Burns

There’s a type of festival called burns. Burning Man in Nevada, AfrikaBurn in South Africa, Lampa on Bali. From the inside they look like temporary cities built out of madness, art, and generosity. From the outside—like a cult for the rich. The truth is somewhere in between: they’re beta versions of reality. Prototypes of a world where different rules apply.

I know this because after BOOM, after Trimurti, after everything—I became something like an A/B tester. You know how it works in IT: you launch two versions of a site and see which one performs better. Well: I’m the user that fate keeps shuttling between versions. You open one “site”—everything is familiar, stable, works. You open the other—everything’s the same, but better. And—glitchy. Beta. Not yet debugged. New features conflicting with legacy code.

Festivals—beta. Regular life—prod. The trick is that after enough “betas” you can’t go back to “prod.” Pretending the other version doesn’t exist—stops working.

The most accurate description of this experience I found—much later—in the Strugatsky brothers. I was never into them. At some point the Redhead played me the audiobook of Hard to Be a God. Powerful, sure, but—not for me. And then—she—recommended Monday Begins on Saturday. And I—lost my shit.

NIICHAVO. The Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry. A place where employees work nights voluntarily. Because it’s interesting. Where a translator-couch lives in the basement and teleports you to other worlds. Where the walls between departments are movable. Where time behaves—strangely. Where nobody knows who’s in charge—but everyone knows why they showed up. Where magic is a formalism. A system. A technology. With formulas. With laboratories. With—data.

BOOM—is NIICHAVO. AfrikaBurn—is NIICHAVO. Lampa—is NIICHAVO. Trimurti—is NIICHAVO. Every burn is a temporary NIICHAVO that assembles for a week in a desert or on a shore, runs—at impossible RPMs—and then vanishes. Until next year.

The Strugatskys wrote this in 1964. Long before burns. Long before BOOM. Long before any of it. They—saw it. An institute where mad scientists experiment with reality, at night, voluntarily, out of pure—curiosity. That is—literally—what happens at every burn. Only instead of “magic”—art, music, chemistry, and human connection.

I’ve been to NIICHAVO. Many times. And—I probably couldn’t find words and metaphors more precise than the Strugatskys’. They—described my experience forty years before it happened.