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

llisper about 1 hour ago 35 commentsRead Article on sfstandard.com

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HaloZero•29 minutes ago

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...

aprilthird2021•15 minutes ago

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

Barrin92•3 minutes ago

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.

rodrodrod•25 minutes ago

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...

whack•about 1 hour ago

> ...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

foolfoolz•38 minutes ago

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)

brianshaler•23 minutes ago

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.

megagpt2•21 minutes ago

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.

chollida1•6 minutes ago

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.

jesse_dot_id•6 minutes ago

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

nsedlet•about 1 hour ago

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.

blackqueeriroh•33 minutes ago

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.

thataccount•27 minutes ago

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

gkoberger•about 1 hour ago

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.

gkoberger•43 minutes ago

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.

megagpt1•40 minutes ago

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.

__MatrixMan__•about 1 hour ago

Regional burns are a thing, and they're pretty awesome.

cassonmars•36 minutes ago

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.

newsclues•28 minutes ago

That’s because it’s easier to recruit kids into cults or whatever

afavour•about 1 hour ago

I think this has been obvious for many years now.

Prcmaker•38 minutes ago

Indeed. It's hard to draw a specific line, but it's been over a decade.

blackqueeriroh•22 minutes ago

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.

aappleby•about 1 hour ago

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

Taniwha•35 minutes ago

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)

DonHopkins•23 minutes ago

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."

ProAm•40 minutes ago

Everything small becomes big, and then gets enshittificated

entropy47•19 minutes ago

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.

chessucation•32 minutes ago

only a matter of time until it's "burning man proudly presented by palantir"

subw00f•24 minutes ago

Don’t some billionaires go there with their servants and bring some porta-mansions or something?

exabrial•23 minutes ago

Burning man is one of the biggest environmental disasters to happen by humans for pure entertainment.

Leave No Trace.

mynameisash•13 minutes ago

Worse than rolling coal? Worse than golf courses? Worse than cruiselines?

johnohara•13 minutes ago

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?