70,000 people, all quarantined together in a fucking mudpit, rumor has it a highly contagious virus is spreading through the festival grounds and festival goers are walking around barefoot in the mood and are going to get all sort of nasty foot diseases. There’s food and water rationing in effect and really the only co conclusion I can get from this is that somebody is probably gonna die from this.
Like since covid I think we as a society realized but haven’t yet actually accepted is that large social gatherings are a societal danger and we shouldn’t be doing them for fun. Yes I never went out in college, my friend group consisted of my dnd group, normalize that instead of super spreader crowd crusher mass gatherings. My opinion on this is the same with guns and cars, abolition would be a good thing. Now I’m a realist, the people want their treats, sometimes a mass gathering like a protest is necessary. Can we at least all agree that there needs to be some change in the way we as a society do huge fucking events like this?
In conclusion burning man sucks, hippies aren’t communist.
Multiple BM attendee here; it was amazing for a while. Stopped going in mid-‘00s, when the population crossed the 30K threshold, as rules started being imposed on everything, and LA industry people and VCs started showing up in plug-and-play camps. Even at that size, BRC was like the 5th largest city in NV for that week.
The size and attendee/intent composition is the issue. I would spend months thinking up what I would bring to share or show. I made a motorized art playa skateboard one year, before rugged motorized skateboards were commoditized, 2,000 cookies another year. But, there started to be a lot of what we called “tourists”—people who brought nothing to share, neither art nor stuff, and who were just there to experience Tweaker Disneyland for a few days.
And, the BORG that runs BM lost all sense of proportion and chased cultural cachet and thus scale, with all of the banality that comes with it. The first time I had to go through a bunch of hassle to get a tiny art vehicle officially registered with the Department of Mutant Vehicles signaled that we had clearly left the heaven of creators and entered the hell of bureaucracy.
Finally, the uploading of shitloads of photos and videos was getting annoying, and that was even before the arrival of smartphones, YouTube, and Insta. Instead of being free to do and say whatever, wearing whatever, and on whatever drugs, for some of us in corporate jobs, it started to be a concern that our BM extracurriculars would be immortalized and shared.
This is why I stopped going to pretty much all music festivals. The types of people that go to those large gatherings just don’t get it. They use the PLUR free spiritedness as an excuse to be selfish and act like a jerk a lot of the time. Everyone is such a vulture at those things anymore.
We used to note in the mid-‘90s that ravers who kept mentioning PLUR were the often people who created the most drama around them.