A couple years ago, I’d been in the midst of more excitement than anyone would or could want. Of course this was happening now, at Burning Man. I got to my feet and followed her, freely and of my own will, and even though I trembled with fear as I got up, there was a nugget of excitement in there, too. But the slide made for a great grey water evaporator, and every drop of liquid that the sliders helped turn into vapor was a drop of liquid the camp wouldn’t have to pack all the way back to Reno. One of the other Burning Man rules was “leave no trace” - when we left, we’d take every scrap of Black Rock City with us, and that included all the grey water. It was a very clever way to get rid of grey water (that’s water that you’ve showered in, or used to wash your dishes or hands - black water being water that’s got poo or pee in it). Then a camp where someone had set up a tall, linoleum-covered slide that you could toboggan down on a plastic magic carpet, after first dumping a gallon of waste water over the lino to make it plenty slippery.
I’d been wandering up and down the radial avenues that cut through the city, lined with big camps sporting odd exhibits - one camp where a line of people were efficiently making snow cones for anyone who wanted them, working with huge blocks of ice and a vicious ice-shaver. The secret part of the plan failed - ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament - but the treaty isn’t dead yet, and has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world’s poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do.
It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called “The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) and “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some.
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