In one small

corner of the World Wide Web, a host of kindreds assembled for January 31 and

February 1 to pant upon their computer screens like blockbuster fanboys

awaiting news of a some superhero sequel, scouring message boards for the

latest intel and awaiting email confirmations that they, yes special they, had

been selected by synchronicity to camp in the desert seven months hence for a

fabulous, if desiccant, week of bacchanalia, abandon, and service. Now that Burning Man's ill-conceived ticket

lottery has ended and the dust storms of indignation have settled, I would like

to offer my own armchair observations on how this ticketing system was doomed

from its very inception, and offer a forum for how it might be improved in the

future.

As Burning

Man's Will Chase states,

"people… found creative ways to increase their odds of getting tickets in the

Main Sale. As a result, there are

a lot more tickets being requested than there are tickets available – an

inordinately large number, in fact, and far more than we projected even after

last year's sold-out event. It

seems that people a) likely got their friends, family and campmates to order

tickets as well, and/or b) requested more tickets than they actually need."

I think this

analysis is both true and understated.

But what's most striking are the pollyanna presumptions about human

nature, as if Burning Man attendees-creative and anarchic by their very

nature-would not find ways to subvert the system. This game was not designed in recognition that its players

were economic actors socialized under a capitalist superstructure that enforces

uncompromising self-interest. In

other words, people are selfish, and are going to act to protect their own

self-interest, even at the apparent tragedy of the commons. It should have been a foregone

conclusion that a large percentage of participants would seek to assure their

own tickets by registering multiple times across various family members or

friends not at all interested in attending. This was a fairly obvious hack to the ticketing system, and

this is after all a community of artists, fringe lunatics, and engineers that

are well-accustomed to finding weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and loopholes in

various systems.

And actually, a

person need not even possess a scamming, cunning, clever, or even creative inclination. A couple, for example, that heretofore

would have simply purchased two tickets would now each individually register

for two tickets in order to maximize their chances. Similarly, a tight crew of eight friends would each register

for two tickets, again, in order to maximize their own and their supporting

crew's tickets. Moreover, much

like the classic prisoner's

dilemma, as soon as it occurred to someone that someone else might game the system in their own

favor, they would have felt compelled to do the same, if only to prevent their

own single registration from being buried under the deluge of everyone else's

presumed multiple registrations.

In this way, it is easy to imagine how 40,000 ticket registrations

ballooned into 400,000 – although the "inordinately large number" is not

exactly known.

To their credit, and

to address their own lack of foresight, the Burning Man organization

established a secondary ticket redistribution system by which those holding

extra tickets could sell them at face-value to those less fortunate. This will work, somewhat, but it does

nothing to address the problem that the impulse toward self-interest has

already been established, and tickets under scarcity now exist as a form of

social currency, a currency that people can use to trade favors, bestow

blessings, or who knows what else.

Point being, there will be some, perhaps many, that will hold fast to

their extra tickets until such time as they feel selling them serves them best.

Allegedly, this

system was established to discourage the scalping of tickets after last year's

sold-out event, although it is not at all clear to this writer how this was

accomplished. Indeed, there is a

less obvious hack to the ticketing system that will not be here revealed by

which an unscrupulous scalper could have directed any number of tickets to

himself. Whether this happened or

not is not known, although it's notable that as of February 1, StubHub

already had 88 Burning Man tickets for sale ranging in price from $630 to

$1500.

Aside from these

unintended loopholes in the ticketing system, there was another intended

loophole in the system that the Burning Man organization actually encouraged. The system of pricing tiers was structured in such a way

that the registrant would state the highest price they were willing or able to

pay for a ticket, $240, $320, or $390.

The advantage to registering for a higher pricing tier is that your

registration will also participate in the lotteries for the lower pricing

tiers. Essentially, then,

registering at the highest pricing tier purchases you 3 chances at having your

registration selected (starting at the lowest tier, and with each progressive tier

drawing from a smaller pool of registrants) whereas the lowest pricing tier

purchases you only 1 chance from the widest pool. This is why the notion that Burning Man attendees created

this snafu by acting in their own self-interest is fundamentally flawed. The Burning Man organization itself

crafted the rules in such a way as to offer a way to stack one's odds of

getting a ticket, and in so doing, established an economic template that others

would naturally follow.

In other words,

the implicit message of the rules of this ticketing system is that money

talks. After all, if you were

willing or able to pay $420 for a ticket, you could have skipped the whole

ticket lottery and purchased something resembling a first-class ticket in the

Pre-Sale back in December. This, unfortunately, bears a microcosmic similarity to the

system of stratification that has metastasized throughout our civilization

during this period of late capitalism.

Those with more money have an unfair advantage, those with less money

suffer more stress, uncertainty, and aggravation, and perhaps most disturbing

of all, those who are the most sociopathic and unscrupulous among us are given

an opportunity to both cause and profit off of others' unhappiness.

Welcome home.

Image by millicent_bystander, courtesy of Creative Commons license.