Jumping the Shark? The Enigma of Burning Man
Implying that it has strayed from its original purpose, or even collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, a popular meme reckons that Burning Man has “jumped the shark.”
Such declarations rely on impressions that the annual arts gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert has drifted from its roots, typically imagined as utopian. As ventured here, narratives of a failed utopia or fallen paradise are vested in perceptions of an event mobilised by a singular ideology, aesthetic or figurehead. Not operating in accord with a unitary logic, purpose, motive, or agenda, and more than simply an event, Burning Man is hardly unidimensional. The original “utopia” proposition is flawed.
Addressing discourses of utopia and anti-utopia suffusing Burning Man, this essay navigates what is otherwise known as Black Rock City in the light of three core traits. That is, as heterotopian, it is an incongruous contested space resistant to fixed definition. As an ephemeral city, it is temporary, provisional and impermanent. And as a seasonally recurrent assemblage, it is perennially optimised, ever becoming, and never perfect.
The heterodoxy of Black Rock City will be explored through discussion of its status as a utopian carnival with tensions anarchic yet civic, ludic albeit pragmatic; a space of promise and abundance while also a site of privileged excesses. As a weird frontier in the conquest of the West, such tensions are embodied by Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs for whom the Black Rock Desert playa is embraced as an open platform. While a travesty of disappointments feed the trope of the failed utopia that circulates in media and academic discourse, such story-telling typically overstates the excesses of the festive, as magnified in the “shark jump,” while neglecting the proactive dimensions of a cultural movement.
Finally, the “shark jump” is imagined as an episode replaying throughout the history of a meta-liminal enigma that demonstrates resilience in its cyclical design, re-assemblage and widening cultural influence. Despite its perceived ignominy, and in the light of a global pandemic, Burning Man evinces that it is purposed towards enhancing not only the conditions of its own reproduction, but conditions in the post-burn world.
A Utopia in the Dust?
As a confrontation with all of one’s senses, Burning Man has been a rich vein for miners of meaning who’ve cavalcaded annually into the Black Rock Playa. For three decades over Labor Day week, a city has been rebuilt on the canvas of that desert’s 400 square mile playa. For a total populace of 80,000 in recent years, the desire to make Black Rock City meaningful elicits efforts from the ridiculous to the sublime. And while the effort to convert the experience into something meaningful does not abate, an enigmatic quality to this city renders it opaque to the outsider. Despite a torrent of media, a cumulus of theory and a mountain of hyperbole, Burning Man has defied explanation.
It may have been a magnetic field for hubris from the moment Larry Harvey and Jerry James razed an eight-foot wooden effigy on Baker Beach, San Francisco, on summer solstice 1986. While accidental pilgrims, playanaughts and brand strategists have gravitated to the event in flame-loving concentrations, their number blooming after its transition to Nevada in 1990, the commitment to capture, codify and classify Burning Man is burlesqued by long-time participants, among them Burning Man Project Education Director Stuart Mangrum, inventor of the “Phrase Generator.”¹ “Post techno millennial love-in.” “Homo erotic dada riot.” “Meta bohemian apocalyptic phantasmagoria.” Rampant combinations satirise commentators entertaining the conceit that they are in possession of the true meaning behind Burning Man.
[1] As published in the first newspaper at Burning Man, The Black Rock Gazette, vol 8, Sep 5, 1999, p.2.
Among the most popular conceits is that Burning Man is utopian, that it strives to obtain ideal social conditions. The proposition is, for example, commonly adopted in documentary films. Jake, for instance, stridently opines in Journey to the Flames: 10 Years of Burning Man (Jacobson 2001) that the event is “a socialistic expression of a true democratic and free thinking society, a utopian realist society.” Many adherents had warmed to the fantasy that Burning Man is a Temporary Autonomous Zone despite the reality that the burn could hardly exist independent from market capitalism.
Idealism is typically utopian in all but name, as expressed by primary founder, Harvey, in his championing of Radical Inclusion, among the Ten Principles of Burning Man. “Imagine a completely abstract space,” Harvey rallied participants.
A world without context, a place that is no place at all apart from what you bring to it. Anyone may enter this arena. Distinctions of race, class, age and wealth are irrelevant here. Participants are free to reinvent their own identities. Reality is what you make it on this ultimate frontier. It is a world wherein the boundary that divides the inner from the outer disappears (Harvey 2011: 11).
Coined in Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia, “utopia” combines the Greek words topos (or “place”) and u (“no” or “not”). Meaning “no place” or “nowhere,” the word appears ripe for an event located on an ancient lakebed absent wildlife, vegetation and virtually insect-free; a place explorer John Charles Fremont knew as “a perfect barren” (Fox 2002: 9). Practicing the principle of Leaving No Trace, by which they are expected to restore the playa to its pre-event conditions, Burners have devised what appear to be complex rites of purification.
In On the Edge of Utopia, Rachel Bowditch (2010a) described how what began on Baker Beach as Harvey’s cathartic ritual (the effigy was torched in the torrid wake of a lost love), “erupted into one of the most significant and creatively radical utopian movements” in the contemporary world. Citing its “gift economy,” the relative absence of commodity transactions, the prohibition of corporate sponsorship, and prolific volunteerism, Burning Man is acclaimed as “an oasis apart from the vortex of capitalism and the commodity,” and “a political performance that proposes a new alternative way of living full of impossibility, contradictions and ambiguities.”
While an “oasis apart” from capitalism seems quite a stretch, paradox is no mirage. Accounts of Black Rock City typically fall on a spectrum in which it is perceived as more or less utopian. It is celebrated for cultivating authentic conditions — i.e. inclusivity, communality, expressivity, immediacy, novelty — and is admonished by its failure to live up to them. Tech entrepreneurs and urban planners, for example, champion the playa as an open platform for innovative solutions, a remote incubator for ideas. At the same time, Burning Man is damned for fostering narcissistic hyper-individualism today exemplified by Instagram “influencers”; rebuked as an exclusive club for a privileged and largely non-coloured population; dissed as a luxurious stage for extravagant consumption; and condemned as a temporary escape from “real world” concerns.
