There’s something to be said for the amount of class and racial (read: white) privilege that allow people to participate in escapist events like this (there’s also significant overlap between burners and people who believe privilege doesn’t exits…if you’re one of those, stop reading this now/leave). Particularly in NYC — Brooklyn/Bushwick in particular (and I would imagine in SF/the Bay as well), there are people around, who have been living in the community for much longer, that cannot afford to sit around and do drugs with their friends. They cannot come inside these events that tout ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘freedom of expression’ because they carry price tags on entry. It would also be extremely risky for them to host parties where people do drugs so liberally (sup, NYPD).
As someone who has been ‘in the scene’ for two years now and is taking a long & much needed hiatus, your article articulated many things that I have personally felt for a long time. The people involved in the scene, though sometimes financially or professionally successful, are often using it as a cover for other issues (I’m not excluded from this) that range from anxiety to actual addiction. I think it does, in some sense, create a community and a space where people can cut loose and have fun, but there is nearly zero interrogation of why they NEED such a space in the first place. I have personally found it to be constructed, vapid, escapist, and all wrapped in a veil of racial (white) and class privilege — ultimately something that served to exacerbate my problems and made me feel more upset due to the rampant apathy I encountered there — rather than solve them in any constructive way.
I’m all for self-care, but the scene crosses into self-indulgent very quickly. If these people put the excessive time they spend planning for these events and making fun costumes into thinking about their own issues or (better yet) bigger ones, rather than simply distracting themselves from how shitty the world is (or how shitty they are), or planned events that are truly inclusive to the wider community and engaged with other people rather than getting completely trashed and pretending to be something they’re not, we’d all probably be significantly better off and maybe actually feel better about our lives and ourselves.
Another thing I was incredibly disturbed by in the NYC scene is the rampant elitism. The scene is fluid in some ways (there is movement between cliques and new people get snatched into them) but deeply clique-oriented in many ways. I can’t count how many times I heard judgment (positive or negative) in the voice of people who learned what ‘group’ I was affiliated with. Or worse, when I would (god forbid) decide not to attend an event affiliated with a particular group. For a bunch of people who want to be ‘above it all’ many people in the scene are deeply judgmental of people who do not think like them or party like them. You might say well, this is no different from anyone else…but it is. There is a sense of entitlement that comes with the lifestyle, a sense that they are enlightened in ways that you are not, and that they can operate without concern for others or anyone not in the scene because they are inherently cooler and more interesting.
Anyway, the likely response from people in the scene to this is going to be along the lines of ‘wow! you’re such a judgmental asshole, just have fun! stop analyzing!’ And yeah, I am a bit of a judgmental asshole (aren’t we all, to some extent?), but at least I’m aware of it and am trying to do something about it.
