M2Danger Ranger on Burn 2

Burning Life is no more. It will be replaced by Burn 2, probably a much smaller event, but completely community owned and operated, without the financial and logistical support that Linden Lab provided for Burning Life. M2Danger Ranger, founder of the rangers in both Burning Man and Burning Life, spoke about it on Saturday in an interview on Treet.tv.

When so many people applauded the recent return of founder Philip Rosedale as Linden Lab CEO, few expected one of his first public moves would be to close the doors on the enormously popular event; certainly this writer didn't expect it. After all, Burning Life was created by Rosedale in 2003 when Second Life was getting ready to go public and he didn't have time to go to the event on which it was based, Burning Man. Nonetheless Burning Man has been shut down, to be replaced by Burn 2, a much smaller event with yet-to-be determined funding and without the former Lead of the Art Department and the Burning Life Curator White Lebed. You'll find a link to her take on the change at the end of this article.

Can Burn 2 be successful with only perhaps 20% of the sims that Burning Life 2009 had and no funding as of yet? In the Treet.tv interview, host Tricia Aferdita asked M2Danger Ranger this and other questions. Ranger is upbeat, sounding enormously optimistic about the change. It will be a community event, a regional Burning Man event, no longer controlled by Linden Lab, but instead by the community and managed mostly by the same staff that managed Burning Life. He expects that this will allow Burn 2 to push the edge more than was possible at Burning Life.

The bottom line question for me and for many others is funding. Where will organizers get the money for the sims that formerly were provided by Linden Lab. M2Danger Ranger's answer was that it will be self-funded. It will be up to community members to provide funding. Burning Man has an entry fee, but Burning Life has always been free to enter. Will there be an entry fee for Burn 2? This hasn't yet been determined, but organizers are hoping to avoid it. Burning Life was a brilliant array of creativity. How space be fairly allocated to artists if we only have 20% of the sims as last year? There's no answer to this yet. Another unknown is whether the land rush will continue; the organizers may not have the technical means to implement it, so it may be done as a lottery this year.

M2Danger Ranger also spoke of his dreams of merging Burning Man with Burn 2, so that avatars at Burn 2 and humans at Burning Man can see each other. For this writer, this was the most fascinating part of the interview, although the questions of how Burn 2 will be financed, who will manage it, who will handle the funds and how they will be managed, and how the artists and other creative people who made Burning Life such an amazing success will be treated equitably and have the same opportunities at Burn 2. Lots of questions, and so far, no concrete answers.

You can watch the M2Danger Ranger interview here and you can learn more at the Burn 2 website (which for now is a single page with very little information). For a counter view, you can read former Burning Life Curator/Art Department Lead White Lebed's blog. Burn 2 will be held October 16-24, 2010. You can see pictures from Burning Life 2009 and read this writer's articles about it here.

All photographs in this report are ©2010 by Erik Gordon Bainbridge. All rights reserved.

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