Burning Man Still Fires Up The Geeks

Burning Man may not be as cutting-edge as it once was, but it still draws the crowds. Some 40,000 all-told this year, according to the festival's organizers. And even though a wild-eyed, face-painted Grinch tried to spoil the fun by firing up the Burning Man ahead of time, all the Whos out in Burnville are building another giant wooden man and plan to go ahead with the scheduled torching this Saturday.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe crypto-pagan folksonomies don't come from the store! Maybe trans-nudist cyber-raves... perhaps ... mean a little bit more!

At any rate, despite the arsonist's attempt to steal Burning Man, thousands have converged on the playa to see if their small consciousnesses might expand three sizes this week. The desert festival's attendance has grown exponentially since its tiny beginnings in 1986, when just 20 or so artists and urban pranksters marked the summer solstice at San Francisco's Baker Beach by burning a Wicker Man-like sculpture. When a 1990 run-in with federal Park Police forced the organizers to move their now-annual incendiary art installation to Nevada's Black Rock desert for the burn, the event began to attract people intrigued as much by the construction of a temporary, barter-based society in the wilderness as with the actual climactic destruction of the eponymous Man itself.

By the mid-1990s, IT professionals made up a large portion of the growing crowd at "Black Rock City," the temporary town that becomes the most populous settlement in Nevada's Pershing County each year for the week of Burning Man. The expansion of the desert party coincided with the beginnings of the Dot-Com boom, which brought thousands of young people flocking to Bay Area start-ups. Groundwork for alternative "team-building" experiences had been famously laid by companies like Apple in the '80s and it seems only natural that a quasi-spiritual trek to a complex, cantilevered art installation in the desert has attracted the next generation of IT engineers and evangelists alike.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who went to several late-90s burns, are arguably the most famous attendees from the tech world. Today, it's the young Turks at Web 2.0 start ups who are likely to spend a week in the searing heat and anthropological stew of the playa.

A stroll around San Francisco's South Park, one of the hippest locations for Web 2.0 companies, reveals several shuttered shops -- though it's difficult to tell if that has more to do with Burning Man or a failure to pay rent. Mike Walsh, CEO of social networking software company LeverageSoftware, sits in his South Park office but admits he'd rather be at Burning Man.

"I'd love to get up there Thursday or Friday, but I'm thinking there's just too much on my plate to make that happen," he says.

A little further up the road, the receptionist at trendy ad agency Jumbo Shrimp confides that she and a colleague usually attend but couldn't make it this year.

South Park seems less crowded than usual. A hipster in a "Tamale Lady" t-shirt is one of the few people on the grass at noon. Meanwhile, the lunchtime line at burrito joint Mexico au Park, usually stretching 10-deep out the door, is noticeably shorter. French bistro The ButlerThe Chef is closed for the week, according to a sign in the window.

Away from the epicenter of techno-cool, established IT firms have a more detached view of the event. Perhaps they've already been through their Burning Man phase.

"I only know of one person in our company that's going, and that's it. It's not something we could do because we're a consulting firm and our clients couldn't have us shut down for a week. We'd go out of business," says a senior sales manager at one San Francisco-based IT consulting firm who wished to remain anonymous.

FusionStorm, one of the Bay Area's largest VARs, had a big presence at past Burning Man festivals but not as much recently, says VP of marketing Josh Krasnegor.

"In the past, there were many people from FusionStorm who went. I know my CEO was really interested in going. I have a new employee who came from the Midwest and we were discussing Burning Man and he said, 'What's Burning Man?' I thought everyone knew Burning Man," Krasnegor says.

"I do have some friends in some big Silicon Valley companies, vendors, who've been going religiously. I brought up the idea recently, only half-joking, to do a FusionStorm camp and have some kind of technology displayed or a seminar or something."

Neil Popli, CEO of San Francisco-based security service provider Microgear, has been observing the Burning Man phenomenon for years from the perspective of those left behind.

"I've been watching this thing every year. It's like a mini-Woodstock every year. Some Web 2.0 companies are going back to that late '90s mentality, offering extras to employees, like sending them to Burning Man. We can't do that, we've got big projects we're in the middle of. But if somebody wants to take out vacation time and go, they can," says Popli.

But he offers up a disincentive for doing just that.

"We handle some high-security accounts and we've got a pretty strong drug-free policy. My guess is that being within 10 miles of Burning Man would get you tested positive for marijuana," Popli says.

It may be difficult to believe that entire companies shut down to play in the mud and burn things in the desert. But a call to OQO's customer services line confirms that the Shotwell Street start-up is collectively calling in sick this week.

"I think they're all there," says an operator on OQO's outsourced service desk. She glumly reports that she's based in upstate New York.

Krasnegor sees a business opportunity from all this.

"We should offer 2.0 companies our managed services so when they shut down, they are covered," says the FusionStorm executive.

UPDATE: OQO CEO Dennis Moore writes in to inform us Friday, "Much as we'd like to be, we at OQO are not all at Burning Man. Quite a few of our employees went, but we have good coverage on our tech support line and plenty of support around in case of customer issues."