As the notion that Burning Man devolved into a mediated spectacle gains traction, such anxieties have floated since the mid-1990s. Back then, the corporate media was felt corrosive to the event’s participatory ethos, causing it to become “yet another commodified, fetishised spectacle of late capitalist culture, to be consumed like a professional sporting event or some kind of desert Lollapalooza” (Wray 1995).
In popular parlance, Burning Man is fêted to have “jumped the shark.” Now a common pejorative, the phrase derives from a scene in “Hollywood: Part 3,” an episode from Season 5 of Happy Days. Airing on September 20, 1977, the scene shows a leather-jacketed Fonz on water skis mounting a ski jump before leaping over a caged shark.
Whether referencing a TV program, brand, or event, “jump the shark” has come to denote the moment in a production’s lifespan when it has strayed irretrievably from its original formula or vision, and has resultantly declined in quality.² Invoking the demise of a once celebrated phenomenon, the phrase connotes a tragic trajectory. But more than simply inauthentic, “past its peak,” or “gone downhill,” in the wake of its “shark jump” episode, the now infamous production plows on, its creators unwilling to acknowledge the failings, ignominy, and even dystopian fate of their creation.
[2] Since Happy Days remained popular for six seasons following the “shark jump” episode, this interpretation is arguably unfairly associated with the TV show.
In the argument presented here, that Burning Man is a failed utopia, or a variation on a dystopian present, is contentious. Such views tend to overlook the complex reality of recombined and contested imaginaries. They also neglect the career of a phenomenon that is more than simply a festival, and that has evolved beyond its event origins.
Burning Man is multiplex. Its heterogeneity is inscribed in a disparate and yet organically derived ethos consisting of codified values that are as complementary as they are contradictory. The Ten Principles represent the living ethos of a phenomenon founded in paradox. This is not to say that Burning Man founders on paradox, as internal tensions serve to inspire debate and incite creativity. Variously couched, propositions that Black Rock City is a fallen paradise are rooted in misperceptions that it is (or was) driven by a singular ideology, aesthetic or figure. “The sheer hybrid strangeness and polyglot weirdness of the participants and performances contradict and challenge one another, and, for a weekend,” claimed Matt Wray in his early commentary (1995), “the desert becomes a contest of meanings. No one interpretation of the event can ever carry the day. If there is a definitive meaning of the Man, it is that there is no definitive meaning.”
As Caveat Magister clarified twenty-five years later, Burning Man is “an engine of possibility because it has no point” (2019: 57). From this perspective, Burning Man is potentially transformative since it is sans any pre-defined transformational agenda. Such (il)logic is inscribed in “the Man” itself. Encouraged by Harvey, the eponymous effigy embodies an interpretative free-for-all. Standing at the epicenter of the “burnerverse” and destroyed annually amid a spectacular fire-dance and pyro performance on Burn Night, the Man stands for everything and nothing. As Lee Gilmore observed (2010: 98), the eponymous statue “invites participants to project a host of potential meanings and interpretations — either personal or communal — onto its naked framework.” In an event whose public is compelled to gloss its signature rites with their own myth, you are the spectacle.
The attitude abroad is that predatory capitalists and privileged consumers, ravenous tourists and their service providers, have laid waste to paradise, a Dusty Eden, the planet’s most hospitable desolation. Though such views assume a variety of postures, they tend to hinge on the belief that a frontier bohemia — a new social order — was intentionally hewed from the desert. Architects, geographers and scholars of intentional utopian communities have championed such views, which are not difficult to entertain given the shape and dimensions of the city plan designed by Rod Garrett (Garrett 2010). By 1998, Garrett’s concentric segmented radial arc grid enabled instant neighbourhoods, restricted motor-vehicle activity, and encouraged the use of bicycles. The scalable plan allowed for the integration of private camping with essential services, city departments and primary installations including, for example, Rampart hospital, a radio station, Black Rock City Airport, Media Mecca, the Commissary, the Temple, and by 2019 approximately 1,200 theme camps. Designed to facilitate a uniquely interactive experience, Garrett’s design is purportedly informed by utopic islands, cities, and spaces formulated throughout history — both imaginary and actual experiments.
If you place a map of More’s utopian island Abraxa next to the blueprint of Black Rock City 2001, Bowditch suggests, “one can see that the two are practically interchangeable” (2010b). The city that rises from the dust is imagined to possess architectural patterns reminiscent of Hygeia, Atlantis, Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Leonard Cooke’s Llano (Rohrmeier and Starrs 2014: 160). It is thought to hold design linkages with Ebenezer Howard’s early 20th century suburban “garden cities” concept as inscribed in his Garden Cities of To-Morrow, inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and a model for the English towns of Letchworth and Welwyn (Rohrmeier and Bassett 2015). Archaeologist Alexei Vranich places an image of Black Rock City side by side with that of Poverty Point, the similarly radially patterned 3,000-year-old site in northwest Louisiana, both sites with routes converging upon and accentuating a sacred centre. “Through a strange convergent evolution,” Vranich argues, “ancient Native Americans and modern event builders arrived at the same solution as to how to manage people and convey meaning” (Vranich 2019: 142). The speculation on the connection between sites vastly removed in time is archetypal: “Both sites are located on Earth but, conceptually, they live in another dimension” (ibid. 141).
While Black Rock City is observed to hold design associations with utopian novels, garden cities and pre-Columbian sites, its designers never intended to create a new social order or sculpt the human spirit in the image of God. “We were engineering society,” says Harvey, “but we weren’t basing it on some elaborate intellectual construct” (in Fairs 2015). As the post-Baker Beach desert phase of Burning Man was inaugurated by the San Francisco Cacophony Society, who had invited Harvey to burn an effigy on their “Zone Trip # 4” to the Black Rock Playa in 1990, Burning Man has had an ambivalent relationship with structure.
