Front Burner - How Burning Man got stuck in the mud

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

This year’s Burning Man festivities were more chaotic than usual when rain poured down in the Nevada desert, turning the usually dry, dusty terrain into a thick sludge. Thousands of revelers were trapped onsite, as organizers encouraged attendees to shelter in place and conserve food, water and fuel until the grounds dried on Monday and roads were passable. Meanwhile, much of the reaction on social media had a whiff of schadenfreude. To understand more about Burning Man’s origins, how it has changed, and why it provokes derision amongst some outsiders, host Tamara Khandaker speaks with freelance journalist Keith Spencer, who’s written about – and attended – Burning Man. Looking for a transcript of the show? They’re available here daily: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. I'd like you to set a goal to drive key learning for your people in 2025. I want you to connect with Humber CPL to design a custom training solution that accelerates your team's performance and engagement. Humber works with you to hone industry-specific upskilling, enhance your leadership, and drive results. Flexible learning delivery formats are tailored to your unique needs. Adapt, evolve, and excel. To learn more, go to humber.ca slash cpl. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. For more than 30 years now, an odd ritual has taken place in the Nevada desert.

The burning of a larger-than-life wooden effigy called The Man. But this year's festivities were a little different. Power is out everywhere. A very soggy burning, man. We're kind of screwed here. Well, I'm soaking wet and everything on the inside of my tent is soaking wet. Rain began pouring down last Friday, turning the desert dust into a thick sludge. Reporting live from Burning Man, I just used the porta potty. Conditions in this post-rain are not ideal. The alkaline dust has turned into clay. Well, I'm here at Burning Man 2023, where the rain has turned the playa into a giant mud pit. Some people made it out,

walking to the nearest passable road. A road, you guys, I've never been so excited in my life to see a road. Exodus! You may have seen the video of Diplo and Chris Rock. They hitched a ride on a fan's truck after hiking for three hours in the mud. But thousands of others who came to party were essentially trapped, their cars stuck in the mud, told by organizers to shelter in place and conserve food, water, and fuel. Here's the proof of life update. I am alive, but all the activities are shut down. We all slept all night with no house music, bumping. Everything stopped because of that. So they shut the water down.

I'm walking around helping pull power cables out of the ground so they don't get stuck in the mud. All kinds of misinformation started swirling around on social media about the conditions campers were dealing with. There is no Ebola outbreak and there's no fence being built. You guys are ridiculous, like seriously. And we can say for sure there was no Ebola outbreak, but one person did die. Authorities now say they suspect an overdose. did die. Authorities now say they suspect an overdose. By Monday, the grounds began to dry and harden. People were free to go. And it seems like those who'd stayed through the worst of it had a pretty good time. Like Mark Frommsen, a Canadian guy we talked to when he was still there earlier this week.

He told us the rave didn't stop. Believe it or not, the burners kept burning. There was music all night. People were partying. There was lots of bonfires. There were people walking around. Lots of people said it's the best burn they've ever had, even with the rain. I did see a bunch of people mud wrestling and doing slip and slide.

I see a bunch of people mud wrestling and doing slip and slide. I saw one girl just kind of lying out on her back in a huge puddle, just kind of floating there and poured down on the party, a lot of the reaction from people watching the chaos from the outside was derision, even schadenfreude. To understand why, you first need to get a sense of what this festival is all about and what it's become over the years. So today I'm talking to Keith Spencer. He's a journalist in California's Bay Area who's written about and been to Burning Man. Hi, Keith. Thank you for doing this. Hi, great to be here. It's great to have you. So we've given people a bit of a sense of what Burning Man looked like this year with the rain and the mud. But can you just step back and give us a sense of what

Burning Man actually is? Sure. Yeah. So basically, it's in the middle of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, maybe two hours north by northeast of Reno. Almost nothing lives there. It's sort of just an empty, deserty playa. And every year it gets transformed for about almost two weeks into a city with, you know, the Taylor man at the center. And tens of thousands of people come to the festival. It's very freeform. I mean, it's very anarchic. Like, you know, I would say the short answer is that it's a big anarchic party in the desert with lots of pyrotechnics, art, drugs, and nudity. And it's guided by a couple of principles. The most famous ones

include radical inclusion, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. So that's the utopian answer to that question. The cheeky answer is that it's become a networking event for Silicon Valley techies because it kind of fits with their worldview of themselves. Like, I think a lot of them think that both their startups and this festival are both these radical things that are going to change the world somehow. Yeah, we'll get into that more in a bit. But I've seen a lot of photos from previous years and it does look pretty beautiful. All these giant sculptures and lights in the desert. And that land is actually owned by the federal government, right? The Bureau of Land Management. So how does that impact the vibe of the festival?

