The organizers of the Burning Man—the annual festival of pyromania in the Black Rock Desert—say they want to create a new kind of community. Participants in Critical Mass—the monthly bike ride through downtown Reno—say they want to change our community. And therein lies an interesting distinction.

At first glance, Burning Man and Critical Mass might seem to have sprung from the same roots. Both came from San Francisco—The City that has given us so much to love and fear over the years. Both put spontaneity, improvisation, and fun at the center of their conceptions of community. Both reject the notion of leaders. Both embrace participants some of us might think of as living at the fringes of our society. Funny haircuts, tattoos and body piercing are par for the course at both events. But the similarity ends there.

Where Burning Man grandiosely promises to create a community over a long weekend, Critical Mass understands that changing our community will only take place over the long haul. Where Burning Man imposes a short-term vision on our landscape from the outside, Critical Mass seeks to change the shape of our community from the inside.

There is a world of difference.

The Burning Man is hyped by its promoters as a spontaneous community. “It’s our goal to reinvent culture for the next century, to prove that the process can still exist in our midst,” says Larry Harvey, the chief architect and artistic guru of the Burning Man. “There are a lot of people who come here who’ve never really been in a community. They live in a suburb, shop in a shopping mall, wait in lines. They consume a lot of products. But they don’t know what it’s like to be part of community.”

But what the denizens of the temporary Black Rock City refuse to acknowledge is that they are already part of communities—albeit communities in which they feel alienated and from which they wish to escape. And they ignore the fact that a community already exists here that includes the Black Rock Desert in its sense of place.

They need to go home to their own communities—whether in Nevada, California, or beyond—and reflect on the fact that you can create a spectacle but you cannot create a community over a long weekend.

Critical Mass understands this. The monthly event has been growing in San Francisco for five years and just started recently in Reno.

Last summer, Critical Mass generated a lot of bad publicity when the mayor and police cracked down on the event in San Francisco and thousands of bicyclists headed out in all directions through downtown. But a month later, the event went without a hitch even though hundreds of bicyclists followed the same strategy. They spontaneously divided into different groups headed in different directions, while stopping at red lights and obeying the rules of the road. One of the unofficial organizers of Critical Mass in San Francisco recently laughed as he told me, “We are conspiring to obey the law.” Their motto is, “We’re not blocking traffic. We are traffic.”

When I mentioned this to one of the participants in a recent Critical Mass in Reno, he said, “That’s right. We just want our right to the road to be respected.”

Critical Mass is not just traffic. When people ride bikes together through our streets, talking to each other, and enjoying our city, they are creating a new kind of traffic that is very different from the usual traffic of people isolated in their cars. They are trying to change our sense of community by acting directly in our community.

The Burning Man rejects real communities.

Critical Mass is making itself a real part of our community. And therein lies a distinction worth remembering.

JOSH WILSON:

I contest the proposition that Burning Man rejects real communities. I fully agree that the community in the desert is very brief—but the experience of being there and creating something with other people is very, very strong. Much of it does not succeed. But much of it does succeed, in spades.

It’s necessary to overlook the hype, because Burning Man is very hyped, and has projected itself aggressively out into mediaville. What saves Burning Man is that people really do invest themselves into making something where you can have new rules and new expectations. And I don’t think Burning Man is “temporary”—except in an immediate, physical way. I don’t believe people can haul out there with their projects and schemes and friends, and not come away with an expanded sense of what is possible.

If they don’t, Burning Man has failed utterly and is a waste of time. Making it happen is a tremendous investment. There is continuity between projects and “communities” from year to year that requires long-term investment by ticketholders—people who do participate in the actual logistics of building the infrastrucutre and getting permits and who do not stand to make any profit (though the Burning Man organizers are deep in debt, as usual).

I look at Burning Man as an opportunity to "field test" new ways of living and thinking. It's necessary for people to integrate the test results into their daily existence. If they don't, it's a waste of time.

In fact, Critical Mass is quite similar to Burning Man, in that, if you just show up once a month—drive your car to the city and then ride the Big Mass, then go back to car commuting —you're not making it a part of your everyday experience, you're isolating the experience and making it an exception, not the norm.

Both Critical Mass and Burning Man are lessons in what is possible. To make the lessons matter, participants must realize what's possible every day, and act accordingly.

That's what daily "mini masses" of bicyclists are all about, translating the revelation of what's possible into a daily lifestyle choice. In the case of Burning Man, you take your sense of freedom, creativity, and spontaneity home from the desert and bring it to your daily life

Both experiments fail if people do not step up and make the experiences more than occasional, once a month or once a year experiences.