Obama can’t make it this year.
I’ve got two highly coveted front row tickets to Burning Man that are burning a hole in my pocket. I want you and your favorite partner in crime to have them at face value $395.
If you post a video in the comments section showing you putting one or more of Burning Man’s ten principles into practice in the default world you will be entered you into the contest. The winner get’s 2 access codes for tickets.
The video must be posted by noon pacific this Sunday (7/29) to be eligible. I will announce the winner as chosen by the Burner Love editorial team by noon pacific on Monday. And the winner will have only 24 hours to purchase the tickets before the link to purchase them expires. Since these are simply codes to purchase tickets, the winner does not have to be the purchaser and can give their codes to whoever they want.
Get creative! We could completely care less about the quality of the video. What we care about is the quality of the act captured by the video, what principal you are illustrating, and why.
Not everybody who wants to make it to Burning Man will get to attend this year but the whole point of Burning Man isn’t the event, it’s the ideas that drive it. And you don’t need a ticket to the dessert to experience the magic of gifting, radical inclusion, immediacy, etc. The more we can spread these values in the default world the more our whole year can be as transformational as a week at Burning Man.
Add even if you don’t win, I bet you will have fun creating the video and spreading goodness into the world.
For your reading and interpretive pleasure, here are the 10 Principles:
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification
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.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
Can’t wait to watch these!!
UPDATE 7/30/2012: About 700 people viewed this post and not a single person posted a video showing them putting any of the 10 principles into practice. I actually logged in to take this post down and erase it from Internet memory so the world wouldn’t know that my contest failed. But once here, I realized that I was kind of proud of this failure. Failure is instructive. I’m noticing something surprisingly liberating about leaving this failure here on the site. Taking it down would be sort of hiding that I’m human. It’s liberating to know that I can hang a failure out to dry in the real world without it impacting my own sense of self-worth. It’s a small act of subversiveness to help make obsolete the insidious cultural norms that keep us from a more intimate experience of life.