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▲ supern0va an hour ago

The funny thing is that in spite of reinventing so much of it, the event still feels dangerous and leaves you to make your own decisions.

Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.

(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)

For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.

In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.

Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.

▲ambicapter 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

> dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on.

Can you give some examples?

▲supern0va 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In 2023 there was a giant cube made out of IBC water tanks. You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FTwpt0OuW_U

This is actually what I was thinking of when I made this comment. I witnessed someone in some position of authority (from either DPW/Artery/someone else clearly sent to check it out) on the first day talking to one of the artists. They were literally watching people climb it and were like "yep, that looks pretty dangerous" and then went on their way.

It felt safe-ish to climb at first, until about halfway up when you could feel it swaying back and forth in the wind. I am usually the "climb dumb shit at Burning Man" type, but had my stomach drop about 3/4 of the way up and had to abort. It was very easy to grip, nothing felt insecure, etc, so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing. But if you ate it off the top of that, you'd be fucked.

▲cr1895 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

>so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing.

Those quotation marks doing a lot work...I guess those IBCs are 1m tall? so 8m at the top. A fall from 8m could result in severe injury if not fatality. Fucked indeed...

https://pdf.journalagent.com/travma/pdfs/UTD_19_6_529_535.pd...

▲tra3 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Never been, but the titular burning man installation comes to mind.