It feels important to note that most of the people at Burning Man, the week-long festival of “radical self-reliance” held every summer in the inhospitable Nevada desert, are not evil. But the festival, which draws thousands of people for its music, experiments in self-governance, revealing costuming and ready availability of drugs, has become a stand-in for a certain kind of self-congratulatory excess.
At least in the popular imagination, Burning Man has become associated with the kind of person who will rapturously tell you about their love for taxidermy, or polyamory, or electronic dance music, often while you smile stiffly and scan the room for an exit. Imagine a white person with dreadlocks: that person loves Burning Man. The clientele is heavy on privilege and light on self-awareness. But most of them, it should be emphasized, do not deserve to suffer. Their only crime is being annoying.
But over the past two decades, Burning Man has transformed from its original purpose as, in the words of its founders, “an excuse to party in the desert” to a hub for the rich and powerful – and in particular, a lucrative networking event for the Silicon Valley elite. Billionaires and executives love it; every year, when the festival takes place, San Francisco’s richest neighborhoods turn into ghost towns. The event’s focus on self-reliance has attracted libertarians and the more libertine brand of Republican, the kind of guys who will tell you why they thinks age-of-consent laws are misguided. The richest men on Earth flock to Burning Man: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Alexis Ohanian, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all regulars.
Like a lot of “countercultural” relics, Burning Man was always more radical in reputation than in fact. But it is now a magnet for the kinds of people who make a lot of money by devoting their lives to upholding the unjust status quo, and who go to Burning Man in part to shore up their smug sense of being creative innovators as they endeavor to make things worse for the rest of us. Neal Katyal, the former Obama solicitor general now best known for his successful argument before the supreme court that corporations cannot be held liable for their use of overseas child slave labor, attended Burning Man this year.
Another great enthusiast is the rightwing anti-taxation activist Grover Norquist, who also spent time there this summer. Of Burning Man’s affinity for his own rightwing politics, Norquist has said: “There’s no government that organizes this. That’s what happens when nobody tells you what to do. You just figure it out. So Burning Man is a refutation of the argument that the state has a place in nature.”
Nature, however, has not been so kind to Burning Man. Over the weekend, heavy rains turned the stretch of dusty flats that attendees insist on calling “the playa” into a muddy mess. Exiting the festival by car or private plane – the preferred transport of Burning Man’s most visible attendees – became impossible. Thousands were stranded in the makeshift temporary city, living out of tents and RVs among the muck. Festival organizers instructed them to conserve food and water.
Burners like Norquist have long insisted that they do not need government help, do not need regulation or law, and so it was more than a little satisfying for those of us outside the festival – those of us who believe in the power of the state to ameliorate social injustice and make people’s lives better, who believe in taxation, mutual responsibility and everyone paying their fair share – to see all the libertarians stuck in the mud. “We don’t need outside help,” insisted one stranded attendee on social media, straining credulity.
Online, the reaction to the Burning Man disaster was mostly laughter at the attendees’ expense. Tech billionaires, anti-regulatory activists, lawyers who ensure that the powerful face no consequences for even their most egregious crimes, were all brought low, their hubris and vanity exposed. It did not help that dispatches from the Burners themselves seemed so oblivious to the irony of their plight.
“It was an incredibly harrowing six-mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud,” Katyal said on X, formerly known a Twitter, of his successful exit from the camp. “The mud is like cement and sticks to your boots.”
He seemed to fear for his feet. Reading this, I thought of the child slaves on an Ivorian cocoa plantation whose exploitation he had defended in court. One of the boys said that when he tried to run away, his enslavers cut the soles of his feet and rubbed chili pepper into his wounds, before tying him to a tree and beating him.
Maybe the reason it felt so satisfying to see the American elite in distress and discomfort at Burning Man is because we are so unlikely to ever see them face accountability for their recklessness and folly in real life. The tech industry, in particular, has undermined a slew of fields, warping how we connect with one another, how we disseminate information, and how we maintain a meaningful democracy. They’ve done much of this impulsively and indifferently, not seeming to care who they hurt. Their industry is unregulated and their wealth is largely untaxed; at Burning Man, they seemed to be seeking some kind of congratulations for all the destruction they have caused.
It is largely because of their own influence that we do not have a meaningful regulatory system to rein them in; it is largely because of the inequality from which they benefit that we do not have an effective criminal justice system to prosecute white-collar crime. We don’t have meaningful mechanisms to hold these people accountable for the ways they have hurt us. All we have are the misfortunes dealt to them by arrogance and fate, and the consolation of our schadenfreude.
Not everyone at Burning Man is a reactionary tech mogul. Some are merely earnest hippies. The festival’s defenders claim that the wealthy and rightwing elements at Burning Man are not authentic to the place, that they are contaminants of the festival rather than its logical conclusion. But the claim has begun to resemble a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the tech billionaires and libertarians have now dominated Burning Man for well over a decade of its 30-odd-year history.
Amid the mud and the Republicans, there might still be noble elements there, and we can be glad they were able to leave safely, hopefully with their optimism intact. But next year, they should take their good intentions elsewhere. Burning Man is not the place for them.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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