That's the three essential tasks of culture, and they're excited by it. That wouldn't at all be the case if it was a consumption oriented experience. They would be satiated, go home, and that would be it. When I hear people say that the massive use of the internet is just another kind of alienation, and that people are wasting their time in front of their computer screens, they're forgeting that there are other people on the other side at a global scale. By and large, the whole internet phenomenon puts power back in the hands of individuals and beyond individuals it makes possible the formation of communities.
Community is less and less based on locality.
That's a thing of bricks and mortar. We've found it's possible to convene ad hoc communities at will and pull people of their free choice to it. Well, at our little popsicle stand, all I really want to do is create as large and persuasive of a model of the kinds of social organization that engender communal relations between people. And make it so large and persuasive that it becomes a plausibe model, and merely a model, for how civilazation might function. The real work and consequence of the Burning Man will be beyond the boundries of the event.