To my white friends and family, I write you with a very simple request: let’s talk.

I don’t mean generally, or in comments, or as part of some “national dialogue.” Instead, here’s my invitation: let’s have some earnest, intimate conversations about race and our whiteness. I have created a signup sheet and conversation guide, and I’m inviting anyone interested to join me in small, safe groups of 2–5 interconnected people.

If you want in — and I sincerely hope to be overwhelmed here — raise your hand in the comments and I’ll coordinate with you via email or text. I’ll send you a doc called “White People Talk About Race: A guide to our (likely uncomfortable) conversation,” and we’ll find the right day to get started. I’m currently preparing myself for facilitating these things effectively, and hopefully equipping people to keep coming back to the dialogue (with or without me) longterm.

That’s the short of it, but for those who care to read, there’s a long of it, too. The thoughts and emotions behind this conversation project are below.

Thank you, and I hope we’re talking more soon.

*****

For the past week, I’ve tried to feel a new emotional response to this murder of George Floyd — one I’m embarrassed I never felt after past murders of this variety, or even after the election of Trump. I’m trying to embrace a feeling of shame.

Not a general, “Oh, I feel bad for the world” variety. Rather a full, deep, personal sort of shame. Last Monday I rewatched that excruciating video, and played a painful game with myself. I tried imaging that cop as my brother or my father or my close friend. The disgusting feeling that ensued felt necessary. Because I’m trying to open my eyes wider to something I am ashamed to even admit I wasn’t grappling with more intensely in the past….

I am complicit in this murder. Every white life is complicit. Every time.

If that’s triggering or feels extreme, please pause and ask yourself why. It is so easy to agree that the victim paid a grotesque cost for his identity, and every person who shares that identity is justified in feeling a very direct pain. And yet the perpetrator, the monster, behaved in a manner only made possible by his identity. Every tiny little signal accumulated over the course of his life that fed him fear or power or an instinct to exert dominance in that moment he committed his crime — those are signals consciously and unconsciously perpetuated by all of us who share his identity. Every person who shares the white identity of that murderer deserves to feel a very direct shame.

This might seem extreme or unfair, but that’s because it is. The system behind our American society is designed almost exclusively by and for white men. For 400 years, the operational mechanisms behind doling out power and personhood on this land have tilted heavily (often exclusively) toward the benefit of white people. To a point where today, white supremacy is our inheritance. Rich or poor, white people are born into the long-lingering benefits of this nation’s founding myth: that white men get liberty, and all others must earn it.

Denying that inheritance was a privilege only afforded to us white people. It’s easy to believe you are over a problem when you’ve never suffered from it. That has gone on for so long that, now, to be white in America is to perpetuate the problematic system solely by benefiting from it. Our basic participation within a society built on this myth is a form of reinforcing its structural integrity.

So… what? Do we burn it all to the ground? I wouldn’t walk away from that conversation for what it’s worth, but most likely the answer you’re looking for is “No.” So fine, let’s agree to not burn it all down. (Maybe just a tiny bit.) Instead, here are two things I believe about what needs to happen next.

1.) We white people need to fucking sit with this discomfort for a long time. We need to own the ugliness of white supremacy. We need to take the very concept and stare it down until we see it everywhere, even in ourselves. We need to work through that discomfort together. We’ve inherited it, we’ve benefited from it, and it’s our burden to destroy it.

2.) We need to reject shortcuts, and similarly embrace discomfort when it comes to our actions. Systems don’t become more equitable without current beneficiaries losing something. Are we willing to dedicate our time and effort to this cause? Are we willing to make less money at work, or reduce the value of our homes? To pay more taxes? To stop participating in gentrification, and start investing more attention into our local community politics? Correcting any of this will be slow, it will require commitments to learning, and it will unquestionably require concessions far broader than donations.

This is why I want us to talk to one another. Because perhaps the greatest privilege of being white is that “race issues” have historically been about everybody but white people. That was white supremacy at work — we were excused from the conversations that we were forcing in the first place.

Not being racist does not exclude us from being a race. And I hope by reading this far you’re with me in seeing that moments like this are not racism problems, but race problems. Which means it’s on all white people to chip in and do the heaviest lifting. Not by asking a black friend “How can I help?” — that puts more burden on them — but by posing that question to one another.

How can we help?

