What Went Wrong With SantaCon?

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In 1996, author Chuck Palahniuk participated in a unique Portland, Oregon event called Santa Rampage, organized by the Cacophony Society. This experience, and others like it, later became inspiration for his novel Fight Club and the concept of Project Mayhem. Now, a new documentary called SantaCon examines how a Bay Area movement originally meant to challenge capitalism transformed into a large, often chaotic, and commercially driven event. Before the film premieres tonight at DOC NYC, Palahniuk shares his memories of being involved with the Cacophony Society and how the group’s original goals were lost along the way.

Here’s a story about Edith Wharton: After completing a new book, she tragically lost the manuscript in a fire. When her publisher asked her to rewrite it, Wharton surprisingly said there was no point. She explained that having already figured out how the story ended, it no longer interested her.

According to editor and writer Gordon Lish, a good story starts with an initial, propelling sentence. He believed each sentence should naturally lead to the next, allowing the story to unfold on its own, without a pre-planned plot or outline. Poet Robert Frost shared this idea, saying that a writer must be surprised by their own work to truly surprise the reader.

This idea of playful disruption extended into real life. The Cacophony Society, founded in San Francisco in 1986 by some of the same people who later created Burning Man, regularly staged elaborate, unusual events. They might gather hundreds of people to dress as Santa Claus and flood a city, just to see what would happen. Their quarterly newsletter announced happenings like a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where members dressed as characters from Alice in Wonderland and played a chaotic game of croquet with sledgehammers and bowling balls. Another event, Le Art Mal, involved the Society collecting terrible paintings and tricking art snobs into attending a fake gallery opening, complete with deliberately bad refreshments.

Each month, we’d set up little challenges – kind of like experiments – and then see how things played out naturally.

The idea for the Society started with Robert Louis Stevenson’s story collection, The Suicide Club, which featured a group of people who planned complicated ways to kill themselves while making it look like accidents. It wasn’t a surprise that during my ten years with Cacophony, I worked at Freightliner, specifically in their Repairability and Maintainability Center. There, we constantly tested parts like ignition switches and windshield wipers until they broke, analyzing what went wrong. We—the engineers—even discussed the disturbing practice of testing vehicles with live or cadaver primates and humans, exactly as you’d imagine. Many of my colleagues had previously worked at Boeing, and they casually shared gruesome details about what happens to passengers during a plane crash – how their internal organs essentially liquefy during the steep descent, turning to jelly before impact. This kind of morbid detail would have shocked even Wharton and Frost.

The Cacophony Society, with all its playful experiments, felt like a natural fit for me. I spent my days pushing boundaries and anticipating some kind of breakdown, and the Society offered a public space for that same kind of exploration. People weren’t seeking danger, but rather a chance to confront their own vulnerabilities and shed their ego. We were all everyday people – postal workers, bookstore employees, truck drivers – who had to return to normal life on Monday. It’s not surprising I ended up documenting everything, constantly taking notes.

Anthropologist Victor Turner would describe Cacophony events as “liminoid” because they share characteristics with traditional “liminal” experiences like Halloween or honeymoons – events that mark transitions in life. These experiences often temporarily erase social hierarchies, creating a sense of equality among participants. Turner referred to this shared feeling of acceptance and connection as “communitas.”

Events like the Tea Party, Santa Rampage, or Burning Man create a strong sense of community, which is often temporary. These kinds of gatherings – what I call ‘liminoid’ events – can happen anywhere and only last as long as the people involved are actively participating. Similarly, my novel Fight Club only existed during the time the actual Fight Clubs were happening. It may seem contradictory, but like Fight Club, Cacophony provided a secure, organized, and agreed-upon space for people to explore and even enjoy a bit of controlled chaos.

I wrote the book back in 1994, while living in a chaotic place called Cacophony, and at the time, I would have titled it Play Club. But now, that title doesn’t feel quite as exciting.

For most people, life revolved around home and work, with perhaps a third place like the gym or church – though even those places often focused on self-improvement and fixing perceived imperfections. Cacophony, however, celebrated flaws. The truth is, all Santas are overweight and look a bit silly, and that’s unavoidable. Even more challenging, being Santa Claus means being the center of attention, open to judgment, and essentially being put to the test. But in playing the role, you’re also testing whether people will actually enjoy the experience enough to keep the tradition alive.

