Daniel Pinchbeck, How Burning Man Failed, Daniel Pinchbeck's Newsletter, Aug. 29, 2023.
I've known about Burning Man for a long time. When I read about it in Pinchbeck's first book, Breaking Open the Head, I wanted to go, but didn't. Now...?
Pinchbeck notes:
As some readers may recall, I love Burning Man and consider it a massive disappointment. When I first visited back in 2000, I was overcome with enthusiasm, inspiration - many people still feel this, today, when they go for the first time. I still recall that wonderfully intoxicating sense of arriving at a "free" or liberated cultural zone where, in theory, you can recreate yourself in any way you want, express yourself in any way, as long as it doesn't cause harm to anyone else. [...]
Burning Man seemed to reveal how society, as a whole, could (and, I believed, eventually would) be reconstructed around the psychedelic anarchist vision. The festival showed me it was possible to deprogram people, en masse, from the economic shackles, blind ambitions, and incessant status-seeking of normative culture. In my naive excitement, I saw Burning Man as a porto-revolutionary model for the future- in How Soon Is Now, I joked that the festival was my version of the Paris Communes (1848), a short-lived worker-run experiment eventually crushed by Napoleon III, which inspired Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
But now, he goes on to say:
Over time it became clear - particularly after the death of Larry Harvey, its founder - that the dominant ethos underlying Burning Man was a kind of occult-tinged free market Libertarianism, influenced by transhumanism and the technological Singularity. Back in the early 2000s, Burning Man mocked itself vigorously. It had a hard, Terence McKenna / Robert Anton Wilson edge. We felt we were exploring Chapel Perilous, awaiting the Eschaton.
As Burning Man expanded and became more popular, it lost its self-parodying humor, its self-critical irony, and its encompassing social vision, to a great extent. It started to feel increasingly hollow, shallow, and narcissistic. Much of the art now seems designed to provide a fitting backdrop for Instagram selfies. The outfits and hats became copycats of each other. Burners no longer explore much originality of self-expression. They follow the pre-set script, the round-the-clock EDM schedule. [...]
There was always an innate beauty hierarchy at Burning Man; over time, wealth started to play a greater role in determining the festival's focus. Wealthy Burners raised millions of dollars for their art cars, sculptures, and mega-domes.
Crank it up, rich tech bros!