How can we, as the beneficiaries of this corrupted system, use our power of historical supremacy to initiate the self-destruct sequence?

How can we be the generation of white people that finally feels shame, finally says sorry, finally acknowledges the very air around us is tainted and always has been?

I don’t know. But that’s why I want to start talking. I really hope you’ll join me.

In elementary school you’re often asked to do reports on historical figures. I can recall a handful of such assignments, and my choice always fell into one of two categories: athletes or civil rights leaders.

Looking back, the content of these reports couldn’t feel more divergent (Martin Luther King Jr. gave the “I Have A Dream” speech and was assassinated for his views; Grant Hill won Rookie Of The Year in 1995 averaging nearly 20 points per game).

But here we are in 2017 and these two disparate fields that have spoken to me since childhood, sports and racial justice, are converging. We are increasingly awakened to intersectionality, but I have to admit surprise that my devotion to social justice would collide with all the hours I poured into playing Madden.

The past few weeks have made me think about sports — maybe the thing I’ve thought about the most in my entire life — in a new way. I was aware of protests from the past, from the 1968 Olympics to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf protesting the national anthem in the late 90s, but it wasn’t until recently that it dawned on me: not only is sports an acceptable place for protest, it’s an incredible place for protest.

Most college and professional sports in America are flattened into a two-dimensional corporate offering. Tune in, unwind, drink Coke. Everything about the experience conditions our brain to treat it like an entertainment product. Between the sounds, the colors, and the superhuman feats, it hardly even registers as real. And that’s by design.

Because all the while we’re served up commercials and patriotism and commercials about patriotism with our brains numbed into a perfect state of acceptance. It’s a capitalistic ideal. Everything about the spectacle is about drawing in attention and selling, and it’s precisely manufactured by the cabal of leagues, owners, brands, and broadcasters. All of them profit immensely.

The only vulnerability in the system is that the product is people.

Having flattened, packaged, and elevated professional sports into primetime entertainment makes it all the more jarring to spectators when an athlete bursts free from his/her commercial-encased confines to shout “I am a human with views of my own.”

And therein lies the majesty I’ve discovered within this wave of protests. Protest is supposed to be jarring. And what’s more jarring than your toys coming to life or the actor breaking script and addressing the audience?

These protests aren’t complicated or problematic, they are fucking perfect.

But applauding their effectiveness doesn’t address the question of whether they should be allowed. Setting aside the basic constitutional arguments (which seems to be en vogue these days), I feel that protests are more than just excusable within athletics. I think they’re essential for the longterm health of these games we love. Here’s why.

Denying athletes the right to protest perpetuates the culture that they are are soldiers with marching orders, chain of command, and a mandate not to desert. It’s often said they are lucky to have their occupation and the spoils of money and fame that come with it. As if those luxuries are a tradeoff — shreds of their own humanity as the exchange.

But it’s exactly that militaristic chain of command mindset that’s responsible for some of the most reprehensible stories to come out of sports in the past few years. Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno were coaches, and those young boys were lucky to have access to them. The athletes or assistants who sensed something was wrong were told the higher ups would take care of it. Stay in your lane, do your job, no need to protest.

The Michigan State and Team USA gymnasts abused by their doctor were given a golden opportunity. Why would they want to risk that opportunity on expressing a basic human sense that something felt very wrong? They were athletes. Older men were in charge of them, their bodies, and ultimately handling their complaints. To protest was to mortgage their future.

Is it a dramatic line to draw between taking a knee and sexual abuse scandals? On first glance maybe, but in my mind they are symptoms of the same public sentiment surrounding the field, or rather industry, of sports. Athletes are athletes not people. They are owned property, and lucky to be so. Property doesn’t protest.

The industry propagates that notion because it’s better for business that Colin Kaepernick is a Nike-wearing, Gatorade-drinking, stadium-filling entertainment product. Not a black-skinned, family-having human whose mindful of the struggles and dangers faced by other humans less fortunate than him. As a spectator and consumer, your stance on these protests is casting a vote for the former or the latter. Do you see a product or a human?

To see an athlete as a human is to see a man or a woman with a platform — a platform they earned. It’s not a gift bestowed to them, and you sure as hell don’t inherit a starting quarterback job the way your daddy passes down ownership of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Athletes are humans who work, and work damn hard, to earn the pedestal they stand upon.

