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.
That's a huge amount even in San Francisco. Sometimes I'm shocked what working in big tech does to people's ideas about what a normal annual salary is.
Burning Man is a once a year event. Being a c level for that is not comparable to being c level for a lot of other even non profit orgs not to even mention for profit orgs
I think you can argue, as the author does, whether the nature of the event has changed but Burning man attracts about 80k people at this point. That's comparable to Wacken, the largest annual metal festival in the world. I know people involved in that one and it's definitely a year long job to organize.
300k is a lot of money but for someone overseeing an event that size, doesn't seem that extraordinary. In particular given the responsibility for the safety of people.
I don’t know anything about burning man except the actor who originally played Dr. Weir on Stargate SG1 was fired (essentially) because she misled the producers about attending it. Tory Higgens did a fine job as her replacement though.
> ...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
it’s still the city. the org might be run in a lame way but any time you get too involved in something you see another layer of politics and favoritism and helping friends out that just seems wrong. most people going aren’t at that level and it’s fine. you’ll still have a good time (if you want to)
I think the point GP was making was that the co-founder was basing their judgment secondhand from stories from friends and headlines.
Another bit I found peculiar was the mentions of anarchism while seeming to have a rigid idea of what the event should or should not be. It's certainly far less anarchistic today—placements, permits, law enforcement—but it's not exactly anarchism to say it isn't allowed to evolve to fit the scale and culture of the participants.
Every anarchistic community ends up with rules to ensure things run smoothly. I think anarchism should be viewed as the movement towards less rules, not a movement that allows absolutely no rules. Allocating office desks so that everyone knows where their desk is is just common sense - if you're concerned about people envying the best desks, randomise it every week. You have to mark out roads if you want there to be roads.
Law enforcement was probably there because law enforcement said they'd ban the whole event if law enforcement wasn't there. That's how they typically work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I looked a bit into the author. His friend unfortunately died at Burning Man in 1996, as did two other people. Since then, he left and has been an advocate for shutting down Burning Man. They fought over the name for 10 years after that.
> ...and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.
I'm biased and a bit amusingly jaded because I left the US many years ago and have been living overseas for a long time, so take my next paragraph with that context.
Have you been to a Mexican ranchero wedding that lasts several days? Enjoyed a weekend BBQ in a Filipino province? Been invited by a bunch of 60 and 70-somethings in a small town in Vietnam who don't speak English to sing karaoke with them?
Enjoying life doesn't have to be a monumental, once-a-year event, and it shouldn't be.
You can't just post an article about pollution and use that as a trump card.
The pollution that comes from the Burning Man artwork, which is the crux of that article, is less than one plane from JFK to SFO. If we're going to complain about anything, the flights to Burning Man dwarf the actual event. But even then, the week of Burning Man, only 0.03% of travel will be people going to BM.
I get it, 70,000 people in one spot creates trash and pollution. But we all are, every minute of every day. In the grand scheme of things, Burning Man is _not_ the problem.
Why can't everyone just do what they want without us taking it to the extremes? I agree meeting locals is a ton of fun and should be a part of everyone's life. But if a bunch of people want to go to a desert and hang out for a week, and they clean up after themselves, why do you care?
They can be, but unfortunately the org has threatened to revoke official regional burn status unless they followed all the same rules, in particular, that children be allowed. There used to be some leeway on that, and there were really wonderful regional burns that did not permit kids. They were forced to, which resulted in the "real" burn being in a small taped off area.
Seems insane to me to think kids should be at burns.
> That’s because it’s easier to recruit kids into cults or whatever
That's what Sunday School is for.
I lived in SF at the time of the original burns on Baker Beach and heard about them but I was too lame and isolated to ever participate but followed their antics (and the Cacophony Society) from afar.
The universe arranged for me to go ten years ago and I found the experience magical. There's an exhibit that shows how each wave of newcomers has destroyed burning man which I found to be a cheeky take on its evolution.
The kids I saw there were doing kid friendly stuff and them being allowed there was clearly to allow their parents to come without having to leave them behind.
There's plenty to hate about it but in the end it's about people coming together to have a good time, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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.
Blackrock used to be pretty wild-west (I was going before Burning Man started), pretty scary stuff at times (a friend once did something silly and hurt himself badly, Clinton was doing something in Reno, the SS heard about it, thought it was nearby and MiB showed up looking hot and bothered in their suits), over time the BLM realised that they needed to police the area a bit more and things got toned down (doesn't help that BM situates itself across multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, these days there's a surfeit of police)
>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."
Nothing can maintain its essence over time, things change and morph. If you want something scrappy you’re going to have to start over with something new until it too eventually ends up the same way.
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.
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...
That's a huge amount even in San Francisco. Sometimes I'm shocked what working in big tech does to people's ideas about what a normal annual salary is.
Burning Man is a once a year event. Being a c level for that is not comparable to being c level for a lot of other even non profit orgs not to even mention for profit orgs
No opinion on the salary, but just because it's a once per year event doesn't mean the work isn't year round.
I think you can argue, as the author does, whether the nature of the event has changed but Burning man attracts about 80k people at this point. That's comparable to Wacken, the largest annual metal festival in the world. I know people involved in that one and it's definitely a year long job to organize.
300k is a lot of money but for someone overseeing an event that size, doesn't seem that extraordinary. In particular given the responsibility for the safety of people.
I don’t know anything about burning man except the actor who originally played Dr. Weir on Stargate SG1 was fired (essentially) because she misled the producers about attending it. Tory Higgens did a fine job as her replacement though.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eDriBfoPzsA&t=120s&pp=2AF4kAIB...
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...