A testament to the Dadaist proclivities of the Cacophonists, Burning Man is ungoverned by ideological or theological objectives. While the recurrent occupation of this unforgiving expanse necessitated order and planning, practices were provisional and strategies improvised. As founder-bricoleurs often recall, “we were making it up as we went along” (Crimson Rose 2019: 204). According to Department of Public Works co-founder and Black Rock City Superintendent Tony “Coyote” Perez-Banuet, “for most every system we have in place, an ample mistake put it there.”
It would be a city planner’s dream to get a clean slate to re-build on every year, and this one comes with a full log of clumsy attempts at what did and didn’t work in previous seasons, as we fumbled around with this new disappearing city. Black Rock City is like a giant Etch-A-Sketch that’s forever erased and improved upon — a disposable prototype that can be made better every season (Perez-Banuet 2019: 111).
The Possible Impossible
Propositions that Black Rock City is a failed utopia, or dystopia, are as misleading as the fantasy that it was, or remains, utopian. Though there are likely more, I want to suggest three interrelated reasons for this, each shaping this foray. To begin with, Burning Man was never utopian, at least not in accord with ideology, secular or religious. It rather features ambiguities that are endogenous to heterotopia, which Foucault claimed possess the “curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralise, or invert the set of relations designated, mirrored, or reflected by them” (Foucault 2008: 16). These musings on heterotopia assist comprehension of Black Rock City, a vast conurbation of incongruous discourse and practice, multiple chronicities, and possible impossibilities, a space of freedom and governance the meaning of which modifies as the event is reproduced annually (St John 2020a). Yet, while transforming over its history, Burning Man has remained a cultural enigma.
Next, as an event,³ Black Rock City is ephemeral, a process, a performance, not an end state. As a performance, it may express the utopic — provisional, paradoxical, indeterminate — but is not a utopia (i.e. perfect, idealistic). Evental impermanence distinguishes Burning Man from the experiments that it is often thought to embody or reprise; experiments that have typically failed due to their economic, socio-cultural and political unsustainability. It is worth noting that utopian experiments invariably fail not just because they’re unsustainable, but as Michael Shermer has intoned, because they are inherently flawed from the start, not least since designs on a perfect society are attempted by an “imperfect species” (Shermer 2018: 194).
[3] While the BMP has since 2016 owned Nevada’s Fly Ranch property, which has substantial potential for building a permanent community, my focus here is Burning Man as an event.
Utopias tend to fail as a result of a flawed theory of human nature in which collective ownership, communal work, authoritarian rule, and a command-and-control economy collide with individualism, the desire for autonomy, and natural differences in ability, leading to inequalities of outcomes and imperfect living and working conditions (ibid: 194).
While its impermanence is rebuked by those condemning temporary escapades, Burning Man “celebrates its ephemerality and disappearance as a radical, political act” (Bowditch 2010b). It is the liminal status of Black Rock City that makes this impossible city possible. And more than that, not a singular liminal performance, Black Rock City is composed of multiple performances, what Jill Dolan (2005) has called “utopian moments,” thought to “promote a sense of communitas, civic participation, and emotional well being, which together create an opportunity for imagining new models of how the world could be” (Bowditch 2010b). Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, a work inspired by the Cacophony Society, captured this potency.
“Events like Burning Man are the laboratories where people go and experiment with social structure and with identity. It’s out of these little laboratories that our new culture will grow. And that’s why so many of my books are about these little “liminoid”⁴ human experiments that are short-lived and are kind of fun and exciting, like party crashing in Rant, or Fight Club. It’s these “liminoid” laboratories that will give us that vision, that new thing to quest for that isn’t just capitalism or Marxism. You’re outside of it, and in a way, you’re outside of yourself. Everyone is equal and everyone is forced to participate; you can’t just be a spectator” (Palahniuk 2014).
[4] The term was coined by Turner (1982) who distinguished the “liminal” realm of obligatory ritual from optional “liminoid,” or ritual-like, behaviour.
Finally, these multiple experimental processes and utopic moments are recurrent. As a seasonal event whose co-creators are inspired to upgrade previous iterations, Black Rock City can be likened to a series of versions, each an attempt to address “errors” in previous instalments. This essentially modernising process is recognisable in what founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, coined “protopia”: “a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better.” Protopia, claims Kelly, is harder to visualise than utopia. “Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict” (Kelly 2011). The concept evokes incremental progress, where technical, social and ethical solutions derive from small improvements, where adversities catalyse design innovation, and challenges drive optimisation. The process of improvement cannot be complete. Ever becoming, never achieving perfection.⁵
[5] A fourth characteristic not covered here is mutability. Burning Man has a viral trait as its culture is mirrored and mutated in a worldwide network of “burns.” For research on burn event culture see output associated with the Burning Progeny project.
A Utopian Carnival
Black Rock City has much in common with frontier settlements in the history of conquest in America. The “burn” is envisioned as a zone potent with opportunity. Its origins are steeped in risk taking and legendary feats. It has a fragile hold on the wilderness. It is fraught with tension. It is home to makers and minions, disparate characters echoing those populating prior frontier settlements (see Diehl 2010). Like a bohemian colony of the San Francisco Bay Area, it is situated in the deep West, both a compass direction and a mythical place in the story of conquest. It harbours a utopian imaginary that has spurred settlement, industry and leisure in America, imagined from the first colony as a “terrestrial paradise.” Not unlike conquest’s legacy elsewhere, Burning Man is layered with dreams, hopes and failures. And as with other frontier settlements, it has been imagined as the “new,” “last,” or even “final” frontier. It generates pride among those who stake their identity in a “home” carved out of the wilderness. At the same time, it provokes the anxieties of an authenticity lost, a devolution in values, a wayward direction reminiscent of lamentations triggered by westward expansion, the violence of colonisation, the desolation of wilderness, with tragic consequences for the native population. The burn carries an ambivalence that accompanies conquest, “reflected on the one side,” according to Bowditch and Vissicaro (2017: 4), “as the ‘utopian discovery’ of the New World — a land of abundance, promise and fecundity — and, on the other, as a dystopian narrative of death, destruction, disease and colonial invasion of indigenous societies.”⁶
[6] Respect and support for regional Native American tribal communities has been demonstrated, for example, through the activities of Black Rock Solar (now Black Rock Labs), a non-profit organisation conceived at Black Rock City 2007 (themed “Green Man”). Black Rock Solar has been responsible for installing solar arrays in Paiute and Shoshone communities and for converting Nixon, home to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, into a “Solar City.” Environmental stewardship is further exercised in the performance of the mandated principle of Leaving No Trace.