Speaking freely from a place of prominence you worked hard to achieve for yourself… How the hell can we protest that?

So, I don’t know how you’ve been feeling these past two weeks, but I’ve been… let’s safely call it, “up and down.” Up meaning “temporarily okay, at least in regards to my own life if not the state of the world,” and down meaning, well, every mental and emotion state below that until you get into the territory of “my body is currently on fire.” That’s been the range.

But mostly I’ve tried hard not to judge how anybody else is responding. Hate speech and violence aside — like completely off the table and into the trash bin aside—I don’t think the more public nature of our coping mechanisms totally changes the fact that coming to terms is a personal thing. We’ve all experienced the same historically huge emotional episode, and whether we’re donating money, writing long posts on Facebook, furiously consuming news, or checking out from the internet all together; we all get a few weeks to move through the paces of acceptance.

I hope most of us can grant one another that time, especially around Thanksgiving, because the looming opportunity is too large and important to fissure with judgements this early. We’re entering a window where the vast percentage of this country’s intellectuals and activists stand on the same side of something. That is incredibly rare. People are already building the new foundation of future progressive ideals within this steaming crater we’ll call Trump. I hope that foundation can be sound.

Which is what inspired me to read Common Sense. (Well, if I’m being honest, it’s likely more the result of my own personal Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake phase. Not knowing what else to do, I read Thomas Paine.)

Common Sense is commonly regarded as one of the most influential books of all time. In a lot of ways, it’s a key pillar in the foundation of our own democracy. Also, I had never read it before — shoutout public schooling! — and it felt appropriate in a time when I want to educate myself more on democracy without reading about the present state of it.

It was a success in the most basic sense that it wasn’t about Trump. Most of Common Sense is the very idea of a King getting a logical dress down. Which proved escapist in a “it used to be worse” sort of way, but it was impossible not to read everything else in the orange glow of this 2016 election.

For others like me, with this same itch to read something historically relevant, but perhaps not benefitting from the same rainy, empty two days I was granted this past weekend, I highlighted a bunch of lines and shared my favorites below.

I hope these can be stimulating, or at least distracting. At the least it’s always refreshing to feel connected to our past. Whether through struggle or conquest, it’s nice to be reminded that we’ve always been trying to figure our shit out and we’ll always continue trying to figure our shit out.

Enjoy my highlights of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense…

The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. … Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.

Right away Paine distinguishes between society and government. “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.” Society is what we want to protect, and government is just our best stab at trying.

I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature, which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered. … But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, and every political physician will advise a different medicine.

And England didn’t even have an Electoral College!

And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to be choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.

The more I read, the more I realized how much fire Paine brought with his writing. This was a 1700s flame war, and he lays some metaphorical smack throughout. And yet every time it’s rooted in a logical argument. You’re a worse judge of smell the longer you live in stink.

It is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.

Pride of a man who sees himself as king: ✔
Mankind thrown into confusion: ✔
Your arguments still hold, Tommy.

The sun never shined on on a cause of greater worth. … Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.

This is so amazing. This a rare class of book that people have died for, and after reading lines like these that feels less surprising.

This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.

For one, it’s good to be reminded that entitlement predates America. Although I’m willing to grant the non-slave owning Paine some leeway here, and assume he’s writing to the desires of his audience. (White people do love feeling inclusive!) Beyond that, it’s just great to be reminded that this country is founded on the idea of being an asylum. Even if it’s been a hazy, warped idea, and sometimes we’ve had our own thumb in our eye while trying to see it clearer, we’ve now largely marched in that direction for 250 years.

Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think it better of an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.

It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American property is possessed.

Paine illustrates the various categories of man who are likely to run contrary to his independence cause. The world has changed so much, yet these still feel like the barriers any noble cause must conquer. He frames the challenge we clearly still face today: how do you bring the sorrow to the doors of the interested, weak, prejudiced, and moderate?

Emigrants of property will not choose to come to a country whose form of government hangs by a thread, and who is every day tottering on the brink of commotion and disturbance.

Right. The bed’s about fully shit on this one. Some of these quotes gave me perspective, while others just made me sigh and say “let’s baby step our way to turning this one around.”

In America THE LAW IS KING.

Those are his all-caps, not mine. He really beat this drum HARD. The idea of installing something bigger than any human, and thus ever-so-slightly less corruptible. Paine outlines a dangerous scenario where if Americans don’t take action for too long, governance will fall to disrepair, and some power-hungry man “may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of the government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.” Just read that again.

