HN

Comments (40)

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  HaloZero
  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...
• rodrodrod
  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...
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  whack
  > ...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
• a-dub
  san francisco had that cool, edgy, gonzo art scene happening in the 90s. also survival research laboratories and their famous pitching machine, the omnicircus, chicken john, laughing squid, critical mass/commute clot. similar things in brooklyn in the '00s like the madagascar institute, black label bike club, idiotarod, etc.in the 2000s, there was kind of an interesting tech meets countercultural art thing where a lot of the more interesting tech people would pour their disposable income into interesting burning man art projects (nimby's ddi, jabba's sail barge) but it does seem like in recent years with the real sf affordability crisis that came with internet business actually taking off the creativity went down and the money went up. i guess that's also true of sf (and brooklyn) more generally.it was a fun time. i was a swe intern in the mid 90s and would marvel when the engineering team would disappear to the desert for a week and come back with colored hair. my boss drove a psychedelic school bus to work sometimes.
• chollida1
  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
  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
• bobby_coder_55
  It is extremely evil that you founded something called burning man. It is extremely horrible to say that, people used to be burned alive all the time and it’s pure evil that you would ever start something like that. You should be ashamed of yourself. You think it’s funny, but it’s not funny to people who died that way.
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  nsedlet
  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.
• HedonicEscal8r
  > Anarchist> Name is John LawMakes sense.
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  gkoberger
  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.
• blackqueeriroh
  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.
• thataccount
  I always thought the whole point of burning man was to forfeit your soul anyway?
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  aappleby
  and he's been complaining ever since they stopped letting him shoot machine guns at teddy bears.
• DonHopkins
  Build A 300-Mile Wall Around SF During Burning Manhttps://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."
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  afavour
  I think this has been obvious for many years now.
• imadierich
  [dead]
• acheron
  [flagged]
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  ProAm
  Everything small becomes big, and then gets enshittificated
• johnnyApplePRNG
  [flagged]
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  dansquizsoft
  [flagged]
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  exabrial
  Burning man is one of the biggest environmental disasters to happen by humans for pure entertainment.Leave No Trace.
• johnohara
  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?