the Bureau of Land Management. So how does that impact the vibe of the festival? Correct. So partly because it's owned by BLM, it has to remain this blank canvas. So you have to pack in everything and pack out everything. You can't leave no trace. That's one of the sort of guiding principles of the festival. So people aren't supposed to leave anything behind. But I think also because it's a blank canvas and mostly lifeless, you can do a lot of things you couldn't do if you rented BLM land, say in like a forest or in Chaparral or something, because you can have a lot of pyrotechnics and you can have weird, you know, what are called art cars,

which are, you know, not street legal vehicles that, you know, parade around the festival, often blaring house music or something like party cars. Some of them are sort of the size of boats. They're like boats on wheels. Or I rode in one at Burning Man once that was like kind of like a mech warrior. Like it had, it didn't have wheels, it had legs and it sort of walked around. It was kind of cool.

Wow. I know at one point it was this kind of free, low-key event with weird art started in San Francisco on a beach. But over the years, it's become this huge phenomenon, right? Attendance has been swelling in recent years. And how big and how pricey has Burning Man become at this point? Yeah. So to get a guaranteed ticket, like they had sort of a presale this year and the tickets were it was something around fifteen hundred dollars. And that was to guarantee a spot. And then the regular ticket, I believe, was five seventy five. Plus you had to pay, I think, was $575 plus you had to pay, I think it was like $150 or $160 to park if you wanted to bring your car in. And then keep in

mind that when it started, it was free. And then in the mid-90s, it was like $35. And the last time I went, which was a while ago in 2009, it was like around $300 or something like that. So it's way outpaced inflation in terms of the cost. And then up until this year, the resale market was just really expensive for the tickets. Like, you know, people would pay two, three thousand dollars for a resale ticket. Wow. The number that I've seen floating around has been like 70,000 people. But I understand that there have been signs that its popularity is waning, right? Yeah. So 70,000 sounds big, right? But usually it's 80,000. So it wasn't full this year. And I find this really, really interesting just in terms of its history is that it seems like we've sort of hit the peak in terms of interest. Like I think last year it sold out like usual, but this

year it didn't. Estimates I've seen right now are like 73,000 people went there. And then also really fascinatingly, this year, it was very easy to get a resale ticket and they were selling for hundreds of dollars below face value. Like you could get a ticket for a hundred bucks. Something's shifted in the air there. Yeah, I want to get into that, like why we might have reached peak Burning Man. And before we get into who shows up to the festival, let's talk about the conditions of the event itself. I imagine this is the first Burning Man that the president had to be briefed on. But it's not unusual for there to be like extreme and uncomfortable weather conditions, right? No. Yeah. So I think that's sort of part of the,

you know, quote unquote, fun of it. I mean, some people would find this fun, some wouldn't. But, you know, there's a certain challenge in surviving there. And it's a desert and it's very exposed. So in the daytime, it's super hot and at nighttime, it can get pretty cold. You know, as a result of climate change, there's more super hot days in deserts all over the world. I grew up in the desert. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, which isn't super far from Nevada. And I see this happening with my family home. The number of 90 plus, 100 plus days is just going up and up. And the same thing's happening in Nevada in the Black Rock Desert.

So there's more hot days now, which is like, okay, that on one hand, burners are probably relatively prepared for. But the other thing is that it's become super popular. And the best way to go in is with a car, like with an RV or with your, you know, an SUV packed with all your stuff on the roof or in a trailer.

