If your Facebook feed has been full of people grumbling they weren’t able to get Burning Man tickets (or if you yourself were unlucky), there's some cosmic comeuppance to relish this morning: the 200 Silicon Valley jerks who allegedly jumped the queue by hacking into Ticketfly will not get away with it.
According to Wired, Burning Man officials know all about the scofflaws, have already canceled their tickets, and are working to make sure this kind of breach doesn’t happen again. The hacked tickets will be made available again during the traditional last-minute sale in August.
People can debate the merits of attending the Burn in the era of gated camps, air-conditioned yurts, and private chefs serving steak tartare, but cutting the line is conduct unbecoming a Burner and should be punishable by ripping the fake fur off their top hats.
However, there’s a bit of a twist. Gliph founder Rob Banagale (aka @jetsetter), who bragged about the hack on Twitter, reiterated this morning that it was all a prank. He seems surprised to learn that people actually did hack the system. Is this a case of life imitating art? Or a weird coincidence of a glib techie bragging about something obnoxious that he didn’t actually do, even as others were also doing it? Is this a false flag operation designed to lure our attention away from something else entirely?
Just like when State Bird Provisions switched to OpenTable to combat its own reservation-stealing bots, it’s good to know that Burning Man is on the prowl for cheaters. So again, if you didn’t get tickets and this is all just salt on your wounds, know that the “No Cuts, No Buts, No Coconuts” rule is ironclad and will be enforced with extreme prejudice.
[via Wired; photo courtesy of Duncan Rawlinson/Flickr]
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