They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.
What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. (...)
Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle... Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop. (...)
My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes. (...)
What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.
Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.
Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.
But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.
What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.
Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.
But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.
by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
