#4: Principle 3 – Decommodification
Hi there! This is Shuga coming at you from the Acculturation Committee for Ignition Northwest. This is our fourth installment of our exploration of the Ten+1 Principles of Burning Man: Principle 3: Decommodification.
As a refresher, Principle 3 – Decommodification states: 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.
This isn’t to say that the practice of commerce is necessarily or always a bad thing, but instead that essential things, things that should never be bought and sold, should not be commodified. For example, love is an essential act of caring that should never be commodified. “Our annual event in the desert is meant to provide an example of what can happen in a community when social interactions cease to be mediated by a marketplace.” Burning Man is a ritual beyond daily life that is intended to “reaffirm certain core spiritual experiences that are held to possess an unconditional value” and as such is an appropriate forum for decommodification. “In conducting the experiment in temporary community that is Burning Man, we have tried to create a special arena in which the realm of commerce ceases to intrude and interfere with vital forms of human contact: contact with one’s inner resources, contact with one’s fellows, contact with the larger civic world around us, and, finally contact with the world of nature that we cannot buy and can’t control.” (Commerce & Community: Distilling philosophy from a cup of coffee … | Burning Man Journal). This is why so many get up in arms if someone uses Burning Man as a platform for advertisement (think influencers taking photos on playa to bump their brand) and why BMorg doesn’t sell licensed swag. It is also why we don’t buy and sell things on playa or at regionals. Ultimately, this principle may be pivotal to our psychological and spiritual health, as it is so different to our day to day experience that it can foster awe and imagination.
The principle of decommodification underlies many of the other Burning Man principles. For example, immediacy can be defined as the decommodification of time. Gifting, by virtue of being unconditionally given, without expectation of anything in return, is an act of decommodification as well. When we decommodify ourselves, we are being radically self-expressive, stripped of considerations of status and transactional value in ourselves.
Some have pushed back on the idea of decommodification being valid in the context of having to purchase a ticket to Burning Man or other regional events. While this is an action of commerce, it doesn’t invalidate this principle because this transaction serves as a means to amass goods, hire services and pay its workers, to create a social and logistical framework (land surveying, infrastructure construction, information dissemination, porta potties, permits and fees, a sensible city design — an entire year’s worth of planning by its staff), which then serves as a framework by which participants can create immediate experiences for themselves and others. What we are paying for is the framework, not the immediate experiences. We have to create those by participating in our experimental city within our Principles framework. This relationship between commerce and community allows for synergistic value creation on both sides.
I often ponder how we can bring more decommodification into our default lives. Zay Thompson of the Kansas regional network has some powerful thoughts on this that I’d like to share. One way to practice decommodification in our default lives is to always consider and recognize the non-commercial dimensions of the people we interact with, their other values, and to look for non-commercial ways to interact with them. Behaving in this way can allow commerce to be less detrimental by keeping our other values at the forefront and guiding our actions when we must engage in commerce. Zay believes that our “major goals in bringing our culture to the default world should be to show society how to simultaneously value commerce and community and not corrupt the two.”
I’d like to leave you with a reminder from a fellow burner, Caveat, that we are not objects or commodities, what we are can’t be bought or sold and we are more important than things. We should consider the principle of decommodification as a challenge to bring that insight into our daily lives.
If you are interested in getting more involved in the community, check out the INW Get Involved web page at: https://ignitionnw.org/home/get-involved/. You can find all of the active committees and roles that you can participate in, including the Acculturation Committee.
Look out for our next installment later in January, where we will discuss the Principle of Radical Self-Reliance. See you then!
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If the introduction of this principle piqued your interest, check out:
- What does it mean to have “Decommodification” as a principle?: What does it mean to have “Decommodification” as a principle? | Burning Man Journal
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