And the line to get in, as you can imagine, because there's no, you know, real infrastructure can take six hours. I did it in the line to get in, as you can imagine, because there's no real infrastructure can take six hours. I did it in the middle of the night the last time I went there and it took six hours for us to get through. And my friends who went last year and this year told me that in 2022, it took nine hours. Oh my gosh. So like, imagine this, like, you know, it's not like there's a gas station once you get inside. So you can't run the AC, at least not for all nine hours. You're in the hot sun, you're baking, you can't really move. You know, you're sitting in traffic, you got to turn

the car on and off. And last year they said it was just absolutely miserable. And a lot of people were complaining about that last year, like just sitting for nine hours in the heat to get in and out. And you can't really use your AC. That sounds awful. I also read that because of climate change, there are more dust storms and the dust is alkaline, so it kind of burns, right? Exactly. Yeah. So when I went there last, I had a little spray bottle with a little bit of vinegar in it, I believe. Or was it baking soda? I'm blanking. But basically, you need something to combat the alkalinity. But yeah, dust storms can be super uncomfortable. I mean, besides getting dirt in your eye, which sucks, it's a mild irritant on

the skin. Yeah. Okay. So this all sounds like a bit of an ordeal, which I guess is part of the fun of it. But like the weather does sound kind of uncomfortable. But let's talk about who goes to Burning Man. I think for a long time, I pictured kind of a hippie-ish vibe. But who else is known for showing up to Burning Man? Yeah, that's definitely what it was, particularly in the early days. And then it really kind of became a tech networking event. There are deals inked there. And historically, there have been venture capitalists who go to try to discover talent and new companies to invest in and make handshake deals and such. So it's been called Silicon

Valley's most important networking event. And a huge constituency of the people going are, you know, people who live in the Bay Area and work in Silicon Valley in some capacity. And a lot of, you know, a lot of them probably are just, you know, programmers and stuff. But there's also a lot of tech CEOs like to go, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have all been known to go in the past, as well as one of the Google founders, Larry Page. So Elon Musk, he said in the past that Burning Man is Silicon Valley. And what do you think he meant by that? Or if it's too hard to get in his head, why do you think these two worlds, Burning Man and Silicon Valley, have become so intertwined?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons that Silicon Valley exists where it does exist, right, is because some of the counterculture ideals, you know, back in the 60s, the hippie era kind of bled into Silicon Valley. Like there was a certain utopianism about technology that inspired a lot of the early tech workers and also with experimentation. Like, you know, famously, Steve Jobs was kind of hippie and he talked openly about taking acid and stuff like that. And so with regards to the formation of Silicon Valley was very much rooted in the counterculture. And obviously, you know, the sort of Bay Area hippie counterculture movement also was one of the progenitors of

Burning Man, right? So they have that connection, but I really think the more salient answer is that, is that they have cultural similarities, right? Like they both, both Silicon Valley and Burning Man kind of see themselves in the same way. Like a lot of Silicon Valley techies, even nowadays, you know, like when the rest of the world is very cynical about the tech industry, a lot of people who work in Silicon Valley who are founders or high up tech CEOs, you know, they really believe what they're making is going to somehow radically change the world. And then likewise, I think, you know, Burning Man, it really has this, it builds itself as something radical is happening here like that or changing minds or changing the world or something like that, which, you know, I don't believe personally. I mean, I think it's fun or whatever, but I don't think there's anything really radical about it, to be honest. Yeah, it sounds almost like a libertarian oasis.

Sounds almost like a libertarian oasis. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, it's sort of the way that it looks is kind of mediated by the wealthy people who go there, right? Like they have the most power and influence and ability to shape it, I would say. Happy holidays. I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. And I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted.

Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's Continuous Professional Learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals and learning options that work with your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash CPL to get started. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So how does this immense wealth coexist then with a lot of the Burning Man ethos and principles like you talked about, the radical self-reliance, the communal effort, decommodification, how do those two things coexist? I think decreasingly so. I mean, you know, so there's a census there, just like there is in the real world in a real nation state or something like that. And the proportion of people who make over $100,000 a year in personal income has gone way up. I look back into the statistics, and in 2015, 24% of attendees made more than $100,000 annual personal income. And then in 2022, it was 41.2%. So that's a pretty big jump. And there was also more than double proportion of attendees who made more than 300K in that time.

It's becoming more of a festival and a place for wealthy people to go and maybe feel like their conscience is a little different or something like that. If it keeps getting to be more and more wealthy and the price of it, obviously, if the price of it continues being super high and rich people certainly have more of an ability to shape it, there's not going to be nearly as many artists and nearly as much good art and nearly as many sort of hippies or traveler types. But these really wealthy, comfortable people, I imagine they're not doing the hard work of setting up the campsites and living communally with others in the way that Burning Man is ideally supposed to be. Yeah, there's been a lot of infighting over this within the Burner community and within the Burning Man organization itself. Like they're called derogatorily turnkey camps because, you know, it's like other people set them up and you can just come in. And if you go, if you go and look at burning man's website, they've talked about how they've tried to push back against this. Yeah. So you mentioned the, the leave no trace

