Question: "Why is this event turning ugly?"
Answer: The culture itself is at fault. A blanket prohibition against "negativity" may keep some from admitting it and inebriation may keep them from thinking about it, but human nature can't be denied. When one person finds that he has to lick another person's boots in order to not be beaten up (or expelled, or suffer some other unacceptable loss) and he has to look happy about it, no matter how much he may go into denial about it, he's going to resent that. The only thing that suppressing awareness of what it is that he resents (by convincing him that he has no right to resent it) will achieve will be to turn his resentment into a free floating rage, always looking for something to attach itself to, and never satisfied for long because it is never really addressed. This is part of what is wrong with "don't worry, be happy", a normative attitude in the "white bread" mainstream of American culture which is only going to be reinforced by the strangely evangelistic apathy which marijuana seems to promote.
This attitude, straight out of the commercially published "The Power of Positive Thinking" by Norman Vincent Peale with maybe a touch of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, is very convenient for a corporate world which likes its workforce docile and found, to its undoubted joy, that political conditions in the New World (including a trendy and more than slightly intolerant rejection of Old World culture) gave it an opportunity to remake the culture in its own part of the world to its own liking. And what would that liking be?
Think about what the defining characteristic of a corporate executive
is, that which made him the man he is, today. It isn't professionalism.
Hard working, talented people languish in obscurity for years. It isn't
ability. The half-witted manager is such a cliche that I won't even bother
to digress on that point. I'll just point the reader in the direction of
the nearest book about Dilbert. 
The defining trait of a corporate
executive is an overbearingly aggressive thirst for power, and it is that
trait that allows him to run roughshod over his competition as he rises
to the top in a bureaucratic system in which advancement is based on
politics, not on results, because results in such subjective areas where
so much teamwork is involved are hard things to quantify. And if your
driving urge is a thirst for power, what is the one thing that is
going to get in the way of quenching that thirst more than anything
else? Assertiveness out of the people one is dealing with. And thus,
you will love the concept of people being told that they should be
positive "no matter what", because on those terms there is no way for
them to assert themselves and question the status quo you are creating
for them.
Like alcohol abuse, such a willful shutting down of one's own critical faculties, while it does make for appalling results, has a way of maintaining itself because life starts feeling a lot worse for a while before its starts to feel better when the addict puts away that to which he is addicted - here, to the illusion of happiness which willful obliviousness offers. The first thing that the groupthinking "go along to get along" type is going to be confronted with, should he start thinking for himself, is just how stupid he has been. If, like a number of the people you saw in the account of the silliness I saw in the Burning Man forums, he is not too bright by nature, this is going to hitting him on a sore point, and for him to retreat back into the illusory safe and warm embrace of the group will be all too easy. And thus, while this artificial culture has been created in order to make him (and others like him) more easy to take advantage of, our "Joe Sixpack" will fight to keep it alive, becoming an accomplice in his own exploitation and wondering why others view him with scorn, even as he makes yet another feeble attempt to browbeat his intellectual betters into letting themselves be exploited as well.
Now, how would you describe the behavior seen out of BMORG which, for example, has gone on the attack because of the creation of a Chicago area burners list to compete with their own, and which the aforementioned Playa Phone people have expressed concerns about, citing a fear that BMORG might attempt to take over their operation? One which tolerates no dissent from its opinions on its boards, even as it tries to cover up the reality of its own censorious tendencies by making vague, hand-waving allusions to "harassment" on the board, stonewalling anybody who asks them for specifics on what form that alleged "harassment" took? One which has taken control over what, by its own account, was a gathering of anarchists out in a place remote enough for those present to be left alone? This is power seeking, corporate behavior seen out of people from a vacuous, corporate dominated and defined cultural background. Having created a parody of their own unwholesome cultural roots, they have lead their followers into an exaggeration of its own unwholesome cultural implications. The hard core burners are just like the American mainstream in the worst possible way, only more so.
It's enough to make one throw a party, just to celebrate the fact that one is a relatively unassimilated ethnic.
Question: "So, the event is a lost cause?"
Answer: No, far from it.
In real life, the "don't ever make waves or be negative, no matter what" approach has one fatal flaw : as fond as the culture it created may be of solipsism in its various forms, the fact is that there is such a thing as objective reality. A culture may be able, in the short run, to survive the mistake of driving out the philosophers in its midst and even maintain the illusion that this wasn't a mistake. If it drives out its physicians and engineers, though, the understanding that this was a mistake will be as close as the next reactor meltdown or outbreak of bubonic plague, and as inescapable as the misery that follows.
Professionals in fields such as these almost never take the "don't make waves" attitude as far as "Joe Sixpack" would like them to, because they couldn't do so and get their jobs done. No matter how positive your thoughts about your circuitry may be, the reality is that if you don't worry about filament formation in a high power semiconductor device, you're going to have a lot of barbecued silicon on your hands. No matter how hopeful you are about the operation, you aren't going to be able to treat a lymphoma with spinal cord manipulation. Objective reality is just that - objective - and if you are too busy making nice with the crowd to pay reality the respect that it is due, it will bite you in your proverbial ass before you have a chance to blink. This forces people in such fields to put politics aside for a large chunk of their day and when they get off work? Like any other addiction, the kind of willful, groupthinking stupidity described makes a mess of the addicts' lives. Those who are not already addicted will take one look, and find that they have no desire to partake.
It is a very different culture that results, and far different cultures that those who enter these professions come from - in many ways, far more liberating ones. The gainfully employed professionals one often meets during the day have rich, well developed lives outside of Burning. Confronted with a Playa "eviction" most would shrug, call the eviction team a pack of idiots, and leave with the thought "it's just a festival; on to better things". They can take it or leave it, and so peer pressure on the Playa won't touch them, and likewise with those from the circles in which they run. "And the relevance of this digression would be?", you ask ...
Click here and we'll discuss that.
