I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul

afavour

I think this has been obvious for many years now.

aappleby

and he's been complaining ever since they stopped letting him shoot machine guns at teddy bears.

whack

> ...the festival I helped invent 36 years ago. Curiously, I get this interest even though I haven’t set foot in the Black Rock Desert since 1996. Not doubting the headline conclusion, but I would have expected a better source than someone who hasn't been to Burning Man in literally 30 years. AFAICT, Burning Man was still very well regarded ~20 years ago, long after this founder stopped attending

gkoberger

Burning Man is easy to hate on. I've never been. But come on. The world kinda sucks. If a bunch of people want to go to the desert with no cell phone service and just do their thing, why do we care? If some of them need an RV to do it, and they aren't charging others, so what? That's awesome, and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.

nsedlet

As the author says himself, he hasn’t attended in 30 years. I understand some of the things he’s complaining about, but I don’t think that is the dominant experience of being there.

ProAm

Everything small becomes big, and then gets enshittificated

HaloZero

An aside though about the whole "lost its soul". I was looking up Marion Goodell's salary and it's pretty high. The Burning Man ORG spends a lot on salaries, especially since it relies on a mostly volunteer workforce. She and the C-suite for the Burning Man Org make like $300,000 plus. It's not a HUGE amount in San Francisco if you consider tech salaries but I parsed salaries of CEOs of arts organizations in California and she's still easily by far the most highly paid CEO in her field. They also have a CTO what makes 300k. https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public...

johnnyApplePRNG

Yea I wouldn't be caught dead going there today. Looks pretentious.

thataccount

I always thought the whole point of burning man was to forfeit your soul anyway?

rodrodrod

Curiously, I found this 1995 SFGate article offering a related perspective: > Many participants tell me this is the last year the event will be bearable before it "goes commercial." https://www.sfgate.com/style/article/Communal-art-in-the-des...

DonHopkins

Build A 300-Mile Wall Around SF During Burning Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO_r6ndZRZY&t=1s >A community effort to construct a 300-mile wall in one week and prevent Burning Man attendees from returning to the Bay Area. >"I'm asking for your help crowdfunding the most ambitious Burning Man project ever a wall that's built around the entire bay area during the week of Burning Man."

exabrial

Burning man is one of the biggest environmental disasters to happen by humans for pure entertainment. Leave No Trace.

blackqueeriroh

Honestly, a pretty incredible article. Yeah, this is what happens. And even so, as he said himself, the newbies continue to find themselves and the proles continue to gather to connect and reconnect. I imagine many here feel convicted because they see themselves in Law’s descriptions of the well-heeled elite, and they resent Law for saying they are not transgressive instigators, anarchic fire starters, and autonomous free zone inhabitants. Y’all. Be comfortable with who you are. Most of us just want good money, an awesome time with cool computer shit to do, and friends and family who love us. It’s okay not to be a revolutionary. What’s not okay is to trick yourself into believing you are one when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s to the revolutionaries - I get to live a more grounded life because of their willingness to live outside the lines.

johnohara

I don't understand how nostalgia can be applied to Burning Man. Outside of those few who dedicate themselves to the organization and administration of the event, each burning man is a unique assemblage of thousands of people, different in every way from one year to the next. Except perhaps the location. Without the different human beings who show up each year, the event would be nothing more than a dust bowl waiting to become a mud pit. The "soul," if there is one, is the sum total of the expressions those humans bring with them at any given point in time. Change the humans and you change the expression. So exactly which "soul" does the author long for?

jesse_dot_id

I've known this for awhile, since at least 2020. Specifically when they told a documentarian he could film and then threatened litigation he release his film after he had already shot it. He had to blur literally everything at Burning Man but the guy he's following around. https://www.blurringman.org/blurring-man

chollida1

About 15 years ago it really started to get corporate. Big money came in and created camps with air conditioning, huge RV's no bartering, etc. Dustin Moskovitz and the like started going and wouldn't dare behave the ordinary peasants, by sleeping in tents, participating in the community, bartering for things. Heck Zuckerberg took a helicopter there one year. instead they just threw money at the event so they wouldn't have to do the things that made burning man, burning man.

a-dub

san francisco had that cool, edgy, gonzo art scene happening in the 90s. also survival research laboratories and their famous pitching machine, the omnicircus, chicken john, laughing squid, critical mass/commute clot, santarchy/santa con (before it became the weird frat thing it is today). similar things in brooklyn in the '00s like the madagascar institute, black label bike club, idiotarod, etc. in the 2000s, there was kind of an interesting tech meets countercultural art thing where a lot of the more interesting tech people would pour their disposable income into interesting burning man art projects (nimby's ddi, jabba's sail barge) but it does seem like in recent years with the real sf affordability crisis that came with internet business actually taking off the creativity went down and the money seeking people showed up. i guess that's also true of sf (and brooklyn) more generally. it was a fun time. i was a swe intern in the mid 90s and would marvel when the engineering team would disappear to the desert for a week and come back with colored hair. my boss drove a psychedelic school bus to work sometimes. in south of market on 6th street in sf, there was a building that had furniture welded onto the exterior like it had all come to life and was trying to escape the building.

HedonicEscal8r

> Anarchist > Name is John Law Makes sense.

johndhi

I started going in 2002 and have friends who have gone every year since then. There has been a meme that burning man sucks now and used to be better that entire time. That doesn't mean the meme is false. It definitely has changed. There's an article in sfgate today that quotes the head of the Death Guild (Thunderdome) camp as saying something like, do people want to carry on the traditions their parents had, or invent their own? I thought that was a great question. Both are valid paths.

SoftTalker

Festivals are big business now. Boomers and Gen Xers have money to spend and spend they do trying to recapture their youth. Hundreds of dollars for passes. Hundreds more spent on food and drink. Times tens or hundreds of thousands of attendees.