While Black Rock City may be among the last, perhaps even final, frontiers, unlike any city in the history of the West, this frontier “city” has been resettled every year for three decades. Burning Man is a recurrent frontier of vast extremes. Temporary yet recurring, it’s a space of promise and abundance, while also an anti-utopia of privilege, exclusivity and excess. This tension characterises an event the meaning of which has been disputed by protagonists, on the one side advocating order and perpetuity (Harvey 2013a), and on the other impermanence and dissolution — notably embodied by Burning Man co-founder and Cacophony Society stalwart John Law.
Emerging at the intersection of civic and anarchic drives, at that remote site where utopia and carnival collide, Black Rock City is born from this accident. The desire to escape the old order, and the compulsion to create the new, are competing (reactionary and progressive) movements in the story of America, annually re-inscribed on the surface of the playa. On the one hand, renegades, pirates and tricksters defying rules and embracing chaos, on the other visionaries, world builders, makers. Setting strong personalities representing growth, management and control against those signifying anarchy and chaos, Marc Silver’s Burning Man: Community or Chaos? (2000) captured this culture war, skirmishes portrayed in Brian Doherty’s This is Burning Man (2006), in documentary film Dust and Illusions (Bonin 2009), and in the stage play How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera. Ultimately hackers and makers have co-inhabited a frontier carnival, a unique space midwife to those identifying as “Burners,” an apparent conflagration of homo ludens (the player) and homo faber (the maker).
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin (1968) regarded carnival as the people’s “second world,” a festive-scape of inversion and reversal, an “occasion for the enactment of alternative, utopian social arrangements” (Shields 1991: 91). While Bakhtin identified the carnival utopia, here I explore the utopian carnival, of which Burning Man appears exemplary. Rather than becoming abandoned to the transcendence of structure implicit to carnival, the concept denotes a distinctly principled carnivalesque, a paradox heir to organisational systems associated with modern festivals subject to design modifications over their seasonal iterations. In this unique spatial context, Black Rock City was born (and cyclically reborn) in efforts to overcome a cornucopia of challenges.
As Katherine Chen observed in Enabling Creative Chaos, a fragile ecology, extreme weather conditions, rising attendance levels, law enforcement priorities, health and safety concerns, liability, unscrupulous media, and volunteer coordination (…. and now, a pandemic), are among a litany of problems, challenges, and crises propelling experimentation. In a community valuing risk taking and the freedom to fail without prejudice, those assuming organisational roles “recognized that members would undergo various setbacks and that complex endeavors involved an incremental learning process that could span several years” (Chen 2009: 95).
Seasonally made to be unmade, where collaborators are free to make mistakes, Black Rock City is incrementally modified, revealing an aestethics “primarily born out of objective process” (Garrett 2010), like avoiding motor vehicle fatalities, and generating interaction through density. While modular and augmentative this recurrent prototype may be, it is subject to relentless parody, pranking and burlesque. In the burnerverse, satire applies the breaks to, calls into question, and problematises, elitism, bureaucracy and micro-management. As a result, the burn’s architectonic is shaped by hybrid trans/pro- gressive elements: controlled burn, organised chaos, participatory spectacle, carnivalesque ritual, augmented disorientation, creative destruction.
Innovation Frontier
The Black Rock Desert playa represents a space of freedom magnetising for innovators and entrepreneurs in the tech industry for whom it is championed as a new frontier. At the dawn of the popularisation of cyberspace, according to Kelly, Burning Man “was a perfect fit. . . . The pierced and tattooed young Netizens of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area spend their workdays and worknights making little decentralised theaters of do-it-yourself creativity on the World Wide Web. Burning Man and its temporary city are material manifestations of the same creative urge” (Kelly 1997).
The ostensibly limitless possibilities of the playa in the dot.com boom era appears to have held consistency with the pre-millennial faith in the emancipatory potential of new information technologies to facilitate a “digital utopia” in which everyone was to be “hip and rich.” Under this view, Burning Man could have registered as a summer camp for the “Californian Ideology” whose exponents “combine the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies” (Barbrook and Cameron 2015: 12).
While that may have been an oversimplified caricature, Burning Man surfs the long wake of what was depicted in Wired as “The New American Holiday” (Sterling 1996). Black Rock City emerged as a beacon for tech engineers at the inception of the world online not least because, as a “real space” the playa appeared to be a virtual virtual realty (a circumstance returning to focus in 2020, the year of Virtual Black Rock City).
Imagined by its primary founder to be, “like cyberspace, a frontier in which individuals can exercise remarkable freedoms” (Harvey 1997), Black Rock City would become celebrated as “cyber-culture’s de rigueur power-networking retreat of the year” (McHugh 1999). Among the industry tycoons known to have gravitated to this innovatopos, Mark Zuckerberg has been noted for “helicoptering in” to serve grilled cheese sandwiches to Facebook employees (Brandom 2013). So attracted, tech entrepreneurs seek to harness the secrets of the playa so as to solve emergent problems, improve performance, build brands. In the wake of his passing in April 2018, Harvey was celebrated in Tech Crunch as a midwife to an “open platform” of risky experimentation. “It’s a landscape free of distraction,” we’re apprised.
[A]nd that sensory deprivation seems to coax novel ideas from those it envelopes. When you stare past the edge of the world into the sunrise, your thoughts laid bare, dreams seem to crystallize more easily. The emptiness shouts back “why haven’t you built this yet?” (Constine 2018)
In their Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, Kotler and Wheal (2017) argue that Black Rock City holds appeal for entrepreneurs, scientists, business leaders and other Prometheans “stealing its fire” to gain an edge in problem solving. For these commentators, Burning Man is “the world’s largest ecstatic trade show” and “the single greatest concentration of state-altering technology on the planet” (2017: 158). From this strident vista, the “Altered States Economy” enabled by the extreme conditions of the playa incites a “boost in information and inspiration” among cohorts whose critical problem solving outperforms competitors (ibid: 6). The idea that Burning Man is an innovation utopia is spurred by its celebrated impact on Google executives, for whom the event has been a near mythical site of a communal “vocational ecstasy” (Turner 2009: 86).
