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

Burning Man won’t let go of me. As one of the three founders of the festival, I am constantly approached by journalists and documentary crews, podcasters, and the odd publisher hoping to make a book about 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. 

Everyone wants the same story: how a bunch of pranksters in San Francisco jumped into a bunch of janky vehicles headed for the desert, hauling weird props and camping gear and the components of a huge, man-shaped wooden figure, and accidentally built one of the most famous festivals on Earth. 

For years after I left, I avoided talking about Burning Man — I’d moved on to other things. But people keep asking, so here’s what I’ll say: What it became makes me a little sad.

I won’t pretend that Burning Man isn’t fun. My friends who are still involved share their pictures and videos, and old-school crews still carry some of the OG punk-industrial flavor. 

But the festival is barely recognizable from what we made. Burning Man has lost its anarchist soul. 

Today’s event is a massive, kaleidoscopic extravaganza for the senses — a phantasmagoric, immersive spectacle built for the consumption of Western elites and the middle-class creatives who service them. It is a carnival. A fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled, all the while presenting itself as a serious artistic enterprise grounded in philosophical principles. You can buy into luxury camps with private chefs and have a stylist curate your outfits (opens in new tab). You can fly in on a chartered plane (opens in new tab). It’s become a commercialized escape hatch — a week when anyone with enough money can leave their real life behind entirely.

Early Burning Man wasn’t a ready-made escape you could buy your way into. It was an anarchistic collaboration of equals, conjured into being by a few hundred people of goodwill, far from anyone’s control. Nobody owned it. No one person directed it. There was no official ideology or set of principles handed down from above — just a group of people powerfully, if unknowingly, attuned to the exact moment they were living through. It wasn’t an escape from reality. For those few days, it was realer than real.

San Francisco has always been a place people came to re-create themselves — running from something, running toward something exciting and unknown, going as far as they could for a shot at a new life. As Oscar Wilde put it: “It‘s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.”

I was no different. I arrived as a teenager in 1976, determined, like so many seekers who landed on the Left Coast to start life anew, to re-create myself.

The region’s mythic attractions — sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and an uncritical habitat — bred an intensely collaborative scene free of the snobbery of East Coast art markets, where any idea could fly as long as it carried passion and transgressive appeal. Our influences were Dada (opens in new tab), surrealism (opens in new tab), adventure fiction, extreme cinema, Mad Max, Lawrence of Arabia, the Beats, the hippies, the punks.

Out of that came a run of organizations and cabals. One of them, the Cacophony Society, grew out of the earlier, more secretive and transgressive Suicide Club, which staged pranks, urban explorations, and stunts (naked cable car rides, bridge climbs). The Cacophony Society was itself barely an organization — simply a newsletter of events its members dreamed up. But it became the cradle Burning Man leapt from.

There was no way to make a business out of it. It was antithetical to structure and hierarchy — a simple, beautiful concept for people to come together and create.

“Confederation” is a good word for it — the kind of temporary, self-organizing gathering Hakim Bey had already detailed in his writings, calling the phenomena a Temporary Autonomous Zone (opens in new tab). Small cabals of artists and free spirits would converge somewhere beyond ordinary control, collectively conjure a world in which they could do anything, then pack it up and vanish before the agents of control could squash it flat. Bey’s later writings on “pirate utopias” off the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean in the 17th century mirrored Burning Man’s earliest years. 

In 1988, artists Carrie Galbraith and Phil Bewley launched Cacophony’s “Zone Trips”: whim-driven expeditions to strange corners of the world — never dressed up as culturally important, just collaborative adventure for its own sake. The first went to Covina and the greater L.A. basin, where the itinerary memorably included a two-hour drive to the Shields Date Garden to drink date shakes and watch a 30-minute promotional film called “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”

Two years later, over Labor Day weekend in 1990, Cacophony organized “The San Francisco Cacophony Society’s Zone Trip #4: Bad Day At Black Rock” — and brought Burning Man with it. This desert event was conceived of and listed in the Cacophony newsletter by me and Kevin Evans. The first burn of a large wooden man had taken place on Baker Beach in 1986, organized by Jerry James and Larry Harvey and inspired by Mary Grauberger’s earlier art-and-fire solstice gathering there. Cacophony moved the event to the desert. A caravan of Cacophonists camped, raced across the playa, and, on the final night, raised and burned a 40-foot wooden man. The Burning Man festival had begun.

The other crucial ingredient arrived in 1993, when Cacophony organized an informal Zone Trip to Desert Site Works, a solstice gathering at the hot springs around the Black Rock Desert created by photographer William Binzen. His idea was to bring together an intentional community of artists, performers, and musicians to create an immersive installation with no separate audience: Everyone present would help make and inhabit the experience.

What happened there remains one of the most profound, immersive experiences of my life. Fifty or more artists built an amazing array of interactive installations, including an underground sweat lodge, a ritual pavilion, and a 300-foot neon outline of the mesa, while Paradox Pollack and Ape Theater staged a 48-hour ritual trance performance across it all. 

Two months later, we brought that sensibility — and artists including Pepe Ozan and Paradox — to Burning Man. Until then, the event had been relatively thin on art. Over Labor Day weekend in 1993, it absorbed the immersive installations, ritual, performance, and collective world-building of Desert Site Works. The Burning Man people now know began to take shape.

Years later, Burning Man cofounder and mouthpiece Larry Harvey would claim that a grand philosophy had animated the event all along. In 2004, he produced a list of (opens in new tab)10 Principles (opens in new tab). (Today, Burning Man even has an official Philosophical Center, charged with preserving the event’s “roots, values and impact.”) But that is untrue. There was no grand philosophy behind Burning Man, no Ayn Randian vision born of brilliant theorizing. It was hands-on, real-life collaboration and adventure. 

