The annual Burning Man Bacchanal in the Nevada desert returns on Sunday after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus. This time, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are conducting a scientific experiment that affects online social networks.

Important reasons: About 80,000 whimsically costumed revelers arrive at a makeshift encampment called Black Rock City Mark A few A sort of reassuring but ironic return to normalcy.

• The addition of hard science projects related to the real world also emphasizes the role of events as meaningful cultural phenomena.

News promotion: Once “Burner” arrives in Black Rock City (near Reno), Researchers at the MIT Media Lab hand out 600 small containers that look like Altoids cans.

• Their goal is for people to turn them around and use the pen and paper inside to write down when and where they received items and where they are camping.
• “The idea is to map a network of collaborations and coincidences at Burning Man. Students leading the experiment.
• No matter how many cans they return to the MIT team after a week of events, they “map Burning Man’s gift economy.” There, people operate on a barter system (and pay a $575 reward ticket).

“What does the network do? What does the Burning Man ecosystem look like?” asks Epstein, who is attending with six colleagues. Unlike optimal routing from A to B, it can happen more in the default world. “

Epstein’s Media Lab Research Group — called human dynamics — is “all about understanding human behavior through the lens of big data,” he tells Axios.

• This includes “decision-making and mobility” studied “through computational techniques such as machine learning.”
• “These gifts are moving within Black Rock City, so we are collecting data on how they move,” he said. “The ultimate goal here is to map the flow of information and gifts across Burning Man.”
• The findings from this experiment, called the Black Rock Atlas Project, “could really help design social networks and other kinds of things,” he said.

Epstein and fellow “Burning Nerds” Spend a week at a science-themed camp and give a TED-style talk about their work in a giant geodesic dome.

• “People are going to run into this conversation, this story, from the desert, completely randomly. I don’t know, it’s about geometry, DNA, or space plants,” Epstein said.
• Like the event itself, the talk juxtaposes high-mindedness and survivalism.

Big picture: With a 36-year history of people creating fantastical artwork and riding bicycles adorned with LED lights, this 36-year-old festival is a sociologist’s delight.

• Burning Man organizers have long supported academia and maintain a list of academic papers drawn from the event.
• Most notably was a study published in Nature Communications In May, I tried to measure the “transcendence” of experience.

• The researchers calibrated the ability of large gatherings to create feelings of “collective effervescence,” a term coined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim.
• As a result, it was found that “63.2% of the participants reported that they had changed at least ‘somewhat’, and 19.5% said that they had changed ‘completely’.”

Backstory: Epstein and his colleagues first attended Burning Man in 2018 and brought 15 poster-tube-sized “containers.” Each one had someone’s name and photo in it to see if the community could pass the tube on to its owner.

• That didn’t work, so I started from scratch this time.
• “We want to do things that are scientific and rigorous and that give us good data to draw inferences from,” Epstein said. I won’t.”

Line spacing: They’re not the only ones trying to blend art and science in Burning Man to escape the realities of everyday life.

• Denver financial advisor Ryan Sobel, who is joining for the first time, is part of a group of 27 people who have been approved for a new camp called Abduction by Consent.
• They build fire pits, “wormholes” for guests to walk through, and dance floors for raves all night long.
• For this event, Sobel, the group’s bartender, learned how to make a fluorescent cocktail with vitamin B2. “I will have a glowing drink and a flashlight,” he said. “This will be fun.”

To the point: With a strong demand for fraternity, sorority and debauchery, this year’s Burning Man will be particularly creative and memorable.

• “It’s going to be a very interesting time,” Epstein said. “Like everything in the pandemic, cultural traditions dry up and then get rebooted.”