Why Your Decommodification Argument Needs a Hard Second Look
I’m part of a community of people who call themselves Burners, a group of individuals that attend and participate in Burning Man and related events. This is an article written specifically to that community and may not relate to others, as it’s about one of the 10 Principles that Burners follow as an ethos.
The 10 Principles are a set of guidelines that are in place to help the community stay sustainable and ethical in its practice. The intentions of them are noble and I fully stand behind them, but today I want to discuss the specific principle of decommodification and how it’s practiced.
Our current world is flooded with commercialism. Ad Campaigns, influencers, big business and a constant message to buy more stuff. The principle of decommodification had the explicit purpose to keep that message off the playa and create a more sacred space where we could shape our own identity.
On the playa (or other regionals), you’ll find no sponsorships, corporate branding, or exchanging of money. Everything that is brought is a gift once it’s on site. This helps change our social practice from transactional to pure unattached interaction, an experience we’re not able to have almost anywhere else in our lives.
As stated by Larry Harvey in 2004, “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”
This is an INCREDIBLE goal, one that I fully and completely stand behind as a principle. Unfortunately as a practice I’m watching it be more damaging to parts of our community than it’s intended to be, and that’s what I want to address.
Photo by Owen Wiltshire
To understand where I’m coming from you have to understand a little bit about me. My full-time job is as a professional artist and I’ve been working with the Burner community and others like it for well over 15 years. I am extremely passionate about this community. One of my life passions is to help create solutions specific to this community, as well as bringing the spirit of this culture into the world on a daily basis. Because of this, I’ve headed several organizations and initiatives, some of which have turned into sustainable businesses in the default world.
One of the businesses I’ve been a managing partner in for the last five years is a company called Archimedes Design. Archimedes was started by my two business partners who had been on the playa for many years running a theme camp. They wanted to see if they could build better structures that would go up faster and offer more shelter specific to the playa environment.
By the time I joined them we resolved a dome design that solved for a bunch of problems. A 26’ dome that could go up in under 30 minutes, pack down smaller than the trunk of your car, parts that could be switched out and fixed so you never had to throw your gear away, fabric that could be easily switched out for art and designs, all that offered you ideal shelter in the desert.
It was something made by Burners, for Burners, and we were in love with the solution we’d come up with. We wanted to make it sustainable to create so we made it into a business where we listed the product as cheap as possible, made all the parts ourselves by hand, made the plans open-source, and we were willing to teach and work with anyone who was interested. But of course, we still had to have a price tag on it. Materials aren’t free (although quite frankly, we completely donated our time for about the first two years). We were passionate about sharing this and just wanted to get it out there.
But then we faced our first dilemma- how do we talk about this solution with a bunch of other people who don’t want to talk about it? This created my first real experience with the problems of decommodification.
Because we didn’t want to step on the toes of this specific principle, we were very careful about how we handled talking about this product. For the first couple of years we were only doing word of mouth, handing out cards to specific people who asked, etc. And yet the backlash to us handling it in this way was still HUGE. On average I would say about 2 out of 10 people would inform us that we shouldn’t “profit,” off of Burning Man (and let’s be clear, we weren’t even breaking even for the first while).
I have had random people chew me out when they watched me handing a business card to a stranger and they weren’t even part of that interaction. I have had my skin torn off on forums for even mentioning that I sell a product that could solve the problem in question. I have gotten emails from strangers who’ve seen photos of the domes in the desert and have chewed me out for using the playa as a background to sell my stuff.
It got so bad that by year three of the company we stopped selling to Burners entirely. We stopped giving Burner discounts, we stopped making it open source and we stopped trying to have any conversation whatsoever about selling these domes in that community. We completely switched markets because of the aggression our own community showed us over trying to make a sustainable solution that was literally built for the playa.
This, unfortunately, is an experience I and others like me have had again and again. I meant to write this article last year when I saw a forum explosion about how the Burner artists in the Smithsonian were becoming too commercial. I meant to write it this spring when the Manish Arora show was verbally hacked to pieces by the local community because it showed at Paris fashion week.
But I’m writing this today because yesterday my link to my new clothing line got posted in response to a specific question about it on a Burner Facebook group, and I immediately got an email and two Facebook messages informing me that I was breaching the decommodification principle.
So let’s break down this principle and how we use it because I think that the way we are currently applying it does more damage than good to our actual community.
Photo by Michael Holden
Let’s look again at Larry Harvey’s quote. In it, he talks about protecting our culture from exploitation and focusing on participation rather than consumption. Those are two excellent points I’d like to break down.
Protecting our culture from exploitation
I actually wrote my Master’s thesis on transculturation vs. cultural appropriation/ exploitation and one of the things I learned was this- Unhealthy appropriation/ exploitation occurs when people outside of a specific cultural space can make money or gain social capital from artifacts or cultural ideas when people who are in that community cannot. This is a complex idea, but the basis of it comes down to a power dynamic.
A good anecdote to describe this was the New Age movement in the 80s, where Native American spirituality was suddenly seen by the white population as something to be desired. What occurred was a huge movement of people and companies selling and profiting off of Native American spiritual artifacts.
At the same time, this was happening there were still laws all across North America that banned Native Americans from even owning their own artifacts, let alone selling them. This transcends to today where the largest producer of “aboriginal” artifacts is China, while a large number of Native populations are still impoverished and can’t make money off of their art or artifacts. This is what harmful appropriation looks like.
