The Law has spoken: Burning Man has been co-opted by The Man. In an essay published by the San Francisco Standard this past weekend, one of the event’s original co-founders, John Law, lamented that the anarchic utopia he and his co-conspirators ushered into existence in 1990 now leaves him “a little sad”. These days, he argues, the festival has become little more than a “fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled,” the whole enterprise eroded gradually by swelling hoards of wealthy tech bros and influencers.
Personally, I’ve spent some of the happiest weeks of my life roaming around Black Rock City, the temporary desert metropolis where Burning Man takes place, but I’m not about to argue with Law. His criticisms of the luxury camps, with their celebrity chefs and private jets, ring absolutely true. As ever in life, though, it’s all relative. So I would add one small caveat: You know what else has been degraded over the last few decades by bowing to the whims of a wealthy elite? Everything on Earth!
We see the effects of growing wealth inequality throughout modern life, from to politics, and festivals are certainly no exception. Over the past twenty years I’ve used my music journalist’s credentials and an acquired knack for blagging to talk my way into parties everywhere from Moscow to Malawi and from Curitiba to Cambodia. Wherever you land on this planet, there is one truth universally acknowledged: Things aren’t as good as they used to be, and the culprit is invariably somebody trying to milk more money out of their cash cow.
So while the same is surely true of Burning Man, it’s also the case that the event has managed to maintain a radical spirit that you won’t find anywhere else. This weekend, tens of thousands of people made their way along a single-track road across the Nevada desert into a sprawling, dreamlike city that bursts into existence just once a year. When I think of them, I don’t pity them because Burning Man isn’t what it was a decade ago. I envy what they’re about to experience.
My first time in the Black Rock Desert was over a decade ago now, in 2014, and like any other neophyte, I really had no idea what I was letting myself in for. The pictures you see don’t come close to doing justice to the sheer scale of the place. The first thing you have to get your head around is the desert itself: 1,000 square miles of nothing. It’s the sort of place you might go if you wanted to set a land speed record or launch a rocket into space, but only true maniacs would look at it and decide to throw a party.
This blank and unforgiving venue weeds out the posers. While Law is completely right to say that the one percenters swanning in to their air-conditioned RVs dampen the atmosphere, the vast majority of those spending this week in the desert will be engaging in a particularly harsh strain of survivalist camping. Everything they eat, every resource they use and every drop of water they drink will have to be brought with them and accounted for. You can’t buy anything on site except ice.
I didn’t realize at the time how incredibly fortunate I was to find myself part of a camp who knew what they were doing. A merry band of ravers, drag queens and drug fiends who also turned out to be resourceful enough to figure out how to set up shade structures for tents, portion out and provide healthy, sustaining meals every day and then run the wildest British pub on the playa each night.
When I ventured out to explore the city, I realized how many other small, dedicated crews were cooking up their own delights. From the outside, it’s easy to imagine that it’s all billionaires in plug-and-play camps with staff that cater to their every whim, but the truth is it’s mostly oddballs and dreamers clubbing together to make something singular and delightful and then to provide it, free of charge, to anyone who wanders by.
So yes, there are nightclubs and, of course, the notorious Orgy Dome, but there are also tea rooms and circuses and orchestras and grilled cheese stands. That’s even before you find the immersive, interactive sculptures or spot the art cars: towering, neon-lit representations of pirate ships or huge woolly sheep or the Golden Gate Bridge that drift across the desert like vivid hallucinations, inviting you to climb aboard.
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Of course, as Law correctly points out in his essay, it takes a lot of money to build all this. Tickets aren’t cheap and camps pool dues from their members in order to create whatever it is they’re creating. Nonetheless, the fact that this all leads to spending a week in a situation where you’re never asked to pay for a single thing does make the whole experience feel pleasingly decommodified. On the playa, at least, there’s no cash cow to milk.
What’s really special about Burning Man is that it’s built by communities, not committees or advertising agencies. You won’t see a logo or a “brand activation” anywhere in the desert. Anything you’re likely to lay eyes on will have been put there for the express purpose of helping you have a good time, just because someone felt like doing it. Many of the same people who ran our pub on the playa now organize a fabulous club night in London. The sparks of creativity that Burning Man kindles can start fires out in the rest of the world.
Now, I’ll confess, I haven’t been back since 2019. Since then I’ve acquired a wife, a dog, a child and a job with regular hours, all of which aren’t exactly conducive to slipping off to the desert for the week to run wild, naked and free.
And I’ll admit there are troubling signs that the festival may indeed have gone downhill since I was last there. I’ve heard rumors that it’s now possible to access the internet from the site, something that would have been inconceivable on my last visit. A couple of days ago, Burning Man’s official Instagram account posted about “3 off-grid apps for your Burn”, which made me feel queasy. Even if they’re offline, the idea of people wandering around Black Rock City with their phones glued to their hands is exactly the sort of thing that Burning Man was supposed to get you away from.
Still, even if things have changed for the worse, it makes me happy to know that right now, somewhere in the desert, somebody has just stumbled across a strange tent and into the best night of their lives.
So if, in a couple of decades, I catch my son packing up a U-Haul and heading to Black Rock City with a gleam in his eye, it will thrill me to know that some part of that anarchic soul Law wrote about is still being kept alive by a new generation.
I won’t sneer that it won’t be as good as it was in my day. More likely, I’ll just ask: “Any room for an old man?”