Attendees treat the playa as an oversized sandbox — a place where ideas can be dreamed up, tested out, and, as often as not, shared freely with everyone. “I like going to Burning Man,” Google founder Larry Page said at the 2013 Google I/O conference. “[It’s] an environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out things and figure out the effect on society, the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world” (in Kotler and Wheal 2017: 161).
These commentators appear transfixed by the neurochemical secret sauce of this “flow” state or “zone” condition. In what might be the first entry on the neurochemistry of utopia, where combinations of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and oxytocin are said to surge through groups of playagoers, “you get tighter bonds and heightened cooperation” (Kotler and Wheal 2017: 20).
Neurochemical reductionism aside, “the zone” championed here is a tech industry communitas, what Mia Quagliarello opined in Flipboard (2017) as “the ultimate life hack for people in Techland .., a hard reboot” readymade and righteous for the tech entrepreneur. For critics, like Cacophony Society members who initiated Zone Trips in which they trekked “beyond the pale of mainstream society” (Evans et al 2013: xi), with The Zone now the apparent site of an entrepreneurial jamboree, we appear to be back in “Kansas.” John Law is notably unimpressed with the exploits of the New Prometheans, and their investors. Rather than the perfect society, for Law, Burning Man became the perfect vacation for the “code slaves” of Silicon Valley. Invoking another Greek god, Law lays it down: Burning Man is “a Dionysian expression of controlled licentiousness,” where “your rebellion is controlled in a completely and brilliantly designed and controlled box where you can do whatever you want” (in Scaruffi 2015).
Echoing the now well worn plaint that the carnivalesque operates as a “safety valve” that permits fleeting subversions and the artifice of rebellion before social order is restored (Stallybrass and White 1986), Law has observed how the minions of code are permitted to annually “blow off a lot of steam” before returning to work (in Scaruffi 2015). What’s more, far from being “a world apart from the real world,” he deplored the “inevitable” mirroring of the real in the development of a “two tier” event, as “the wealthy people come out in their RVs and are serviced by the poor punks and hippies who organize the work to make the event happen” (in Silver 2000). From this vantage, which gives little quarter to innovation, Black Rock City grew to become a spectacular form of entertainment for the privileged more than a disappearance from The Spectacle, its inherent contradictions thoroughly predictable.
Better Last Year
Law might well be the Grand Daddy of Snark. Seasoned with ironic criticism, Burners are notorious for their reflexive bite. Conversations on-playa, and threads in articles published in the Burning Man Journal, or on webfora like ePlaya, are replete with this “potent brand of ethos-aligned sarcasm” (Berry 2018). That Burning Man was “better last year” is a long-standing article of faith that may reinforce the cultural capital of cynics in the face of a stampede of “sparkle ponies,” “broners” and other virginal posers with dustless orifi. Prolific playascribe Caveat Magister (2016) offers a clever riposte to this narrative in “A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man.” The article provides a chronology of culprits imagined to extinguish the flame; from the strangers who appeared at the inaugural burn on Baker Beach in 1986, to “ravers,” “frat boys” and “plug n play” camps.
Commentary on these invaders is mixed; from outright condemnation of the current organisation by detractors jumping ship, to valuable operational criticisms, not uncommonly authored by those owning their mistakes. As engaged story-telling purposed to engineer improvements, even if incremental, advanced snark has a role in a culture geared to its own survival. The common refrain that Burning Man was “better last year” evokes a desire to improve it next year. The commitment to optimise is an ongoing collaborative process, while absolute perfection is not a feasible end state.
Amid a wider narrative on cultural devolution, popular reports convey how predatory capitalism undermines the event, and co-opts its organisation. While the BMP — referred to in former years as “the Borg” — has suffered a long history of unscrupulous typecasting, a new wave of media attention emerged in 2014 after The New York Times ran an exposé of gated RV compounds and luxury concierge services that appeared to be sanctioned by the organisation. One “plug n play” camp was reported to possess a $25K per head fee, featuring private return flights to Black Rock City Airport, luxury restroom trailers, female models flown in from New York, sushi chefs and “sherpas” (Bilton 2014).
It was later revealed that a chief culprit inspiring the exposé was Camp Olympus, a 2013 theme camp underwritten by billionaire founder and CEO of leading healthcare investment fund Foresite Capital, James Tananbaum, who was at that time on the BMP Board of Directors. Tananbaum became an unwitting subject of reproach when his 2014 camp, Caravancicle, was lambasted as an elitist hotel for wrist-banded VIPs flown in on private jets (and paying 15K per head) and issued popsicles to be distributed as “gifts” (Gillette 2015). The controversy erupting in the wake of the “sherpagate” scandal triggered public grievances, resentment and recriminations over the growing presence of “tourists,” the transgression of Decommodification and the apparent outsourcing of other principles, like Gifting, Participation and Radical Self-reliance.
Prior to the “plug n play” debacle, that Burning Man was crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions was a foregone conclusion at The New York Times, where, following the 2013 appearance on-playa of General Wesley K. Clark, Burning Man was imagined to have become “the new golf” (Williams 2013). As Marge Simpson attended “Blazing Guy” in an episode aired on The Simpson’s in November 2014, and with Burning Man and its regionals featured, for example, within the pages of inflight magazines (including Delta, EasyJet and Eurowings), Burners grew dismayed.
