Comment by kaycebasques

I remember asking a friend what makes Burning Man (BM) interesting, and he said "it's a glimpse of a fundamentally different economy." He was talking about how everything is organized around gifts rather than exchange. AFAICT that is still very much true. Most (all?) interactions do not involve money. E.g. at BM you can walk to a tent and get a drink and there's no expectation to pay for it. But of course the whole system only works when everyone agrees to be mutually generous. Sure, people use money to bring all the stuff into BM and to get themselves to BM so it's easy to write it off as fake, but nonetheless I can see how even a week demonstrating a fundamentally different social structure could be quite a profound experience. BM is still on my bucket list because of what my friend said.