It makes me fearful that we’ll struggle to differentiate between the government and the potentially terrible people who stand to fill it. We can’t throw the liberty baby out with the dirty alt-right bath water. If the systems and laws themselves suffer further, and don’t eventually regain esteem, it’s the next iteration of this entire episode that could get truly frightening. That’s when the entire system could collapse.

Ye are opening a door to eternal tyranny, by keeping vacant the seat of government.

See! Told you. T-Paine and I are on the same page.

Commerce diminishes the spirit both of patriotism and military defense.

This thought is one that has stuck with me most while reading: that commerce diminishes patriotism. I might argue they’ve essentially merged. Our methods for expressing our patriotism have largely reduced down to the same methods we have for expressing our loyalty to the Chicago Cubs. Hell, the nation’s most-successful sports franchise right now is called the goddamn Patriots for crying out loud. In that light, it feels less surprising that the Vegas act of American patriots was just elected president.

The more men we have to lose, the less willing they are to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.

Just another reminder that Paine’s inkwell was filled with napalm. Dude did not hold back with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.

First, they had a king, and then a form of government; whereas the articles or charter of government, should be formed first, and men delegated to execute them afterwards.

Another great line about this notion he harped on (and I love). Our elected officials serve a higher power.

Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.

Reminder: deep breaths.

These proceedings may at first appear strange and difficult; but, like all other steps which we have already passed over, will in little time become familiar and agreeable; and, until an independence is declared, the Continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.

These are the final words of Common Sense — aside from an appendix which has even more great stuff I wanted to share including an intellectual smackdown of some condescending Quakers, but this post is already super long. Paine returns to his trusty stand-by of comparing the large, abstract predicament of the present day to a total schlub who needs to get his act together.

C’mon, America. Don’t let Trump be that lingering unread email.

Let’s keep the computer closed for the holiday. Try to finish wrapping our heads around what it’s likely to contain. Then time will come to pour some whiskey, open that email, sift through the stacks of shitty news it spews forth, and get to work composing our reply.

I’ve never been to a hackathon. But I’ve run 10 weird ones.

We just eclipsed that number with Comedy Hack Day — our humor-hackathon hybrid. Ten times we’ve put out the call for tech-curious comedians and talented developers hungry for an event that doesn’t take itself seriously. In the process, we’ve discovered an underserved market of genius weirdos.

Personally, I entered this run as a bit of a technology dullard. My dream jobs out of college all specialized in printed paper. So what does somebody like me learn by organizing, hosting, and eventually recovering from 10 comedy hackathons? What do those learnings suggest about the state of the technology and comedy writ large? Are three rhetorical questions enough to properly segue into a glorified listicle?

Let’s find out! Here are some lessons learned from 10 Comedy Hack Days.

Hackathons are technology contests.

Technology and contest are two easily grasped words, whereas hackathons are still a woefully misunderstood concept outside the tech community. Many understand it has to do with hacking, but they aren’t exactly sure what that is; while another set knows them as something their company does or thinks it should be doing. Why? Um, because innovation? I put this lesson first because the whole concept should pique people’s interest more than it does. A hackathon should feel approachable to anyone remotely creative. It is building the framework of a business as a contest — you start with an idea, name it, give it a story, design it, program it’s primary functions, complete a prototype, and ultimately sell it live on a stage. Everyone can contribute to that, and I wish “hackathon” could either evolve to reflect that approachability or die so a more inviting moniker could take its place.

Comedy is a beautiful beast.

It’s a chameleon made of T-1000 goop able to take form anywhere. I got to see evidence of that at The Onion, but CHD has offered me a front row seat to something that feels a bit more uncharted: comedy as functioning technology. In any art form it’s very rare to be graced with a virgin medium. Watching really funny people contribute in the creation of an app, I’ve seen jokes I’m not sure have ever existed before. And that’s a hard thing to lay claim to. Just as one example, our newly crowned winner Equipay used a slider for the gender entry field on their app — acknowledging that gender is a spectrum. It was so simple and ultimately a one-off in the context of their presentation, but it made for such a hilarious beat and all because funny people were actually coding a product instead of mocking up a screen or writing a line of dialogue. I could go on and on about Pizza Blaster, Computer Roommate, or the drone selfie stick, but I now realize this should be its own entire post…

The truth is always most interesting.