When president of Americans for Tax Reform and board member of the NRA, Grover Norquist, had accepted Harvey’s invitation, tweeting “Scratch one from the bucket list” on July 28 2014, and then made agreeable noises in The Guardian and elsewhere about how the event’s ethos of Radical Self-reliance squares with his neoliberal sensibilities (Norquist 2014), critics were appalled. Burning Man had “truly jumped the shark,” explained journalist Steven Jones who saw the event “launching from the ramp of a high-minded experiment . . . splashing down into the tepid waters of mass-consumed hedonism” (Jones 2014).⁷
[7] Whether Burning Man had “jumped the shark” was also addressed on TechCrunch (Buhr 2014), while another commentator concluded that this had already occurred when Wall Street bankers were observed to be “laying down black Amex cards for $1,500 Burner outfits at the Manhattan vintage-clothing boutique Screaming Mimis” (Williams 2013).
With brand strategists circling like vultures there was cause for alarm. Burning Man was being openly lauded for immersive experiences that facilitate personalised attachments to the brand. “Burning Man embraces this best practice to the delight of enthusiastic repeat attendees,” claims one brand expert marvelling at the utility of the Ten Principles to endear custom. “Whether it’s a festival in the desert or your industry’s annual conference, if the experience speaks to the intellect, imagination, and heart of your target audience, they’ll return year after year” (Allen). In another online Freeman article subsequently taken down, a “global event marketer” entertained the idea of “bringing the ‘playa’ to the convention hall” (Gilcrease 2014). Over the duration of Black Rock City 2014, this corporate ethnographer diligently rode her bike “from one end of the circle to the other trying to capture everything I could to share with my fellow event marketers.” The fantasy is laid bare:
What if expo halls were redesigned in concentric circles instead of rows of booth after booth located by hard to find numbers and confusing diagrams? A concentric design would serve up a completely new experience, opening the center for brands to create custom installations and engagement activities for attendees as well as a view of all the top sponsors along the front “esplanade” (ibid).
A breakthrough experience for brand strategists is a source of exasperation for others. Hunter S. Thompson was conjured to inveigh how Burning Man had, not unlike the idealism of the Sixties, finally crested like a wave and rolled back (Wyatt 2016). And yet, the precise moment of demise, the “watermark” of the movement’s peak — peak burn — is open to debate. While for contemporary detractors, “sherpagate” was the moment in which Burning Man jumped the shark, one could chart a history of breaches, a litany of elasmobranchic episodes traced back to the event’s beginnings; a possible accompaniment to the study of “who ruined” Burning Man.”
At each of these ruinous moments, the orators of tragedy will exhort that the essence, the original spirit, the purity, has been lost, the flame doused, authenticity diminished. Such tragic narratives involve story arcs with an eventual point of no return — i.e. death — the narration of which serves to inter the now deceased phenomenon that today haunts its former self.
And yet, despite the repeat internments, Burning Man is no lifeless corpse or reanimated zombie. Over the past decades, the Black Rock Playa, and the worldwide proliferation of burns modelling and mutating the prototype, have beat a healthy cultural pulse, even when confronted with the unprecedented risk of event cancellation in 2020.
The Trope of the Failed Utopia
As Burning Man grew in popularity, it drew more and more attention from commentators with no or little first-hand knowledge of Black Rock City. While one-dimensional media typecasting is ever-present, here I’ll turn to examples circulating among public intellectuals. The trope of the failed utopia is as common among the positions adopted as the distance commentators are from their subject matter — many having never stepped onto the playa.
Burning Man is, for example, assessed within work addressing prefigurative forms of social action — such as radical gardeners, outlaw bicycling subcultures, DIY technicians, and biofuel cooperatives — understood within a working class self‐organisation framework. From an autonomist Marxist perspective, Burning Man is reckoned to have de-evolved from “a free festival on a local beach to an exclusive event with skyrocketing ticket prices, heavy reliance on petroleum and cars, and corporate management.” Unsupported by the kind of empirical detail that might derive from first-hand experience of a living cultural phenomenon that has nurtured a complex ecology of principles that serve to enable its own survival in face of considerable odds, this ostensibly corrupt trajectory is believed the “outcome of a deeper and decades-long process of remolding consciousness in conformity with capitalist values” (Carlsson 2008: 222). I want to suggest that while such slick story arcs are alluring, they tend to seize up and choke when confronted with a reality that is much messier … and dustier.
A common refrain is that Burning Man has deviated from its countercultural roots, with the principle of Radical Self-reliance targeted as a chief culprit (see Rodriguez 2014). If this were a stand-alone principle, there might be little argument. Let’s explore this further. As it is stated to “encourage the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources,” Radical Self-reliance seems to evoke a rugged sort of individualism, a maverick self-sufficiency requisite for settling a remote desert frontier — an experimental zone where the resourceful, the independent and the enterprising have achieved notoriety, status and power. A paean to the authority of the individual unfettered by state intervention, moral guardianship and soul destroying bureaucracy, in Radical Self-reliance we find an expression of the Romantic realisation that the “truth” lies within, a sensibility integral to the American Transcendentalists, namely nonconformists like Ralph Waldo Emerson whose influential 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” exhorted readers to have faith in their selves, to trust their inner genius, that medium of divine inspiration to which all are purported to have access. Fuelling an inner gold rush charged to mine human potential and influencing the self-help movement and “mindfulness” industry in which the corporate world has vested since the 1980s to inspire innovation, drive competition and maximise profit, self-reliance is a virtue recognisably radical in the myth of neoliberalism.
But Radical Self-reliance is not a stand-alone principle. It has emerged within an ecosystem of principles that includes, for example, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility and Decommodification. While easy targets for critics, fixation with singular principles risks reductionist posturing. Introducing the Burning Man Philosophical Center in 2013, Harvey meditated on the Ten Principles as “an ecosystem,” countering tendencies to exalt single principles by extending their logic absolutely. “If, for example, Radical Self-reliance is held to imply unaided survivalism, how can it possibly correspond to Communal Effort?” For Harvey, paradox serves a purpose. “Philosophy occurs when principles collide, and we should allow these Principles to interpret and interrogate one another. Our philosophy, in other words, is muscular — it depends on the capacity of its assumptions to do work” (Harvey 2013b).
