Millionaires changing vibe of festival
THE BURNING Man festival is supposed to be a radical celebration of communal living, where commerce is banned and kindred spirits commune amid thumping trance music in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Next week, though, the vibe promises to be less Glastonbury and more Gilded Age, as Silicon Valley millionaires pay up to $30,000 dollars each to sleep in airconditioned yurts and dine on lob- ster and steak, private jets.
Burning Man has long been attended by tech moguls such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, but they have been joined by Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook tycoon, and a small army of executives from companies such as Twitter and Uber.
As one pundit put
having
flown in on
it
this
week, Burning Man has been transformed into ‘‘a secret game of I-can-spendmore-money-than-you-can’’.
This would appear to betray the event’s manifesto, which espouses ‘‘ extreme self- reliance’’. Burning Man is held far from civilisation and the only things allowed to be sold are coffee and ice. The idea is you bring with you what you need to survive and you promise to be a cheerful giver.
‘‘ Relationships are created, neighbours meet one another and our collective survival is challenged,’’ the organisers claim. However, the tech set does not appear to have embraced the festival’s ethos: there are tales of them linking camper vans together to make private forts, and the festival now has its own airport.
‘‘ Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,’’ one former servant told The New York Times. ‘‘In one camp, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees – Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.’’
Environmentalists say that the remote location leads to vast greenhouse gas emissions and the desert ecosystem has been damaged.