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Tech

This Man Is Crowdfunding a 300-Mile Wall to Keep San Francisco Burning Man-Free

A fake crowdfunding site seeks to build the wall while the Bay Area’s worst techbros are doing peyote in Nevada.

With less than three weeks to go until Burning Man, the week long festival in the Nevada desert that routinely attracts the Southern California tech corridor's wealthiest jags, some San Francisco residents are proposing a modest way to extend the respite from the creative class elite—by building a 300 mile wall around the Bay Area the week they're gone to keep them from coming back.

To make the less-than-serious proposal a reality, San Francisco "comedic" creative agency Cultivated Wit created Megagogo, a "funding platform for large-scale infrastructure" that mimics other crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

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As Brian Janosch, co-founder and creative director of Creative Wit explains in the slick pitch video, the week of Burning Man, happening this year from August 30 to September 7, is the only week of the year where ordinary, non-Burning Man attendees (or non-Burners) don't have to hear about Burning Man. It was an obvious conclusion, Janosch explains, to try to extend that week by building a wall that keeps burners out.

Image: Screenshot

Using much of the same language that defines the Burning Man ethos, Janosch talks about the "self-reliance" and "community" needed to build the wall (along with the $7.3 billion the fake crowdfunding site is seeking to raise).

It's a sly satirization of the Bay Area's unique brand of oblivious but hyper-mindful hippie-capitalism, and touches on San Francisco's ongoing class-conflict between the area's original middle and lower class residents and the new influx of wealthy tech carpetbaggers chasing the startup dream.

With only a few weeks to go, the fake project appears to be about 50 percent backed by fake money.

Once the campaign ends, it appears the site will turn its focus towards new projects, such as rerouting the Mississippi River directly West to solve California's ongoing drought, and building a tunnel under the Midwest because the Midwest is boring.