For some commentators this ethos is flabby more than muscular. A contributor to the socialist left magazine Jacobin avers that Radical Self-expression is a right-wing Randian ideal reminiscent of “the core motto of any of the large social media companies in Silicon Valley.” Accordingly, “technocratic scions” now mould Black Rock City to their radical libertarian ends. No longer participants (in any democratic or meritocratic sense), Burners are now reliant on the charitable whims of wealthy elites (Spencer 2015).
Others recline into a stronger polemic, while continuing to remote view the phenomenon from the comfort of their deep lumbar support four-mode office chairs. Jeremy Gilbert, for example, weighed in on the fate of Burning Man in Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013). In light of the growing popularity of “Transformational Festivals,” of which Burning Man is celebrated as a prototype (Leung and Chan 2014), Burning Man is thought to be “symptomatic of the long-term success of neoliberalism in neutralising and disaggregating any opposition to itself.” In this view, “hegemonic neoliberalism is perfectly happy for individuals to undergo personal transformations, so long as they do not aggregate or catalyse any significant social transformations” (Gilbert 2013: 195). While Gilbert recognises the value of “joyous affect” in social movements, which he contends is instrumental to the “democratic sublime,” his caution echoes the Marxist critique of carnival — i.e. that which reverses but does not displace “the whole system of relations” (ibid: 197).
With Burning Man, Portugal’s Boom Festival and other Transformational Festivals in mind, “the danger of self-defined ‘carnivalesque’ spaces, of cultural ‘temporary autonomous zones,’” according to Gilbert, is that they “become spaces of enclosure within which any challenge to hegemonic social norms is safely contained, posing no threat to wider power relations” (ibid: 195). Admitting it would be problematic to simply dismiss Burning Man for falling short of a “radically democratic aesthetic,” or for failing to be genuinely oppositional, Gilbert argues that the absence of “political ambition” makes possible conditions for “affective and symbolic experimentation.” Rather, the fault lies in a socialist Left that hasn’t effectively appropriated Burning Man to its own ends (Gilbert 2013: 200). This assertion is troubling with regard to the BMP — i.e. an organisation whose survival has relied upon avoiding ideological platforms.
The fallen paradise trope hinges on oversimplified characterisations that tend to reduce a complex phenomenon to its stature as a festival. Such mischaracterisations highlight actions and transactions that tend to be, though are not exclusively self-serving: the abandonment to the moment of Immediacy, the celebration of unfettered self-sovereignty in Radical Self-reliance, and the performance of self-authenticity invoked by Radical Self-expression.
Focusing almost exclusively on the festive dimensions of Burning Man, then, these complaints are blinkered to its broader cultural panorama. This includes, though is not exhausted by: the complex ecosystem of an event-culture with Ten Principles; Black Rock City’s status as the “largest leave no trace event in the world”; the emergence of over 100 Regional Events in a worldwide network; the prolific disaster relief and civic initiatives of NGO Burners Without Borders (BWB);⁸ the BMP’s stewardship of Fly Ranch, a 3,800 acre Nevada property promoted as “an opportunity to create a year-round rural incubator for Burning Man culture and a catalyst for innovation and creativity in the world”; the release in June 2019 of an Environmental Sustainability Roadmap (Burning Man Project 2019); and emergent community actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As long as cultural critics ignore the widening movement contours of Burning Man, the phenomenon will remain poorly understood.
[8] Also ignoring Burners Without Borders is Chris Rojek (2014), an armchair critic whose research reveals less about Burning Man than it exposes the folly of remote viewing.
Resilient Inferno
As media and academic commentaries demonstrate, Burning Man has been typecast according to narrow-band models informed by popular mythologies of a failed utopia. While utopic yearnings and dystopian visions have motivated Burners, Burning Man was never a utopia. As discussed above, if Black Rock City is incomparable with utopia, the “failed utopia” trope is equally troubling. Such is informed by an understanding that Burning Man is multitudinous, ephemeral, and recurrent — the phenomenon’s distinct meta-liminal traits.
Unfolding in the wake of the “plug n pay” controversy, “sherpagate” was a crisis of legitimacy, an episode in which Burning Man was imagined to have “shark jumped” from its origins to become a culture of convenience. And yet Burning Man has experienced prequels and re-runs of this episode over its history. It is worth noting that founders were anxious that the burn could devolve into an “alter-Disneyland,” an apprehension surfacing in 1996, the year of the Dante-inspired art theme “The Inferno.” As Harvey (2013a) explained, The Inferno, which dramatised the corporate takeover of Burning Man, “substituted corporate-induced consumerism for metaphysical evil.” Integral to this device was Helco, a mock corporation that failed to acquire Burning Man in a Center Camp performance. On Burn Night 96, Helco Tower and other installations satirising infamous corporate franchises were razed to the ground. With lines dividing irony from sincerity and satire from solemnity difficult to determine, The Inferno is reported to have “touched on anxieties that were real for those who made Burning Man happen, both in the organisation and in the crowd; the corruption and the selling out of their experience, their community, their reality, to large, sinister, forces” (Doherty 2006: 105).
For John Law and other Cacophonists, this drama in the desert was intended to draw the final curtain on Burning Man. But the Phoenix-like event emerged from the ashes to survive not only as a “city” in the desert, but proliferated as a worldwide movement. The BMP is today a nonprofit registered organisation, there is no corporate sponsorship, and cultural resistance to commodification remains implicit, albeit fraught with tension.
Notably, such resistance doesn’t correspond with outright opposition to capitalism. In the wake of “sherpagate,” while identifying the dangers implicit to a “concierge” culture, Harvey (2014) imparted that “radical equality” is not among the Ten Principles. That Burning Man is not anti-capitalist was averred by Harvey using the example of the Center Camp Café — which operates as a coffee shop and is among the few official sites of monetary transactions on-playa — to dispel the myth that Burning Man is a “moneyless utopia.” The Café was promoted as an alternative to the alienating impact of marketplace mediated social interactions — i.e. the effect of commodification (Harvey 2013c). That Burning Man never espoused a non-commercial ideology sparked commentary (see Patella-Rey 2013) on the disingenuous proposition that it is a failed utopia. According to one commentator, given that Burning Man “is fairly clear in placing itself against commodification, not capitalism,” it is more akin to “alt. capitalism” than “contra-capitalism” (Adam 2013).
