AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
His best-known concept was the Temporary Autonomous Zone, a sort of short-lived bubble of alternative reality where humans could live as they were supposed to, free of oppression. Burning Man is a TAZ, or was thought to be, it may have accumulated too much structure by now. A party is a TAZ, partly because (as Prince sang) they aren't meant to last.
Something about the idea irks me, I'm not sure why, I am certainly not against the imagination and I'm have zero problems with the notion that immaterial things like ideas can exert real-world causality – I mean, I'm a programmer, I do it for a living. Maybe it's framing it as a separate world? That smacks of dualism, it's just the mind/body split projected onto the cosmos. The imagination becomes something like Bali or some other foreign land where one may visit, admire, and absorb culture but you always return to prosaic default reality. Or a TAZ where a different and better logic makes things go. A Separate Reality, as Carlos Casteneda called it.
I think it's a mistake to take Hakim Bey too literally. They say Burning Man is a TAZ, and far be it from me to say otherwise, but it's not one which does me much good. Burning Man is hard to get to, and while it might have been pure anarchy in its early days, it has become unavoidably institutionalized, a place of rules and regularities.
Nothing wrong with that per se, in fact the institutional mechanics of soemthing like BM are quite interesting and astonishing and worthy of study. But it doesn't seem very TAZzy. That's OK, nothing can stay that way forever, why do you think it has "Temporary" in its name?
The true TAZ is a state of mind that is accessible anywhere. Like the kingdom of heaven, it is found within.