carry your phone in a way you will not lose it, and preferably in a way that takes intention to use it.

I carry mine in a waterproof neck or over the shoulder pouch with my ID. The phone is labeled with my contact information: name, camp address, email, and independent alternate phone number. It is easy to decorate with fabric or bling out those pouches. Maybe decorate it as a heart. If your phone is in your pocket, it can easily fall out. Phones are slippery devils. Over 1000 phones are returned to lost and found. It can take weeks or months to get them returned. That is a big inconvenience. Keep them backed up to the cloud when you have good connectivity at home before you get to the playa!

Second, instead of “taking” a picture of a person, ask someone you meet, and have a conversation with, to make a picture of you. You can easily so selfies of you together on both of your phones. Make the experience an interaction! I usually will make a series of images of the person requesting it and angles you can’t do with a selfie; multiple images minimizes the chance a picture has eyes closed.

Third, it has become a habit to experience music performances videoing them with a phone held high. Think through for videos and stills, “what am I going to do with this?” What have you done with all the pictures and movies on your phone now. I find I rarely use most of what I capture on my phone. Much of the artwork and the MVs are professionally captured by photographers with excellent equipment and credit the creator. Many of the DJ sets are publicly released with very good recording off the mixer, and no wind noise! Many of the large sound camps/vehicles release very good videos.

Sometimes you are on a mission to get to a certain place at a certain time in Black Rock City. Other times I am in no hurry and make accidental discoveries, or smile at a stranger and start a conversation. The Burning Man apps are an easier way to use the What, Where, When than the paper version, and an easier way to find camps than the paper map. Mobile phone apps are deliberately designed to be addictive. Black Rock City is a good time to be intentional about your use of the tool. It would make no sense to go through life with a hammer in your hand, using it as often as we use our phones off playa.

Bikes! Every year about 2000 bikes are left on playa. They are MOOP! Lock your bike even if you are using the potties. If it is an e-bike, use even better locks. Make a distinctive bike totem that works for day and night. And drop a pin in your app to be able to find your bike. Any big gathering of hundreds of bikes - at camps, burns, or events is a recipe for losing a locked bike. Even if your bike is a beater, lock it.

Last, and this is long, because I’m a technology ethnography geek! Skip to the end if you like, that is the important part.

The magic of phones is their connection to the Internet. That can be a curse too. This question is one of the greatest disconnects between older Black Rock City leadership and younger participants. It is a generational difference. Can we talk about that?

My first mobile phone was in the late 1980s paid for by work. By somewhere before 2000, the Oregon Country Fair Camp brought an Internet satellite dish to the playa and redistributed it a short distance with WiFi. The Googlers camped near them for that reason. Sometime in the early 2000s (20 years ago!) Gerlach got Internet, and Internet was brought to the playa over wireless at a capacity which would be embarrassing today.

Eventually the public WiFi network was launched where camps would buy antennas and point them toward Center Camp, or camps brought satellite dishes. Sometimes people rented expensive satellite phones. Now a large number of camps bring Starlink, and redistribute it on WiFi to friends and family. The technical and business roadmaps of satellite providers will bring handheld always-on Internet to just about everywhere on the planet with real time satellite look-down video views. So it is time to think about how we use that on playa now, and in the future.

An incoming alert to our mobile devices is an interrupt to life in the moment. You were going about the experience of life, and that alert means you need to stop what you are experiencing, decide to check on the interruption, and then if you investigate it, decide how much time to devote to it.

Using a mobile device to take a picture, make a movie, to receive an alert, or send, interrupts the immediacy, the flow, and face-to-face interactions.

So Black Rock City is a great opportunity to experiment with degrees of disconnecting from the Internet and messaging.

Most people in their daily lives disconnect when they are sleeping. Maybe if you’re the president, you can’t disconnect and you have staff to wake you up and inform “you have 10 minutes to make a decision to blow up the world.” Most people would disconnect when they are making love. I’ve never heard of a person who did not disconnect for their yoga. Some families disconnect to have dinner and conversation. A surgeon is going to disconnect during brain surgery.

My observation is that most Black Rock City participants understand this and disconnect to the degree they are comfortable.

Every year Black Rock City has about 30% first time participants. They have to teach themselves a thousand things which are new: consent, desert survival, preparation, all about MOOP, our unusual LEO situation, and all the little very important things about our social customs and the 10 Principles.

How do we teach them different mobile device habits in Black Rock City?

I hope we can open a conversation.

That is a nice essay SSE.

Immediacy was a fun Larry-isms. One of my faves.

I’m pretty sure it will continue to live in small pockets and random places on the Playa.

I can most definitely state that there was way more bare-ass prior to 2007 and the arrival of the smartphone. Way more!

Some interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing it.

I started burning before the rise of iOS/Android devices, but I've been using what were considered smartphones in their times since before then. At the recommendation of the person leading my camp and helping me figure stuff out back in 2004, I powered it down once I got to Reno and didn't turn it back on until getting to Reno on the way home again. I did that for a bunch of years.

In coming back to the playa in 2011 after a break, I realized two things. First, my smartphone was essentially a sealed glass slab, and effectively dustproof. My consumer-grade digital camera had a better optical zoom lens, but it was not dustproof. The second realization was that I quite liked a couple of the camera apps I was using at the time. That year, when I got past Reno I just switched the phone to 'airplane mode' which turns off the radio transmitters, and saved on some battery usage. That worked out great. I didn't take tons of pictures, but I like the stuff I bothered to take.

A few years later, I don't recall which one exactly, I had come out early in build week, and our camp had a wide-ranging mix of first timers and international burners with complicated travel plans coming in days after I was. As camp mayor I wanted to be there as best as I could in case there were any last-minute freakouts or situations, so I did not turn my phone's 'airplane mode' on until the last person arrived at camp. That also worked out great, and also turned out to work both ways. A campmate arrived the day after I did who had forgotten a headlamp or something, and we got word back to another campmate to pick one up. Hilariously, in a subsequent year I was the one who needed a headlamp.

I've tinkered with a couple of the burner guide apps. They're potentially useful in a pinch, but not something I would bank on using. I do make a point of trying to get the last big update before the event downloaded into the phone, so that if I get into a pinch I have it. I don't have an issue with anyone using a guide or an app/camera type thing.

The social media aspect is a little cringey. I didn't really think it was that bad, then I took 2024 off. Wow, the ridiculous flood of people posting and even livestreaming multiple times a day to their socials was intense. Years back I might have been a little more judgmental in my thinking ("you're doing it wrong!"), but my attitude now is a bit more live-and-let-live, as it were. There are lots of different ways to burn, it's about finding what works for us and leads to getting the most from the event.

I'm a big fan of immediacy, too. It's kind of funny, as smartphone cameras have gotten better and better I don't even feel a need to bring a separate camera, and I almost always have it someplace on my person... so in theory I should be able to capture more magical moments on the playa... but I still struggle to document a lot of stuff.