2025-09-22
- Best estimates are that the mesh at this year’s burn was probably less than ten-thousand people but definitely more than one or two.
- It worked really well in some ways and didn’t work at all in other ways.
- We had a lot of fun and learned a lot.
- The public group chat was very active and lively.
- The configuration the group recommended was to have an “Everyone” chat which has an encryption code, but no public “zero” chat.
- “Everyone” did not share location.
- Camp-specific group chats did share location.
- For whatever reason, direct messages basically did not work at all, but group chats worked very well. This means group chats with only two people worked better than direct messages.
- Especially for things like weather alerts, the Everyone channel was very effective at disseminating information.
- A lot of people asked questions or posed issues or problems or suggestions in the Everyone channel and got good responses from other users.
- There were a lot of suggestions for more public group chats with more specific topics like Weather, Bugs/Suggestions, etc so those topics can be discussed without overwhelming the Everyone channel, and so that stakeholders can monitor the relevant channels without trying to sift through the torrent of messages in the Everyone channel, and without missing anything important.
- The Everyone channel was a bit overwhelming at times, and it was hard to keep up with everything that was being said. Also, sometimes messages were sent to “everyone” in cyrillic or other non-latin characters, which made it hard to read for people who don’t know those scripts. Because we were offline, we couldn’t use translation tools to understand those messages. Qwen worked extremely well for explaining these messages. It might make sense to have a bot listening for help requests in the Everyone channel and responding with translations or explanations when asked to do so.
- Overall, the radical anarchic nature of the non-organization was extremely positive and generated great creativity, immediacy, and responsiveness. People were very willing to help each other out and share information.
- In case of future bad actors or intentionally disruptive users, developing culture and technical capacity around fox hunting will be extremely important.
- There needs to be teams capable of tracking down and dealing with bad actors, whether that includes the official FCC bounty program (as disrupting a network like this constitutes a federal crime) or simply direct-action through community policing.
- One issue was the fact that maps don’t really work at burning man because the landmarks and even streets are not always in the same place and frequently move or change names.
- The mesh network was very useful for coordinating meetups and events, as well as for finding lost items or people.
- It could be even better if camps hosted their own nodes which did share location on the public channel, and which served as chat bots or information hubs for things like questions about camp programming or weather alerts. They could also serve as portals into MUDs with resources about institutional knowledge and the history of the group, both real and imagined. Entire fantasy universes could exist inside the MUD of a camp, where all its dreams and stories and lore could be stored and shared and made real in a way, for people chatting with the bot.
- Also, it’s interesting to consider a reprise of the famous Astropups disruptions of years gone by, where they would install fake wifi access points at camps, advertising “[Camp Name] (Ask for password)” so that hundreds of people swarm the camp asking everyone for the password to their non-existent wifi. Imagine instead, a pwnagotchi which works 24/7 to crack the neighbors’ wifi passwords and post them on the mesh so that hundreds of people instead descend on every starlink node armed with its newly cracked password, trying to get online. This would be a poetic, though potentially immoral way to protest the commodification of connectivity and the enclosure of the commons.
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