There’s an ever-growing market for technology companies that perpetuate lies or some false version of your identity. We’ve had dozens upon dozens of ideas pitched at CHD for lampoonish exaggerations of that false presentation of self, but none of them have ever done well. Something technologists can learn from comedy: the very best material taps into the truth rather than perpetuating the superficial.

The diversity problem is disappointing, and demands real work.

We’ve had a tough task uniting two fields traditionally dominated by white men (comedy + tech) under the banner of an event type that mostly attracts more white men (hackathons). Because hackathons feel largely like an in-group thing, as addressed above, a passive approach to recruitment paired with allowing the in-group participants to establish the tenor of your event is the easiest recipe for an unwelcoming environment. It’s worth stating again that I’ve never attended another hackathon, so I’m not accusing anyone. I’ve just seen the work we’ve had to do on both fronts — recruiting participants and maintaining an open, approachable vibe — and still every CHD winds up mostly white men. When someone tells us our event is “diverse for a hackathon” I hear a condemnation of the landscape more than a compliment of what we’ve done. That shit won’t fix itself.

Technology is strange. And strange is fun.

The self-seriousness of the tech scene has become a trope, but there’s still plenty of air to be let out of the industry. It’s not all important, and that’s okay. On an abstract level, technology today is a marvel. But a trivial thing at the push of a button is still a trivial thing. I wish more startups were allowed to be simple, and distinguish themselves by embracing the strangeness of a world where a company like theirs can even exist. The tech scene often rewards those who bury their heads in the biggest, most disruptive possible future of everything — but there are a whole lot of people turned off by the bullshit and mostly looking to make fun, interesting stuff. Even if it’s small or fleeting. Comedy Hack Day is a space for people not looking to change the world, but just looking to make the one we’ve got more tolerable and fun. I like that.

10 Comedy Hackathons: Making Some Sense Of A Strange Thing was originally published in Cultivated Wit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We run Comedy Hack Day, a hackathon that pairs comedians and developers and the whole goal is to make the funniest possible tech products. It challenges people to use apps, sites, and Chrome extensions as vehicles for comedy. At three of our first six events someone pitched “Yelp for people.” It became the poster child of a bevy of “pass judgement on people” ideas that reached such a critical mass we actually banned pitching “Yelp for people.”

We thought that ban made sense because the perpetual pitching revealed its simplicity. Even as a joke it felt too basic. But above that, the idea always seemed predicated on the inevitable cruelty that would occur. “You know how Yelp reviews get crazy and mean and out of control? Wouldn’t it be funny to apply that toward people?” Unless you mean some dark, dystopian sci-fi form of funny, then no. It would not.

Now I realize the error in our ways. We weren’t wrong about “Yelp for people” being a bad idea for our event, but boy were we wrong about why. The reason a “rate humans like objects” app idea didn’t work in a comedy context is clearly because it’s too viable of a product idea. It’s now so obvious that the idea is completely worthy of actual funding and development. Thus, it could never be taken as a joke.

As background for those who haven’t already heard, an app called Peeple has been the focus of some news this week and the whole premise of the product is exactly what we heard at three CHD events: “like Yelp, but for people.” It’s reportedly received millions of dollars in funding, and it most certainly seems to have a pair of co-founders uniquely positioned to corner the superficial judgement market.

After reading all the news about Peeple, I have to admit we feel pretty silly. Here a million dollar idea kept popping up right under our noses, and we were so caught up in the ethical quandaries around objectifying one’s peers that we couldn’t see the idea for what it really is: too brilliant to waste in a comedy setting.

It reached a point this past January where, in a resource created to acclimate and inspire our CHD participants, we provided the following verbatim instructions:

It’s worth noting that certain ideas/types of ideas are pitched at every CHD so we recommend you avoid them. They include: Yelp for people, disguising your activity (Gawker looks like the NYT, Shazam looks like Twitter), goofy voices/personalities for GPS directions, and almost anything that’s Tinder for _____. Ideas about decreasing time on social media come frequently and offer ripe territory, but they demand extra inventiveness (we’ve had a lot of low-hanging-fruit ideas on this front and none have ever made the finals).

DO NOT PITCH YELP FOR PEOPLE.

