It's our approach that's changed more than anything. We've learned a lot about what it is to be a journalist, so we go out to greet them, to make their job more meaningful. We try to make their experience more immediate. We find they write and present much better stuff that way. We're trying to combat the paparazzi effect as much as we can.

MACLACHLAN: Tell me about some of the best experiences you have had with media onsite and some of the worst.
HARVEY: The worst is pretty typical. The worst is when they ask you questions and you look back at them and they've got raisin eyes and look like gingerbread men -- when clearly they're not engaged. It's hard to talk to an abstraction. It's impossible for me to. When I sense that they're not genuinely interested, I have nothing to say to them.

The best experience is when someone is lit up and you can speak to their experience. I've found in public speaking that the best way to speak is to let your gaze travel in cycles through the audience, but always I fix on one or two people in the audience. Those are the people I talk to. It's whoever seems to be responding in way that's broadcast on their countenance. How do you speak to a collectivity, unless you're Mr. Bill Clinton, of course.

The same thing goes when you're talking to a journalist. To the degree that we've got journalists more actively involved in what we do, in actually participating in the experience in the desert, its much easier to talk to them.

MACLACHLAN: Obviously, in the past few years you've dealt with the media a lot. So much so that you mentioned you have 10 tag lines you give to the media. Can you tell me what a few of those are?
HARVEY: They're just phrases of convenience. They mean something, or I wouldn't say them, although if you repeat anything long enough it seems meaningless.

Let's see, last year we did a great trade with "Burning Man is Disneyland inside out" and "We're the national alternative to Prozac," which made a great hit. "Culture is not about consumption, it is produced by communion," is another one that's brought up continually.

There are more. Usually I'll just say such a thing and just riff off it for a while. I'm not very good at discursive speech, I tend to think in analogies and free associate. So, it helps to have a few landmarks along the way.

MACLACHLAN: The festival has come to be associated with the technology industry, to a certain degree, because so many of the participants are from the San Francisco Bay area and work in that industry. Apparently this has led to some opportunities and some speaking appearances for you. Tell me about how you got involved in the Webbie Awards.

'I couldn't quite figure out the relationship to electronic technology, until I began to think about the character of some experience in cyberspace, the idea that you could create a virtual reality, self-defined worlds of your own.'

HARVEY: Our communications director, that's how. That's how I got involved in computers. I didn't have e-mail until a year ago.

I am fascinated by it. It's impossible to move in the art scene, for instance, in San Francisco and not get swept up in it. But my acquaintance [with the technology industry], until really quite recently, is second hand.

It began, in way for me, when I realized that a lot of people from the world of the Internet were showing up at the event. I was just frankly stumped for some while. Here we were doing this terribly immediate thing in a wilderness. I couldn't quite figure out the relationship of that to electronic technology, until I began to think about the character of some experience in cyberspace, the idea that you could create a virtual reality, self-defined worlds of your own. That in fact in communicating with people, you were liberated to assume an identity of your choosing. The inherent democracy of the situational radical democracy that prevails on the Internet, all of these things I began to perceive as an analog of our experience in the desert.

Those factors defined both experiences. That was actually my first introduction to the implications of this new technology. Now I'm of course on the Internet and I've forgotten how to write with a pencil. I find it indispensable for the act of writing.

But I'm approaching it with a fairly deep skepticism in a way. I know there's a lot of talk about it being a community. I don't know if it does form that. I think it's a miraculous technology for communication, which has as radically changed the world as the car did in my father's day.

But I am somewhat skeptical. I find it best serves one if you have a focused intention. I think it becomes rather counterproductive if your intention is diffuse. I try to apply the tool to the task and not mistake that for the goal itself.

C O N T I N U E D . . . 2 of 4
MACLACHLAN: In your opinion, has the computer industry or the Internet -- you can take these separately -- increased the amount of good craziness in the world?
HARVEY: I don't know. It's enormously empowering. This started way back when -- with desktop publishing -- when suddenly you didn't have to go to a printer, you could make your own. It was instant access to respectability. That was certainly empowering to a lot of people.

It's certainly possible to communicate with a lot of folks, and to communicate radically new visions to vast numbers of people. So I think probably good. It's inherently democratic. It rewards initiative.

I don't know if in and of itself it connects people to one another. I mean, just communicating to a lot of people is merely operating in a mass medium. I don't know if that leads to dialogue. It certainly has the potential for that.

'I don't know if in and of itself it connects people to one another. I mean, just communicating to a lot of people is merely operating in a mass medium. I don't know if that leads to dialogue.'

MACLACHLAN: A friend of mine has a phrase he likes to use: "Every day technology is making people easier to use." Could you react to this? Do you see a dark side to technology?
HARVEY: I can see a downside to every technology. I've always thought [Marshall] McLuhan's phrase "The medium is the message," to be annoying. The medium conditions the message. But I think that's one mistake we've made, it isn't the message. It's only useful as a means toward some kind of focused goal. To formulate a goal you need to have values, and tools don't give you values. Tools are strictly subordinate to your intention.