> ...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
it’s still the city. the org might be run in a lame way but any time you get too involved in something you see another layer of politics and favoritism and helping friends out that just seems wrong. most people going aren’t at that level and it’s fine. you’ll still have a good time (if you want to)
I think the point GP was making was that the co-founder was basing their judgment secondhand from stories from friends and headlines.
Another bit I found peculiar was the mentions of anarchism while seeming to have a rigid idea of what the event should or should not be. It's certainly far less anarchistic today—placements, permits, law enforcement—but it's not exactly anarchism to say it isn't allowed to evolve to fit the scale and culture of the participants.
Every anarchistic community ends up with rules to ensure things run smoothly. I think anarchism should be viewed as the movement towards less rules, not a movement that allows absolutely no rules. Allocating office desks so that everyone knows where their desk is is just common sense - if you're concerned about people envying the best desks, randomise it every week. You have to mark out roads if you want there to be roads.
Law enforcement was probably there because law enforcement said they'd ban the whole event if law enforcement wasn't there. That's how they typically work.
Anarchism is rules without rulers. Removal of unnecessary hierarchies.
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.
Festivals have changed. People want high speed internet, good food, professional security and not having to put up their own tent.
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.
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
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.
burning man is cringe and you can downvote me if you want. it just proves my point.
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.
And yet, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for the founder of something to share his opinions on why he thinks it’s no longer the thing he created.
Both things can be true.
Anything with a soul that gains popularity is doomed to value extraction.
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?
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.
I looked a bit into the author. His friend unfortunately died at Burning Man in 1996, as did two other people. Since then, he left and has been an advocate for shutting down Burning Man. They fought over the name for 10 years after that.
> 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?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/burnin...
> ...and life would be better if more people had the ability to do their own flavors of Burning Man.
I'm biased and a bit amusingly jaded because I left the US many years ago and have been living overseas for a long time, so take my next paragraph with that context.
Have you been to a Mexican ranchero wedding that lasts several days? Enjoyed a weekend BBQ in a Filipino province? Been invited by a bunch of 60 and 70-somethings in a small town in Vietnam who don't speak English to sing karaoke with them?
Enjoying life doesn't have to be a monumental, once-a-year event, and it shouldn't be.
You can't just post an article about pollution and use that as a trump card.
The pollution that comes from the Burning Man artwork, which is the crux of that article, is less than one plane from JFK to SFO. If we're going to complain about anything, the flights to Burning Man dwarf the actual event. But even then, the week of Burning Man, only 0.03% of travel will be people going to BM.
I get it, 70,000 people in one spot creates trash and pollution. But we all are, every minute of every day. In the grand scheme of things, Burning Man is _not_ the problem.
Why can't everyone just do what they want without us taking it to the extremes? I agree meeting locals is a ton of fun and should be a part of everyone's life. But if a bunch of people want to go to a desert and hang out for a week, and they clean up after themselves, why do you care?
Regional burns are a thing, and they're pretty awesome.
They can be, but unfortunately the org has threatened to revoke official regional burn status unless they followed all the same rules, in particular, that children be allowed. There used to be some leeway on that, and there were really wonderful regional burns that did not permit kids. They were forced to, which resulted in the "real" burn being in a small taped off area.
Seems insane to me to think kids should be at burns.
That’s because it’s easier to recruit kids into cults or whatever
> That’s because it’s easier to recruit kids into cults or whatever
That's what Sunday School is for.
I lived in SF at the time of the original burns on Baker Beach and heard about them but I was too lame and isolated to ever participate but followed their antics (and the Cacophony Society) from afar.
The universe arranged for me to go ten years ago and I found the experience magical. There's an exhibit that shows how each wave of newcomers has destroyed burning man which I found to be a cheeky take on its evolution.
The kids I saw there were doing kid friendly stuff and them being allowed there was clearly to allow their parents to come without having to leave them behind.
There's plenty to hate about it but in the end it's about people coming together to have a good time, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Burning Man is also a quintessential example of "what if we just did a thing?" - a philosophy that more of us need to try following.
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.
Quite right but it would be nice if the kids would invent their own things instead of whining about how expensive doing "boomer things" is nowadays!
Where are your modern alternative festis or something else? Where is the the modern counter culture? What on earth is a counter culture nowadays?
Its fucking doom scrolling shite that my peers dump on you!
I think this has been obvious for many years now.
Indeed. It's hard to draw a specific line, but it's been over a decade.
> Anarchist
> Name is John Law
Makes sense.
and he's been complaining ever since they stopped letting him shoot machine guns at teddy bears.
Blackrock used to be pretty wild-west (I was going before Burning Man started), pretty scary stuff at times (a friend once did something silly and hurt himself badly, Clinton was doing something in Reno, the SS heard about it, thought it was nearby and MiB showed up looking hot and bothered in their suits), over time the BLM realised that they needed to police the area a bit more and things got toned down (doesn't help that BM situates itself across multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, these days there's a surfeit of police)
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."
Nothing can maintain its essence over time, things change and morph. If you want something scrappy you’re going to have to start over with something new until it too eventually ends up the same way.
I always thought the whole point of burning man was to forfeit your soul anyway?
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.
Everything small becomes big, and then gets enshittificated
I don't quite agree, there's a lot of small things that don't get big / are shitty enough on their own. Agreed with the rest though.
only a matter of time until it's "burning man proudly presented by palantir"
Don’t some billionaires go there with their servants and bring some porta-mansions or something?
Burning man is one of the biggest environmental disasters to happen by humans for pure entertainment.
Leave No Trace.
Worse than rolling coal? Worse than golf courses? Worse than cruiselines?