One of Burning Man’s founders spent the opening weekend of its 40th edition backing away from what it has become.In an essay published over the weekend in The San Francisco Standard, John Law, who helped move the burn to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1990, wrote that the gathering no longer resembles what the original crew built.
“The festival is barely recognizable from what we made,” he wrote.“Burning Man has lost its anarchist soul.” Law described the modern event as a sensory extravaganza assembled for wealthy Westerners and the creative class that serves them, citing plug-and-play camps with private chefs, stylists hired to curate playa outfits, and charter flights into the desert.
He also disputed the origin story behind the brand’s famed ’10 Principles,’ which he said were retrofitted in 2004 onto an event that never had a governing philosophy.Law, who has not set foot on the playa since 1996, traces the cultural shift of the gathering to the late 1990s, when WIRED put the event on its cover and Silicon Valley adopted it wholesale.
He explicitly names Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and points to Google decorating its offices with playa photos and even treating burn attendance as a factor in a CEO search.What began as a self-organizing confederation, he argues, became “top-down, hierarchical, status-generating” and ultimately a sanctioned release valve for tech workers to blow off steam.
Law didn’t mince words in his critique, asserting 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.” The commercialization complaint that belies his argument is structural.Law was involved in litigation aimed at pushing the Burning Man trademarks into the public domain, on the principle that nobody should own the event.
He notes the organi...