So if you translate that to our space we can use the example of companies or influencers who are not a part of and don’t contribute to the community. Exploitation happens when they come in and use images of that space in order to sell product, while (and here’s the key component) the actual artists and designers who exist as a part of that environment cannot.
So, if we’re harassing our own community members who are trying to make a sustainable space from their practice, we are actually contributing to an unhealthy power dynamic that keeps our own community impoverished.
The balance of power is shifted however when actual community members begin to make their contributions to the world sustainable. Interactions where community members can intake money as a resource, which then can get put back into the community, closes the loop, and retains power in the culture. Then, instead of members having to work for corporations and companies that are of a different ethos in order to fund their “gifted art habit,” the member can instead start to contribute to their community and the attached culture full time.
Participation rather than consumption
Participation is part of a complex eco-system that takes a lot to sustain it. There has to be a framework built that meets our basic needs as well as creating all of the art and happenings that we can engage and interact with. The art, theme camps, events, gifts, etc, are what make the Burn such a magical place, but we need to be clear about one thing- creating all of that takes a lot of STUFF. (Extra reading about Burning Man and Capitalism)
While we’re on playa we like to forget about all of the objects we had to buy to get there, and I fully approve of creating a Temporary Autonomous Zone where we can imagine living in a transaction-free environment. I agree wholeheartedly that there should be no sponsorships or logos and that space be made a pure as we can make it. But let’s talk honestly about the before and after.
When I go to the Burn, my standard cheapest possible budget is about $1500. This is just my personal budget and doesn’t include any of the art or structures I build. So let’s say that part of that is travel, tickets, and food and that about one-third of that is buying things I need/ want to survive on the playa. So let’s say I spend $500 on goods. Tents, water containers, gear, clothing, etc. This is an extremely conservative number compared to a large majority of people I know who attend.
So at this basic smallest number of $500, let’s multiply that by the 80,000 people on-playa yearly (not even counting regionals) and we suddenly have 40 million dollars spent on products just for Burn week. That is an unbelievably large amount of buying power.
Now, let me ask you this- how many of you shopped at places like Walmart or at any other large scale company with horrific values and sweat-shop labor and predatory business practices? How many of your costumes came from online shopping and cheap labor in Asia? How many of you bought one-time use goods for your Burn that you threw away immediately after?
So if we honestly want to talk about consuming less so that we can bring Burner values into the real world, let’s talk about how much we are voting with our dollar. When we spend money at these places we buy cheaper goods, which means we have to buy them more often. When we spend money at these places we are devaluing people from around the world who work in horrific working conditions to give us an abundance of cheap crap. When we shop at these places we are giving power to companies who are profiting off of our culture, rather than making our own cultural economy sustainable.
The markup prices for most big business is anywhere from 70-90%, whereas the markup price for most art is generally 10-20% That means that when you buy a product from a corporation, a tiny percentage is actually going to the people that made it, the rest is pure profit to the corp. When you buy from an artist or designer, the majority of the cost goes directly to the labor that’s creating it, and if there’s any profit, more often than not it gets put back into the art process. The economics of art-making are actually incredible, and one of the only models that keep the majority of the money circulating within the community. This is how community models can be made sustainable.
On top of that, when people spend more money on objects that they find really special, they tend to buy fewer things. They tend to use those special pieces year after year instead of throwing them away or replacing them. For me, this is the best-case scenario, and the only one that truly embodies how I feel about the values of decommodification and anti-consumption.
So, before you rag on someone who posts a link to their latest project on Facebook, maybe ask yourself these three simple questions-
1. Is that person from and contributing to our community?
If this is a person who has been shaped by and has helped shape our culture, then they have a right their personal ideas that have come from their engagement with that cultural shape. If these are people whose ethics are in check and truly just desire to make their ideas and art sustainable, maybe try supporting them instead of making their life harder.
2. Are they disseminating their ideas in a respectful and content appropriate way?
No one likes spam and I think it's essential that we address when people are pushing something without actually contributing to a conversation. But if someone on a Burner page asks, “Hey, I want to buy from some local designers, any suggestions?” then I shouldn’t get flack when I respond with mine and my other designer friends websites.
3. Is it ethical?
If the way this person is producing art or products is harmful to people, the community or the environment, then we also shouldn’t be helping support the dissemination of their products.
I want to be very clear that being a full-time artist is in no way a lucrative career. It is an extremely hard path and not for the faint of heart. It is what I do because I am so committed to bringing the values of art and community into the world at large. I want the culture I love about Burning Man to exist year round and everywhere. I would absolutely give away everything I made for free (and often do) if I could do that and still eat. In fact I price my stuff way cheaper than I actually should because I’m committed to trying to make it available to as many people as possible.
What I want is to feel supported and cared for by my community in my goal of making art more available to the world. In order to make that sustainable, I have to sell some of it. When people make me feel bad about selling my stuff then I have less energy to make art and contribute to my community. When this community attacks me for trying to make my art practice sustainable, it makes me feel like I should take my art and go play with people who are actually exited about what I do. In my mind this is exactly the opposite of what a community should do for each other. We should be encouraging each other in our endeavours and our expressions so that we can continue to grow and thrive together.