principle, everyone's supposed to clean up after themselves, but there have been complaints. At least one local sheriff is complaining that people end up leaving huge amounts of trash in Reno, Nevada. And this year, because of the mud, a lot of stuff has been left behind, right? Cars, tents, carpets, even entire campsites. Yeah, right. Now, people were fleeing this year because of the weather and it was miserable and difficult affair to get out. One, you know, one of the most arresting images I've seen is of the bicycles left behind each year. A lot of people fly into Reno, right? You know, you can't fly with a bicycle. So you, you buy a bike at the Walmart there and then you go out to Burning Man. And then, you know, when you're done with your bike, you just discard it in, you know, Reno somewhere. And there are these images you can look up of

like, you know, like thousands of these bikes that were just used for one week and just like thrown out. Right. Not to mention the broader environmental impact. Like I know there were climate change protesters that actually showed up this year with a bunch of demands. They were demanding that the festival ban private jets, single-use plastics, unnecessary propane burning, all kinds of things, right? Because building a temporary city every year for 70,000 to 80,000 people is bad for the environment. Totally, yeah. And that is one thing I should probably mention to your listeners is that there is an airport that temporarily exists there.

I mean, it's a dirt runway, so it's not like, you know, you can't land a 747 there. But a lot of super wealthy people will fly in and out that way and not have to come in in the nine hour line with a riffraff. So you wrote a piece about the gentrification of Burning Man many years ago. So this isn't a new phenomenon at all. And the contempt that we saw from people when it got rained on this year has been building for a really long time. But you still have friends who go, right? And what did they tell you about how it's changed in their view? Yeah, I know. I have a lot of friends who go and the ones who were trying to get me to go this year, like, you know, I was talking to my friend Sean. He was like, yeah, you know, like, I know. I have a lot of friends who go and the ones who were trying to get me to go this year, like, you know, I was talking to my friend Sean.

He was like, yeah, you know, like I agree with everything you've like written about Burning Man not being radical anymore. But the one thing you forgot to account for is like, it's a really good place to take drugs. Yeah. So he went and he was also telling me, I mean, he and a couple other mutual friends of ours who have a camp every year, they're the ones who are saying like, you know, the art was really bad last year and the conditions were really miserable last year. And that seems like it might partly be why this year was like, you know, the tickets, the resale tickets were so cheap and it didn't get to capacity. And then on top of that, this disaster with the weather happened. So they ended up fleeing in the middle of the night and like they had a four by four car and they drove like, you know, out past the trash fence and just got

out. Oh, man, they got lucky. Yeah. And like a Jeep. Yeah. So, Keith, why do you think it matters that this desert hippie art festival has gotten gentrified? I think that like Burning Man is very interesting as a cultural phenomenon. And it's, and it's connected to Bay Area and Silicon Valley culture in a lot of ways, right? And understanding it is kind of key to understanding Silicon Valley and the California ideology and the Silicon Valley mindset. environmental impact. I mean, it's like generating a huge amount of waste and CO2 to wet end, I guess. I guess the one more thing I might add, which I think is probably its future, is that there is this thing in the Bay Area that's called the Bohemian Grove. So this goes back in the late, I think it was in the late 19th century or early 20th century, some artists and musicians founded this artist colony and club and escape. Right. And they ended up bringing in a bunch of businessmen and the businessmen sort of took over. And nowadays, the Bohemian Grove is like one of the most kind of elite clubs for wealthy conservatives in the United States.

Like the Bush family is in it. And, you know, Karl Rove famously talked about the Iraq war. Then, I mean, it has the word Bohemian in its name, but it's like, it's far from it, right? It's like a super elite private club. And so I kind of think the future of Burning Man is this, like, I think it's going to become like the Bohemian Grove where in its name, it sounds like it's a artsy or, you know, working class endeavor, but it's sort of just like a private club for rich people to party and have fun. Yeah, I can totally see the parallels. Okay, Keith, thank you so much for giving us a window into this really fascinating world. I appreciate it.

This was super fun. Yeah, totally. Thanks so much for talking to me. All right, that's all for now. This week, Front Burner was produced by Imogen Burchard, Shannon Higgins, Lauren Donnelly, and Derek Vanderwyk. Our sound design was by Matt Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao.

Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blokos. And I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening. FrontBurner will be back on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.