Looking back now, it’s clear that our choice to list “Yelp for people” first in the list of ideas not to pursue then repeating that “DO NOT PITCH” message in its own bold, all-caps paragraph stemmed from a place of ignorance. We assumed the idea invited cruelty and mostly hinged on reactionary judgement — all things the internet already has in abundance.

But it turns out, it didn’t work as a joke because it’s a good idea! And like any good idea, it was only a pair of self-proclaimed empathetic entrepreneurs and a misspelled word away from becoming a lucrative business. I see now the flaws in our logic. It wasn’t that “Yelp for people” was too morally confounding of an idea to get developed in an event previously won by a social network for people on the toilet. No. It was far too practical of an idea to be debuted alongside the likes of Shit Talk.

I suppose it boils down to one of those things where your instincts are right, but for the wrong reasons. We were right to dissuade people from pitching this idea at a comedy event, but we should have been encouraging them to pitch it to VCs instead. To anybody who pitched or even thought about pitching “Yelp for people” at Comedy Hack Day I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. If we led you to believe it was a bad idea, we’re sorry.

To think, if only we’d encouraged “Yelp for people” then some lucky CHD contestant could have received everything these Peeple co-founders are getting now.

We Banned Pitching “Yelp For People” At Our Comedy Hack Day For All The Wrong Reasons was originally published in Cultivated Wit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last month you may have seen my face. It was the face asking you to contribute to a $7.3 billion dollar crowdfunding campaign that would build a 300-mile wall around the bay area during the week of Burning Man. I urged you to “make the best week in San Francisco last forever.”

Now I’m back to being a regular schlub whose face isn’t doing squat aside from occasionally itching. Since the viral part is over and now my company, Cultivated Wit, is nothing but washed up internet has-beens, I figured we might as well reflect on what we learned and share it in a Medium post. The official closing chapter of any Silicon Valley talking point.

Before I sigh deeply and begin reflecting, here’s some synthesis:

• The campaign lived on a made up crowdfunding site for massive infrastructure projects we called Megagogo. Just to be abundantly clear: We made this up. It’s not real.
• That Megagogo page saw 200,000+ visitors within the first 48 hours.
• The video had more than 120,000 plays within that same window of time.
• Those numbers occurred with virtually zero distribution. We shared it within our Cultivated Wit community, but didn’t partner with any larger sites or pay for ads.
• This means everything that happened was 100% “organic” / “earned” / “earnganic”
• And one more time because a significant percentage of the media and public at large did not grasp this, the campaign was a joke. It was not real. We took no money.

Great. So here are some things we now know after making a satire thing people found funny and shared with their friends…

Everyone Wants To Know Where An Idea Comes From

The answer to this is never quite as exciting as I think people imagine it in their heads. But because it’s the most frequently asked question, here is the answer. In this case, the recipe was one part easy observation (“Man, non-burners sure do love Burning Man week”), one part absurd riffing on that notion (“What if we tried to crowdfund a wall to make that week last forever?”), and roughly two years of letting all that stew (“Remember that Burning Man wall idea? I still think that’s funny.”).

Once we decided to finally do it, three important builds on the core idea pushed it to a state of readiness:

1.) We first discussed walling off or dropping a dome over Black Rock City to trap everybody there. But that felt too logical and obvious. Building the wall around SF, essentially trapping ourselves inside, felt stupider and, thus, funnier.

2.) We briefly entertained making it a real project on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, but we doubted that they’d allow it. Then we considered skinning a fake page that looked exactly like one of those sites. But at that point we figured we might as well invent our own fake crowdfunding site where a $7.3 billion dollar project would feel less out of place. That birthed Megagogo, “the funding platform for large-scale infrastructure,” perhaps our favorite component of the whole thing.

3.) It felt essential that we not let the wall be the entire joke. It made for a great headline, but ultimately felt superficial, a little easy, and only amounted to “Burners are weird and should go away.” So we agreed to turn the mission of building this wall into an opportunity to forge a more perfect community. A chance to instill founding principles (stolen directly from Burning Man). And more than anything, our moment to set an example that could inspire the entire planet. All that rhetoric — the kind you see in actual Burning Man crowdfunding efforts, of which we watched far too many — felt like the more deserving target.