I see the same hazards in the Internet that I see in TV. Most of us are convinced that TV has not only had a noxious effect on our society, but a deeply corrosive one, because it hinders all the processes that lead to the creation of culture, a kind of Novocain to the body politic.

I see the same kind of thing in the Internet. To use the Internet as a substitute for a social life is pathetic. To surf the Net with no particular intention is no different than channel surfing.

I wanted to do a clock that was representing the national attention span and its continual shrinkage. We'd bolster this with phony sociology and fake empirical data, which of course as we all know is very easy to produce. We'd have several indices that we'd consult in setting our clock.

Year by year it would go from 17 seconds to 14 seconds to 12 seconds until we wouldn't have the press conference anymore because there would be no time to think left at all.

It's a medium. If it connects two people with one another, that's wonderful. The trouble with mediate things is when they substitute for contact. That's what TV is. The Internet used for masturbatory experiences -- it has, in that way, the potential to be profoundly negative. So when you hear people saying that all we need to do is dive into this medium ...

'To use the Internet as a substitute for a social life is pathetic."

I've thought a lot lately about convenience. We live in a convenience culture. It's a natural human tendency to seek the most efficient ends to our goals. Indeed, the Internet is very convenient. Convenience is great in the context of focused, passionate activity.

However, when convenience serves passivity, I think it annihilates spirit. So, it's wonderful that the Internet is convenient to communicate. But sometimes the uses people put the Internet to for the sake of convenience looks to me like a sort of electronic amplification of the things you might find scrawled on lavatory walls.

Convenience, as it abets a passive withdrawal from the world, is nightmarish. Really, the battle isn't to be fought out in the medium or over the tool itself. It really has to do with the philosophy that animates our use of the tool.

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MACLACHLAN: When I was at Burning Man this year, I met a 63 year-old venture capitalist who said to me very seriously, watching the young people and the craziness and everything that was going on, he said, "This is the future, these people are the future." Growing out of that, what is your take on the future? How do you see this country in 10 or 20 years?
HARVEY: It depends entirely on my mood, as it does for everybody. At moments when I feel alienated, I can paint a very dismal picture. It's the same in one's own life. It's always a battle between hope and despair. If you look at the downside of the future, I can easily imagine monsters, I think we all can.

When I began Burning Man, part of my motive was the perception that everything I cared about was disappearing from the world.

I considered myself an acolyte of the arts, of culture. Clearly we live in a decadent period. Now decadence isn't necessarily bad. Mulching soil nourishes new growth. But objectively described, this is a decadent period. Our art is mannered. We've become increasingly self-conscious.

This is not a heroic era. I seem to be seeing people, whole populations dislocated from one another. Increasingly, our society seems to be not ordered by processes of culture, but ordered by forces that impose themselves from without. And that frightens me.

American society, world society, is becoming more of a mass society. And mass ultimately doesn't work for human beings very well. The ants and the beavers may be able to order their hives and build their damns without the benefit of culture, but they're served by instinct. Our instincts have been generalized into this thing we call emotion. We are adapted to live by culture as animals. Without that, we become less than animals. To the degree that we have a mass culture that we must endure such an alienated regime, I think that we live in a horrible world.

I can easily imagine mall riots in the next century, great towering columns of black smoke coming from Northgate and Southgate and Westgate and Eastgate, as people suddenly wake as in a dream and see the products shining behind the glass cases in the mall and, buy a dream logic, reach forward through the glass and simply grab them.

'Think what Joseph Goebbels would do with the Internet if he could control it.'

As we become a society of haves and have nots I think that becomes more and more possible. When the last riots happened in L.A., I noticed all the malls [in San Francisco] closed down. Now nothing happened, but I thought at the time, maybe they're anticipating something.

Obviously, a world such as this, if we project its negative tendencies, is ripe for Fascism. It would take a little more time for it to happen, but think what Joseph Goebbels would do with the Internet if he could control it.

That's about as negative as you can get. Now on the other hand, I see that as an end result of a process of dissolution. Whole hierarchies are disappearing, and technologies are beginning to dissolve the boundaries that used to form our world.

When I'm in a good mood, usually when I'm working on the project and moving toward a meaningful goal, I look at it differently. I think that as we approach the end of this century, I think that people are more available to follow visionary goals, which isn't normal in human society. People think nostalgically of the great presidents, but the norm is mediocrity, and great presidents were created usually by war or some extremity in which people suddenly felt a radical connection to one another, and were faced with some great threat that forced them to act as one, and it created heroic prospects.

As the old values are dissolving, there's great yearning for new visions that would order people's lives, and that's a great opportunity for someone like myself. What the result will be, I haven't any idea. I think anyone who tells you they do is a fool.