The closest thing we had to a founding text was far less solemn. In 1977, Suicide Club visionary Gary Warne began writing his 12 Chaotic Principles — a running, self-deprecating response to event experiments that had gone sideways. They were practical guidelines for immersive ideas that had to survive contact with the real world: “Divest yourself of expectations,” “You will never be totally in control.” The first desert run included over a dozen Suicide Clubbers and maybe 25 more Cacophonists. Sometime in 1990, I gave Harvey an old Suicide Club newsletter containing Warne’s principles. I can’t prove a direct line from one document to the other, but I have always suspected that this was the seed of Harvey’s 10 Principles, which is treated as holy writ by the more cultic of Burning Man’s devotees.

Those early years were small and scrappy. 

Then Burning Man blew up. The first year was around 80 attendees, most of whom slept on the desert floor in sleeping bags and maybe small pup tents. The primary revels were a formal dress party, driving very speedily across the playa to the various hot springs, and proto “theme camps” such as the Bolt Action Rifle Club, whose members dressed in 18th century garb and shot targets with antique rifles. 

By the fourth year, 1993, the entire thing assumed the more involved ritual, performance, fashion, and artistic influence of Desert Site Works and was soon to be invading the day dreams of the Silicon Valley elite, as well as thousands of less career-oriented seekers, artists, ravers, new age wannabe guru types, bored suburbanites, and many, many others. The party was on!

Blame the concurrent rise of the internet in the ’90s for much of what came next. By the time Wired put Burning Man on its cover in 1996, there was no stopping its growth. Attendance rose from roughly 70 people in 1990 to 25,000 in 1999. What had begun as a strange desert expedition became the vacation of choice — and eventually something close to a required pilgrimage — for the emerging Silicon Valley elite.

Interconnected as it became with the Ayn Rand devotees who captained the new, technology-infused culture, Burning Man became a very different kind of animal. The captains of the new internet economy — Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos — adopted the event as their own. Google decorated its atrium with photos of employees at Burning Man, bused staff to the playa — sort of a reward for slaving away in their keyboard pens for the other 51 weeks of the year, and made Burning Man attendance (opens in new tab) a consideration in its search for a new CEO. 

Great societies have always needed ways to mollify their worker populations — to provide, as Karl Marx might say, a release valve for exploited workers to blow off steam, so they remain otherwise docile. It’s hard to imagine a better one for the youthful computer workers of Silicon Valley from the late 1990s through the 2020s: paint yourself blue, drop designer hallucinogens, make passionate love with a stranger, and spend a week under the biblical weather-gods of the playa. What better corporate-sanctioned therapy could be imagined?

If early Burning Man was a confederation of anarchistic free spirits, the event that emerged from its explosive growth was top-down, hierarchical, status-generating, and controlled. It became a massive hippie, new age, tech-hipster hoedown, a magnet for well-healed seekers and dilettantes searching for something to fill the colossal God-shaped hole left by the decline of religion in America. Belief in Jesus and virgin births isn’t easy to rationalize in the wired age. What the festival offered instead was a neo-pagan revival built on hedonism, tempered by self-referential new age concepts, and crowned by a pagan-lite wooden deity that required no messy actual belief. It was a temporary cure for the existential ache carried around by so many agnostic white-collar workers.

Today, the event has become so wrapped in celebrity and red-velvet-rope exclusivity that it projects an image as glossy as anything emanating from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. Of course, many of the more proletarian attendees, and not just the P-Diddys or Diplos, continue to attend in order to build cool art, organize their own theme camps, and meet up with old friends from across the country and the world. What many old-timers would consider a decline in value, meaning, and creativity is no such thing for most of the new attendees. It remains one hell of a party.

It is also an extraordinarily expensive one. By the late 2010s and 2020s, the event’s own organizers still insisted that Burning Man wasn’t a “business” and that no money changed hands there. Anyone who looked at it with a critical eye knew otherwise: With ticket prices approaching $1,000 and the enormous expense required to provision for and travel to the event, it’s absurd to claim money has nothing to do with it. Wealthy attendees run closed, plug-and-play camps — exclusive enclaves that cost thousands for package deals featuring celebrity chefs, luxury accommodations, and craftsmen and artisans who design and fabricate their costumes and art cars.

The Burning Man organization has bought up land all around the desert (opens in new tab) and in the town of Gerlach (opens in new tab) and has developed some trappings of a major commercial institution, starting its professional public relations department in the late 1990s. From its humble if ambitious temporary autonomous-zone beginnings, Burning Man has inevitably been absorbed in important ways into the capitalist celebrity-entertainment complex.

As someone who has aimed to live a free life, I see in Burning Man today an instrument of top-down control. I was always opposed to the commercialization of the event — and was involved in litigation for the purpose of releasing the trademarks to the public domain at one point. To me, the point was fundamental: No one should own this thing.

None of that makes Burning Man a fraud. The pleasure people find there is real. For the people who go, it can be the most affecting, immersive, fun week of the year. 

But it isn’t what we made. 

Early Burning Man was an anarchist confederation of equals — thrown up out of nothing but nerve and collective will. Nobody owned it. Nobody ran it. This camaraderie, collective creation, hard work, and harder play is precisely what made it real. There were no pretentious “principles” or annoying philosophizing about how this giant hedonistic party was changing the world. There were no billionaires. Everyone made their own costumes, art, and art cars. Early Burning Man was an emanation of the firmament of that place in time. And as a result, we captured the zeitgeist in a way that today’s Burning Man, with all its budget and its billionaires and its plug-and-play camps, could never hope for. 

“Anything worth doing is worth running into the ground.” — Stuart Mangrum, director of the Burning Man Philosophical Center