Analytics, Facebook’s Power, & Media Spread

Guess what everybody? Facebook is powerful. Like, 80% of our traffic powerful. Consider us members of the ever-growing hoard of people wishing Facebook’s analytics were better, not to mention more honest *ahem video plays ahem*. I wish we knew more about that giant slice of our traffic pie, beyond how much was mobile (most of it). Burning Man’s official Facebook page was one of the first to share the link and we suspect that single share to be the most influential traffic driver. But alas, we can’t really know for sure.

Our favorite piece of data underscores a pretty core philosophy of our company: that constructing jokes with computer code in addition to words and video is exciting, immersive, and doggone-it people like it. That’s evident in the 34,773 clicks on our “Related Projects” at the bottom of the page. There were no links, but it’s pretty clear that a world where we built pages for Reroute The Mississippi River, Tunnel Under The Midwest, and LA Blimps! would have been a world that made more people happier.

The final observation here: as fun and exhilarating as it is to get massive amounts of media pickup, it doesn’t drive traffic. At least not much. Sure, there are less quantitative benefits that increased exposure can offer, but if traffic is your biggest goal then convincing blogs to write about you probably won’t help too much. Of the 50+ sites that wrote about this wall, they combined to provide us with roughly 11 percent of our traffic. If a major component of journalism’s long term health is its ability to drive awareness and attention, then that number is scary. Meanwhile Facebook’s 80 percent number, well, says plenty about media’s biggest challenge.

Whole Lotta Reblogging, Whole Not-Lotta Reporting

Continuing on the journalism thread, of those 50+ media outlets that ran some piece of content about this campaign a total of four reached out to us for some sort of comment. Four.

I’ll acknowledge that this fell into a pretty meme-y category of internet talking points, and nearly all the “facts” involved were jokes. But in the carnivorous quest to crank out copy we saw numbers misreported, Cultivated Wit called a “comedy troupe” on multiple occasions, and far, far too many respectable outlets taking the site at face value and assuming we had actually raised all that money.

As a sidenote on that, we did notice a pretty direct correlation between people who believed the site was real and who cannot distinguish the difference between billions and millions when the number is listed out in full.

There’s something interesting to me about this “Hey, check it out!” variety of reporting / content creation. Namely how it doesn’t really amount to anything more than the Facebook content those media outlets are essentially trying to compete with in the first place. The value of the 300-word glorified reblog is lost on me, but maybe that’s just because I still subscribe to printed Sunday newspapers.

In the end, somebody out there could have grabbed the headline “We Talked To The Creators Of The Burning Man Wall Campaign” and nobody went for it. And thus, here I am writing on Medium.

The “Techie Gentrifier” Assumption

Within the small amount of negativity projected at this campaign the phrase “techie gentrifier” got bandied about on more than one occasion, and always in reference to me, the host of the video. I feel like there’s a whole bunch of fascinating Bay Area analysis within the prevalence of those two words.

For starters, the assumption that the campaign was orchestrated by techie gentrifiers immediately suggests the commenter believed the campaign was real. They had to believe it stemmed from an actual member of the SF community and not comedians — excuse me, a comedy troupe — or they wouldn’t have been angry in the first place. That assumption says three things to me:

1.) The Bay Area is not very familiar with comedy or commentary emerging from within their community.

2.) The Bay Area is very familiar with harebrained ideas that have ludicrous amounts of money attached to them.

3.) Everybody, for the most part, still believes something if the web page looks legitimate enough. Our bullshit-o-meters are not yet well tuned for the internet. Basically if numbers move and links don’t take you directly to a bunch of clown and banana GIFs, a good percentage of people will think it’s real.

That last one isn’t too shocking, but the first two really reveal something about this city. There is plenty of absurdity here and very little of it is self-aware or intentional. When I moved here three years ago I expected to find a larger, more organized contingent of people tackling the culture here with commentary or satire. I see it sporadically and usually conducted by rogue individuals with a funny idea, but I wish there was more.

So yeah, let’s do that. Let’s make more. If you want to help San Francisco tune their bullshit-o-meters by dumping more jokes into the regular wash of tech news and Kickstarter campaigns, email me (brian@cultivatedwit.com). Or at least just join our mailing list.

We might not be able to build a wall, but we can at least assemble a decent amount of goof offs who find their fun somewhere besides a desert.

Yours Truly,
TG

What You Learn Trying To Crowdfund $7.3 Billion Dollars To Build A Burning Man Wall was originally published in Cultivated Wit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.