These are very interesting times. My goal for years has been to present to people a new awareness of what culture is and how crucial it is to our ability to simply be. I think that the times are very ripe for developing new cultures that may have imbedded in them the power to spread in fantastically powerful ways.

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MACLACHLAN: You're a parent, yet also you speak of a society that is becoming more disillusioned, more disconnected. Also, there is this ever increasing amount of information flowing by people, and you've spoken of the attention-span clock, the national attention span getting shorter. Is this creating among the children of today a new kind of human? How are people my age, your age, how are people growing up today going to be different from us?
HARVEY: There was a generation recently that they tagged Generation X that had a rather hard time of it. Certainly in contrast to my own. I grew up in the late 50s and 60s. The kids who came afterwards in the last two decades, had instilled in them a deep sense of cynicism. I think that's been changing in the last four or five years, and I think that change is going to accelerate rather quickly now.

Frankly, I don't know. I have hopes, like any parent, for my own son. But really just don't know.

MACLACHLAN: Speaking of growing up, a lot people who've been to Burning Man know who you are, but don't know that much about you. Maybe you could tell me a little bit your childhood and your life growing up.
HARVEY: I grew up in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, in a truck farming region that was amid truck farms and pastures, at the end of a road, in an area that was populated by this diaspora of immigrants. Japanese, Germans, Italians. And the Harvey's there, squatting in the midst of it.

My father was a carpenter and mason. A relentlessly self-made man. Semi-literate, and so fierce in his autonomy, so insistent on his integrity as someone self-made, that not through a mean heart, but perhaps because of a blind one, he neglected to make contact with those around him.

So, our family in many way was nestled in the midst of strangers. I turned at an early age to the communion of nature, which was wonderfully, mystically present to me from an early age. We were on the flood plain of the Columbia river, sitting on top of 30 feet of loam. We had an acre and half. We had chickens, we raised every vegetable known to man.

I was an adopted child, as was my brother. Both my brother and I had reasons to feel isolated, doubly so because in our family there wasn't a great deal of direct emotional communication. Finally, the world receded in my childhood to what I could securely keep behind my closed door.

My father, avatar of integrity that he was, respected that, which was a wise thing. It was a kind of love. But I, for years, felt as if I didn't know why anyone did anything. In a way it's good. Throughout my life I've always felt that I was making some new landfall on the shores of humanity, having started out from such radical isolation.

'It's not surprising that I would end up creating a man of wood -- my father was a man of wood, he was a carpenter -- and inviting people out into a wilderness to gather around him.'

As a child I used to dream of how wonderful it would be if everyone came out of their houses. We had no connection to the people around us. We lived the myth of my father, the self-made man, all alone. The American ideal in some ways, the complete individualist. But I dreamt that people would come out of their homes and maybe gather in the fields and somehow connect around the passions that had grown up in me.

It's not surprising that I would end up creating a man of wood--my father was a man of wood, he was a carpenter--and inviting people out into a wilderness to gather around him.

Freud said somewhere that the only true happiness in life is the realization of a childhood wish. He said it about the discoverer of Troy, who played with tin soldiers as any German boy in the Victorian age, and dreamt of finding Troy, as thousands did, and then actually accomplished it in his adult life. He said surely he must be the happiest of men.

I think that is true of all of us. There is not happiness in life, but for the realization of such fervent wishes. Maybe the art of happiness is to pursue them as baldly and directly as possible. It may be my imagination is sort of literal. In any case, my career in a way has been the pursuit of such an aim.

MACLACHLAN: Have you always been a leader, and do you consider yourself a leader now?
HARVEY: Well, when I was a boy in grade school, I would tend to organize people. By the fourth grade I was writing plays and convincing people to play in them and directing kids in the making of sets and basically bustling around getting people to collaborate on original projects of one kind or another.

Usually, as time went on and I entered an adolescence of a subversive nature, I became expert at holding adults hostage to their stated ideals. That was just my nature. I didn't really have a model for that. I'm left to believe that was what I would believe we would call genetic, I believe it was just my nature to do that.

But I was for years a furious personality, a very shy person, and disconnected from just about everybody. I lived according to visionary notions that I would get very excited over. What happened to me gradually in the pursuit of my project, which became Burning Man, was that I became connected to those around me in a way that I don't think my nature would ... people would talk to me and I would get very animated and there would be this communion.

But there was so little small talk in me, and so little even awareness of other people that it never led to much in the way of sustained connection. As our project has grown, it has evolved around the idea of community, and that of course has made me a little less insane.

You know, I have always been sort of grandiose, and harbored the notion that ... how do I want to put this? I don't know if I do want to put this. I'm a little messianic. I'm more messianic than charismatic. So I'm willing to believe that visions that I have may be radically and universally true. That always helps. As long as it is corrected by moral relationships with people it can be an asset.