One memorable event organized by The Cacophony Society involved members creating and wearing sequined salmon costumes. They then ran against the flow of runners in San Francisco’s Bay to Breakers race, playfully “swimming upstream.” These flashy, human-sized salmon caused a bit of chaos, sweating and bumping into people, but the spectacle was so captivating that Nike later recreated it in a commercial, using professional costumes. The salmon project was considered a success because it was widely adopted. This pattern continued with Burning Man, which began as a *Stalkerinspired event called a Zone Trip – the first man was burned at Black Rock Desert during Zone Trip No. 4. Similarly, Santa Rampage (also known as The Red Tide), which I first witnessed in Portland, Oregon, in 1996, involved a Tonya Harding séance and even prompted a riot-gear response from the police. Today, nearly 30 years later, that event has evolved into the widespread phenomenon known as SantaCon.

In his book Originals, Adam Grant identifies two kinds of innovators. Some start with an idea and then try to make it work, while others simply enjoy the process of trying new things. Grant notes that those focused on proving a concept tend to be most creative early in their careers, but their innovation often fades. Those who experiment, however, can stay creative for decades. The Cacophonists were the latter type. Their newsletters were full of ideas – experiments, really – and most of them didn’t succeed. For instance, very few people remember an event called Hoot & Holler, Paint & Burn, which involved harmlessly setting small fires and doing graffiti under a bridge in Portland. No one got in trouble – no arrests, no complaints, and no real attention. At one point, a member named Lana got frustrated and yelled, “This is pointless!” But she wasn’t saying all their events were silly; she meant they already knew how it would end. There wouldn’t be any dramatic failure or lasting impact – nothing to remember or regret, and no story to tell.

Cacophony events, even the ones that stuck around, often feel distant from their original spirit. Think of the time someone staged a mock passion play with a giant stuffed rabbit outside a church – I wasn’t there, but it’s the kind of thing that recalls the rebellious energy of Fight Club. But even the events that became popular and grew bigger each year are complicated. Burning Man has largely become a luxury experience for the wealthy, and New York’s SantaCon is now mostly a boon for businesses, despite its charitable donations. The original participants are rarely involved anymore; the Santas have gone from being outsiders and rule-breakers to something more like a fraternity. It makes you wonder if Edith Wharton would even recognize it. Ultimately, we know how these things usually turn out.

Even ideas that originally came from the Cacophony Society have been adopted by others. Look up the book Fight Club, and you’ll find many other books with similar titles. It’s ironic that groups as different as the Proud Boys and antifa both seem to be inspired by Fight Club, and through that, by Cacophony and SantaCon. It all began as a form of playful experimentation, a spontaneous activity. Perhaps the only positive thing is that these kinds of activities can still bring people together.

Victor Turner believed this kind of playful, unconventional behavior actually reinforces existing social norms. While those who go too far often face consequences (like arrest or even harm), most people simply burn off energy and are relieved to go back to their regular routines.

It’s possible that unique groups are creating new experiences, but they face a real challenge. Avoiding the police at an event like SantaCon feels easy compared to avoiding people who immediately post about it online. An anthropologist like Victor Turner would be fascinated by these ‘claimers’ – people who attend events just to prove they were there, like posting pictures of themselves surfing or at SantaCon. Events that used to be about taking risks and being deliberately outrageous – like the messy, unconventional happenings at past gatherings – are now just backdrops for people to show off. It’s frustrating. Where’s the challenge in simply looking good, and where’s the real test of character?

For people focused on completing challenges, these events are just another item to mark off their list. It makes you wonder, will future iterations of Cacophony need to resort to things like confiscating phones?

As someone who got into writing through groups like the Cacophony Society, I imagine Edith Wharton felt something amazing finishing a novel – not just the act of finishing it, but knowing it was done, truly complete. And then, the idea that a fire could erase it all… it’s almost perfect. It means no one could ever misunderstand her work, or pretend to have read it just to look cool on platforms like BookTok, where reading feels more like a performance these days.

Okay, so the story goes that a train fire destroyed Edith Wharton’s manuscript – she made it out okay, thankfully, but the book was lost. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter that we never got to read it. It’s clear Wharton wasn’t writing it for us, and I respect that immensely. It was a personal endeavor, and that’s powerful.

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2025-11-13 20:56