Rumours of an Ebola outbreak, it unsurprisingly turns out, were greatly exaggerated. Speculation that festival-goers might turn on each other in Lord of the Flies fashion did not come to pass. There was no cannibalism. No human sacrifices took place. Anarchy was not loosed on the world. Instead, the rain stopped, the roads dried up, and, on Monday, an exodus from the northern Nevada desert began. The tens of thousands of festival-goers who had been stuck at the Burning Man festival because of flooding got in their vehicles and left. By now, most of the revellers are safe at home – no doubt telling everyone they know how life-affirming and radically self-sufficient their Burning Man experience was.
While this year’s festival may be over, let us not forget all the jokes that were made along the way. For a brief but beautiful moment, large swathes of the internet came together to delight in others’ misfortune. People from the left and the right united in hilarity over the fact that 70,000 tech types were stranded in a desert, covered in mud, and having to deal with a less-than-enjoyable toilet situation.
I’ll be honest, I was one of the people inhaling as much Burning Man content as I possibly could and chortling along at the dystopian scenes. I mean, can you blame me? The great Burning Man Muddening of 2023 was almost scientifically engineered to evoke schadenfreude. Wealthy, insufferable attendees? Check. Improbable details, such as the fact that the rain was causing a bunch of three-eyed fairy shrimp, which can survive as eggs in sediment for decades, to come alive? Check. The fact that climate activists, angry about private jets and single-use plastics at the event, tried to shut down the festival and were jeered at by annoyed attendees, then vindicated by mother nature? Check. A situation that was uncomfortable but not life-threatening? Check! (I should note that one person did die at the festival, but organisers have clarified that it wasn’t related to the weather.)
Before a bunch of Burners get fired up about being called insufferable, let me acknowledge that not everyone who goes to the festival is obscenely wealthy and generally awful. Burning Man has countercultural roots and, once upon a time, it was a celebration of creativity and a counterpoint to mindless consumerism. Over the past few years, however, it has become massively commodified and started attracting some of the worst people on earth. Nowadays, it is an excuse for influencers and Silicon Valley types to take a bunch of drugs and party in the desert while pretending they are doing something meaningful that elevates the world’s consciousness. Burning Man is supposed to be about “radical self-reliance” and yet a number of attendees appear to be flown in on private jets and shacked up in luxury accommodation with air conditioning. I don’t care how exotic the drugs or how interesting the art is: once people such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk show up to your party, there is no longer anything countercultural about it. You are not rebelling against the man. You are the man.
Speaking of the man: one of the accidental celebrities from this year’s Burning Man was Neal Katyal, a former Obama administration official and supreme court lawyer. He managed to trek out of the site “through heavy and slippery mud”, documenting his escape on social media with lots of pictures of himself wearing tie-dye and a propeller hat. X (formerly Twitter) immediately did its thing and reminded everyone that Katyal has been involved in some, uh, interesting lawsuits – because England has annoyingly strict libel laws, I won’t say anything about these cases, I’ll just quote a 2020 Slate headline which stated: “Prominent anti-Trump attorney [AKA Katyal] asks the supreme court to let companies off the hook for child slavery.” To be clear: I’m not saying Katyal helped a large corporation skirt child slavery laws, I’m just saying that he is the sort of guy who is a typical Burning Man attendee these days: the establishment in a goofy hat. Excess disguised as enlightenment.
