spoken like someone who's never been there.

first off there's no food for sale.

There is ice, mainly because that's one item that most people will probably want and can't provide themselves very easily.

Coffee is also available for sale, i have to admit i don't understand that one, but plenty of people provide free coffee for themselves and anyone else. There was a community tea/coffee house around the corner from my tent that offered free coffee/tea every morning. My guess is they use it as a bit of a fundraiser for the organization....if that's a problem for you, don't buy it...I didn't.

I'm not sure what offends you so much about a week in which you can't spend money....i found it fascinating. Not going to claim society could work that way long term, but it's certainly a novel experience.

seconded... I went in 2008 (would love to go back but it's a bit of a hike+ a lot of gear from the east coast) and one of my favorite aspects of it was knowing that for the next week I would have no contact with the outside world. Even when i left to drive home, i left my cellphone turned off for a few hours just to savor my last moments of "freedom" before listening to the inevitable voicemails, letting my parents know i'd survived "that crazy thing in the desert", etc.

As you say...you can choose to leave it off, but it's awfully hard to resist that urge to just check in on one little thing, if you know you can..... it's also a lot easier to tell people you're not going to be reachable for a week when there's literally no cell service, than to say "i'm turning my phone off for a week and no, i'm not even going to turn it on once a day to check for voicemails/texts just in case"

Maybe it's just me (and my job at the time which involved a lot of late night wakeup calls for server issues) but a whole week of not being reachable was utterly amazing. (so was the rest of the burn, of course)

why would you assume the person is on facebook and even knows they've being tagged? last i checked FB let you tag people even if they didn't have an account. Or they could just caption the photo "joe smith doing a great keg stand!"

I think you're asking a bit much for people to continuously monitor what might be posted about them on any number of social media sites.

As for discussing w/ your friends what's appropriate...yeah, ideally... practically? not so much. besides, if you don't catch it for a month, it's too late anyway.