At Savage Minds, every so often they've included a post about the perennial desert-subversive-anarcho-utopian event "Burning Man". Recently, Adam Fish wrote about the subversion of the subversion by the forces of capitalism:
BM is designed to resist the atomization of capitalist society. The theme this year was Evolution and I wonder if all social organization fall prey to convenience and evolve into reflections of capitalism. The impossible dust storms, the absence of cash money or commodities, the gifting economy (not bartering, but giving), the impetus to participate and play all work to destabilize the alienation and isolation of late-capitalist society. But as a free-range and malleable event I wonder if capitalism can be kept at the gate. BM is expensive: at $300 ticket, $200 gas, $200 food/water—it is easily over a G per person. It can be done cheaper, but those who do it cheap tend to mooch and/or not have the material resources to abide by the simple principles of BM: self-reliance, gifting, and radical expressivity.
Kind of makes you think one of two things: (1) these soft Americans are so addicted to the anonymity, convenience and met expectations of a capitalist exchange network that they can't be weaned from the money teat even for a fun desert potlatch; or (2) capitalism works.
I just thought it worth pointing out that this is the anarcho-utopian version of gold farming. Fictitious economies recurrently fall back on this Neolithic social organization, the cash economy. Why? Well, the entire point of fictitious economies is to substitute one measure of value for another, and the only universal one is time. But most people like having their time, and will -- given the chance -- trade it for money.
