It was August of 2017 that I finally moved to China. Like a lot of people witnessing the first year of the Trump presidency I could see the writing on the wall.
A friend of mine once referred to us as an echo. I like that. An echo of an attitude or sentiment that's resonated its way through time to catch us more than 40 years removed from those personal revolutions of daily life being had down by the Bay, across the Golden Gate Bridge, through Haight-Ashbury.
The lineage runs clear: The Suicide Club begat the San Francisco Cacophony Society in the 1980s. Cacophony members helped birth Burning Man in 1990. Burning Man spawned regional events worldwide, including Dragonburn in China. And at Dragonburn 2018, Camp Cacophonia planted a flag and decided to bring the spirit back into the city.
We're not a franchise. There's no membership card, no dues, no hierarchy. The original Cacophony worked the same way—if you showed up, you were a member. If you organized something, you were a leader. The only requirement was participation.
Cacophony is less about systemic activism, and more an activism of the self. It's a space to engage with vulnerability and presence. It's a way to discover and take ownership of your own creative liberty, generating freedom internally through the act and spirit of playfulness.
The Shanghai chapter of the Cacophony Society to this day has more fun than anyone else I know. The events followed naturally from that first MOOP parade: midnight picnics in abandoned construction sites, coordinated acts of harmless confusion on the metro, an annual "Tour of the Obscure" visiting the city's strangest corners. Polar bear pub crawls in sub-zero temperatures. Fire spinning by the Suzhou River. And always, always, someone was there to write it down.
You may already be a member.