Rather than collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, Burning Man appears to have thrived on them. This is the legacy of a phenomenon more assiduously theatrical than ideological. In the mid-1990s, when the event grew self-conscious enough to evolve a theme, there were suspicions that Burning Man was devouring its own tail, and thereby devolving into the sort of regulated spectacle its founders abhorred. For artists and those eschewing the idea of “art,” the ideal response was to stage-manage the breach, convert art from life, script the crisis into a pageant, unleash the redressive power of satire, animate the dark side of human nature . . . and burn it to the ground. The Inferno and many subsequent themes have been devised with a redressive design intelligible according to the “social drama” (Turner 1974: 38–42) model, where the tragedy is a breach that either begets a new beginning through renewed attention to threatened cultural values, or triggers schism.
It has been argued that Burning Man is among those organisations absent “either formal or informal processes of collective self-interrogation and self-problematisation” (Gilbert 2013: 199). The position is questionable given that the BMP commits to self-interrogation, for example, through the “Project Cultural Citizenship,” an initiative charting a “Cultural Direction Setting” away from non-participatory “convenience camping.” Affirming her view that Burning Man “strives to stand in technicolor contrast to the typical consumerist, status-driven, brand-saturated, optimized-for-your-convenience world,” and with the aim to “target and reduce factors that have inadvertently fostered a ‘convenience culture,’” CEO Marian Goodell announced key operational modifications in 2019 including reforming theme camp registration criteria, placement policy, ticketing sales structure, while limiting reliance on outside service providers and banning offending and noncompliant theme camps (Goodell 2019). Such initiatives transpire in conjunction with the artful means of dramatising the crisis (see St John 2020b).
The worldly impact of Burning Man is a subject of growing attention in recent years (see Shister 2019). Researchers have demonstrated how Burner practice is integrated in a complex web of activities, across regions with diverse cultural and political influences, including permaculture in the case of Salt Lake City, Utah, a city with a conservative Mormon heritage (Nicolosi 2020). Other studies illustrate how an event model migrated from the spatial margins of United States to its symbolic centre, as in the case of Catharsis on the Mall (see St John 2019). Over the next years, published output from the Burning Progeny project will address the transformative quality of Burner culture in Europe, not only as Black Rock City is mirrored and mutated in a proliferation of burn events, but as Burner principles, identity and culture are performed in extra-burnal modes of action that are ritualesque (intentional and proactive) and carnivalesque (immediate and playful).
The call-to-action that warrants most attention at this time, and deserving more detailed discussion in the coming months, is the community response to COVID-19. In response to the pandemic, it was announced on April 10 2020 (Burning Man Project 2020) that Black Rock City will not be built on-playa for the first time since Zone Trip # 4, and ticket refunds would be offered. For its survival, the BMP relies on profits from annual ticket sales. To avoid the disaster of full cancellation, the organisation announced that while Burning Man would not be built on-playa in 2020, it would nevertheless be constructed in “The Multiverse” (the 2020 art theme), thereby becoming “Virtual Black Rock City.” With this proposed leap into virtual reality, the nature and shape of which is largely unknown, we appear to be on the brink of another potential shark jump, making the BMP a likely target for further accusations of (virtual) irrelevancy.
And yet, early signs suggest that the response from the Burner community amounts to actions greater than the urge to recycle and virtualise Black Rock City. At the same time, reactions echo the practicalities that are inherent to a cyclical and optimisable event culture. “Our extended community has in a very real way been practicing for this moment for years,” reflects Goodell (2020): “how to provide for ourselves in a difficult environment, and then how to take care of each other and those in need.” The entire enterprise, influencing over 100 communities worldwide, has relied upon co-creative self-organising, advanced resource sharing and collaborative initiatives necessary for making a temporary settlement in a hostile environment. C-19 is a moment for which Burners Without Borders seems to have been preparing for fifteen years. In the introduction to the BWB Spring Newsletter 2020, it is stated that Burners often characterise the conditions of the playa “as a common enemy that brings us all together,” implying how such collective action holds valuable lessons in the response to the pandemic.
Burners are some of the best prepared for situations like this. The Burning Man Principles are great guideposts to think about the future. Let’s play the long-game and wield positivity and strength along with preparedness and civic responsibility. We’ve got the infrastructure, and we’ve got training. Now what are we going to do with it?
It has been asserted elsewhere that Burning Man is critical among those “temporal experiments in the kind of community we believe exists on the other side of the Long Disaster” (Farr 2020). In conversation with Make Magazine founder Dale Dougherty, who champions a “bottoms-up” movement of makers he calls a Civic Response Corps who have initiated ingenious local distributed responses to the shortage of medical equipment and supplies, Peter Hirshberg connects the threads with the participatory culture of Burning Man where “a panoply of tribes [are] able to collaborate with the lightest scaffolding of government.” Hirshberg avers that this prototype of “sustainable localism” offers “a blueprint for what the economy and our systems might look like on the other side of this crisis.” And as for the burn’s virtual trajectory, he doesn’t shy away from transformational possibilities of this moment, especially given “now this enormous community is unleashed from the enormous effort of building something in a few square miles of harsh desert and can now express itself globally, in a multiverse of its own imagining” (in Dougherty 2020).
Extraordinary assertions, matching the moment we’re in. They allude to the way actions in support of the principle of Civic Responsibility, orchestrated to facilitate a temporary city in the desert, and the survival of its 80K denizens, can be mobilised to mitigate the impact of a pandemic. What this means and to what ends the principled ecosystem of Burning Man could serve within and beyond the global liminality of the crisis warrants attention.
Multitudinous while incongruous, fleeting and recurrent, civic yet ludic, Burning Man is an impossible possibility that continues to defy classification, not least of all utopia. Far from obtaining an ungracious terminus implied by the “shark jump” meme, this cultural enigma radiates a purposeful resilience not only suited to its own reproduction and to its multiplication in regional burns, but to applications in the post-burn world. Such resilience merits further research.
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