Even at the 2000-era Webzine conference, the community there was hand coding its own web sites, DIY in full effect. I miss that nuts and bolts era, years before everyone was glued to their phones. SOMA was home to young women with nose piercings who’d be chain smoking while fixing their motorcycle, talking about wanting to go to welding classes- and crudely painting things in garish colors with their spiky hair in disarray- while wearing grimy paint-stained coveralls. The 1995 film ‘Tank Girl’ felt like it was about my friends. Looking back at the context of the mid-90s, San Francisco- which spawned Burning Man- was a beacon for DIY culture. “Radical Self-reliance” is one of those principles. It was still a few years before Harvey introduced the 10 Principles to the Burner community. In essence, Harvey explained that you didn’t want to be milling the rubber for your own tires, or soldering together circuit boards for your own computer. Larry had the audacity to say to a large audience of young, independent creative people in an art gallery in San Francisco that corporations were not bad. Larry- who didn’t write code- was a brilliant intellectual, cultural engineer and visionary, and he made a statement on that panel that still rings true in my head today. This was before google, facebook and today’s internet giants, in an era when much of the internet was still being built by small design firms and ad hoc coalitions of mercenary contractors such as myself. Larry obviously carried on and the Burning Man legacy continues.ĭuring the panel discussion, we fielded many questions from the audience, largely about the role of early internet corporations such as Yahoo!. Larry and I remained cordial, he was always a valuable friend and mentor. I had worked with Larry from 1992-1996 on the Burning Man Festival (Larry did proudly call it a “Festival” back then) but I had quit working on BM in 1996, when someone died on the playa, multiple others were badly injured and there were numerous arrests. He was there because he was an influencer, a voice of the counterculture. I was in my early 30s and Larry had to have been in his early 50s. Everyone in the panel was Gen X and some sort of web developer or coder, except for Larry. Larry Harvey and I were onstage together in 2000 as part of a panel discussion at SOMARTS in San Francisco’s SOMA District. A superlative guest post from Terbo Ted, the first DJ at Burning Man and therefore one of its Unofficial Founders.
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