How burning man is turning into one of the hottest comoditie

Share your pictures and video. Tell us about the sights, sounds, and scents, as well as the rumors and truths found at Burning Man.
Post Reply
Blooming Bard
Posts: 28
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Berkeley
Contact:

How burning man is turning into one of the hottest comoditie

Post by Blooming Bard » Fri Sep 29, 2006 3:57 am

A freind of mine told me about the following cnn money article about how counterculture has become one of the most imortant qualities to have to be considered for really cutting edge jobs.I find this article so completely cool and so completely on time and on schedule with everything which has been happening around this planet.

Right bout a week or two before I go to burning man this year, I felt there was some big changes happening. Like some huge flux of light. Then I went to burning man and had the best burn ever in 6 years. Then I come back home and get offered a job without being interviewed, at one of the coolest companies I can think of, without even applying for them. I have no idea if they are burners who hired me, but I do belive, they saw something in my work, that got them to hire me, without even talking to me.

Now for the article :

http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/31/technol ... /index.htm

BUSINESS 2.0: Future boy
Talent hunting in the counterculture
Pyromaniacs on the payroll? Sure. Counterculture events like this week's Burning Man attract exactly the kind of creative people you want working for you.

By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor
August 31 2006: 4:48 PM EDT
Sign up for the Future Boy e-mail newsletter

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- If you want to make an appointment to see Larry Page and Sergey Brin this week, you'll have a harder time than usual doing so. The Google founders are making their annual pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for the Burning Man festival.
Google's known for its exacting hiring requirements, which include a degree from a top-notch university and a stratospheric GPA. But Page and Brin also have a preference for hiring Burning Man attendees - a practice that other talent-seekers would be wise to imitate.



Page and Brin are just two of the approximately 30,000 Burning Man devotees - burners, as they're known - who gather every year to help build and enjoy the art-filled collective on an ancient, dried-out lake bed known as Black Rock City (which, for the week it exists, is the third most populous burg in the state).
So many tech types attend the event, it's a running joke in Silicon Valley that you can't get any software code written or raise venture capital funding the week before Labor Day.
The Google guys have been going for almost as many years as they've been running Google. When this correspondent hung out with them in the desert in 2000, they were body-painted blue and green, respectively. After the pair hired Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2001, Brin explained their choice thus: "He was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man."
Fire in the belly
To the untrained eye, Black Rock City may look like it's filled with a bunch of dusty, pyromaniac proto-hippies partying in the desert. And it is, sort of.
But it's also a fountain of the most incredible out-of-the-box thinking and engineering. Participants spend thousands of dollars of their own cash to build their temporary community, and it encompasses both the sublime and the ridiculous.
According to the Burning Man organization, this year's 240 constructs include "flaming blocks of ice, a steam-engine powered insect carousel, a deconstructed cathedral, a robotic spider, a field of sunflower robots, a mobile 3-story Victorian house, a homicidal hammock, a rubber chicken-launching trebuchet, a gigantic burning bra, and much, much more!"
Of course, none of this art would be very useful to your business. But the brains that create it are worth their weight in platinum. If you're in an industry that demands constant innovation, if you despair of the inside-the-box thinking displayed by your buttoned-down employees, then you could do a lot worse than follow Page and Brin's rule: Look for signs of a counterculture before you hire.
Counting on the counterculture
If you rolled your eyes at that suggestion, you would do well to read up on recent business history. After all, the PC and Internet gold rushes did not spring from staid old East Coast technology behemoths like IBM.
As Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand wrote in his essay "We Owe It All to the Hippies," "The counterculture's scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution."
More dispassionate observers concur. The New York Times' John Markoff, one of the most respected technology journalists in the world, wrote a seminal tome last year called What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. The hothouse of the San Francisco Peninsula, which gave us the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, also gave us the integrated circuit and the Internet router.
The two groups of achievements are more connected than most of us care to remember. Consider, for example, that we would not have the iPod or the Macintosh without a certain acid-dropping, long-haired college dropout named Steve Jobs.
So should you go to Black Rock City with an eye to hiring the Steve Jobs of tomorrow? Of course not; burners consider talking shop to be terribly gauche.
Go instead to marvel at what creative people can do with the tabula rasa of an ancient lake bed. Go to discover how successfully community is fostered in a harsh environment that is trying its best to kill you. Go to participate (a key Burning Man tenet is "no spectators").
And if you happen to find yourself sailing across the desert in a vast pirate ship on wheels, sipping margaritas with a venture capitalist, an engineer, and two suspiciously familiar-looking guys painted blue and green - well, consider yourself lucky you didn't have to make an appointment.
========================


My take on this is as follows: I see our world like this. You see I belive eveyrthing so far has been created for a consumable throwaway economy, an unsustainable world, where greed and fear rule supreme. This system is made of replaceable parts. Its a humangous machine, which has run for millenia, on old thinking staus quo, and grey drab uninteresting unsexy stuff. It has run like clockwork, well as much as clockwork a machine like this can work on. Now with this new vibration on this planet, with how people are just tired of cycles of suffering and violence and sadness and emptynes. How they are tired of being so damn disconnected. this machine doesnt seem to work all that well anymore, in fact it is completely outa gas, and its about to be put to its timely end. Everything used to serve this machine before, this old tired matrix. Including the education system and how it would make replaceable parts just so afraid of authority.

What is gonna happen in the new world? this new contraption of course, this new world, this world that people like sergei and larry can see, can sense, this new thing is a weird contraption, its made NOT of replaceable parts, but totally unique crazy parts. Its made of parts such as ,a massage expert with a mohawk on the playa who is a transplant surgeon and mines crystal in the default world, or a crazy artist, painter, technologist, bagpiper, troublemaker who single handedly turn an tool made primarily destrction to an object of beauty which then these same google guys fall in love with, anyway u get the picture. This new machine needs new light, it craves light, it thrives on light. And the place its gonna get the highest purest most crazy talent with that gigantic light is burning man. That tabula rasa where the creative economy is in full force, where people troubleshoot hardest scientific problem as a hobby in total joy, while painting themselve colours of rainbow and next going on critical tits.

Speaking of weird contraption made of totally unique crazy parts recenctly I had the privelege of visiting berkeley marina where people had made incredible art out of industrial waste, and modern garbage. Take a look at divinexperiences.com/artofgarbage/ to see how human creativity, love and movement of spirit can animate the stuff that we throw away. The new contraptions that are gonna build our whole new reality look just like these, only they arent made of garbage, but shinyest most precious, and sometime tatoo covered, fully pierced jewels!


========

To get a full range of opinions in the burning man community of tribe I recommend you to take a look at the tribe burning man tribe where this article is getting a lotta traction.

http://bm.tribe.net/thread/e987d166-d16 ... 1ae5e93665

Post Reply

Return to “Stories”