Burning Man’s Gentrification Was Inevitable
Burning Man wanted to escape capitalism’s ills. It ended up recreating them.
A Burning Man attendee from Las Vegas sneers in an Elvis Presley costume on September 6, 1998, in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. (Mike Nelson / AFP via Getty Images)
Burning Man might seem like the ultimate “escape” from capitalist reality: an annual anarchic gathering in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, full of pyrotechnics, nudity, drugs, robots, and bizarre vehicles. The short-lived city that attendees create each August, dubbed Black Rock City, has no corporate sponsorships or advertisements — no money changing hands, even.
You might think a week and a half spent camping in the desert sounds like the epitome of “roughing it.” Yet Burning Man is increasingly the province of the wealthy. Burning Man has evolved over thirty-five years from a small affair made up of hippies, drifters, and artists into a must-see event for the jet-setting global elite, up there with Art Basel, Cannes, Coachella, and the Met Gala. Among the titans of industry, the tech barons are particularly enamored of the festival — so much so that Google’s cofounders used Burning Man to vet potential CEOs, and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg all count themselves as fans. As prices of attendance rise and demography shifts, attendees of lesser means have been increasingly squeezed out.
That Burning Man would become a getaway for one-percenters was not always so apparent. In its early days, Burning Man was a bona fide bohemian experience, a sanctuary for misfits and libertines. Longtime attendees I’ve interviewed over the years describe it in glowing terms, as more “real” than the real world (or the “default world,” to use Burner slang). Many see being a Burner as a crucial part of their identity.
I feel great empathy for people who find identity and meaning in life on the playa. Regardless of one’s station in life, most of us can relate to the profound feelings of alienation engendered by life under contemporary capitalism, where the majority of our day-to-day social interactions are mediated by the exchange of money, our labor is stolen from us, and eccentricity is socially unacceptable. Burning Man is an escape from the transactional nature of our social lives in capitalism.
These utopian sentiments, however, are not what most of us think of when we think of Burning Man. At least not anymore. Sometime in the past two decades, Burning Man’s reputation shifted from eccentric to normie. Now when most of us think of Burning Man, we’re more apt to think of the software engineer and CEO gentrifiers who’ve taken it over.
The annual wave of press coverage that accompanies the start of the event in late August has tilted to cover the insane wealth and excess that accompanies it. Burning Man is now a place where start-ups send their employees for free, to which a private jet booking company sells $55,000 round-trip flights, and where “turnkey camps” let the superrich pay five or six figures for an army of “sherpas” to do the labor and set up camp prior to their arrival. (The nonprofit that manages Burning Man has tried to discourage turnkey camps, with limited success.) Now 59 percent of Burning Man’s attendees make over six figures, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year.
Stories of the kind of luxuries the rich bring to Burning Man have left a sour taste in the mouths of many onlookers, some of whom publicly expressed schadenfreude in 2023, when Burning Man was interrupted by a once-in-a-lifetime storm that made conditions downright miserable, miring cars in the mud and trapping thousands. Indeed, who wouldn’t laugh at a gaggle of soggy venture capitalists having to ration food and poop in a bucket for a few days?
This is a stark shift from its early years. Burning Man was supposed to be the thing that might upend the world and wake us to the hollowness of life under consumer capitalism. Burners were supposed to leave the playa changed, more giving and generous. Yet that didn’t happen. CEOs attended and didn’t come back giving away their wealth or advocating to redistribute it. Grover Norquist and other conservatives counted themselves as unironic fans. And as the years passed, and the stereotype of a Burner tilted more brogrammer than bohemian, the idea that it had any radical potential at all faded from public consciousness.
How did a festival for hippie weirdos and libertarian art-car enthusiasts turn into a mainstay of the global party scene, the realm of Silicon Valley’s C-suite, beloved by the libertarian right?
The truth is that Burning Man’s laissez-faire nature made it ripe to be manipulated by the people with the most. Given that Burning Man’s purportedly “radical” underlying principles were never particularly clear or radical, its devolution into a rich person’s playground was all but inevitable.
The Arc of Gentrification
Stories of the early days of Burning Man seem quaint given its enormity today. In the 1980s, a group of friends, including Larry Harvey and Jerry James, held parties at Baker Beach in San Francisco that culminated with the burning of a wooden effigy. Starting in 1990, when the flammable effigy got so big that park officials objected, the group moved their eponymous gathering to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, gaining permits from the Bureau of Land Management. That flat, hostile desert canvas was perfect for their experiment in “radical self-expression,” as they put it. The event (Burners loathe when you call it a “festival”) quickly developed its own culture, mores, and tenets. These underlying principles include practicing “radical inclusion,” “decommodification,” and “radical self-expression.”
It grew very quickly. In 1990, the first year that Burning Man took place at the Black Rock Desert, 350 attended. By 1995, it had swelled to four thousand people, and by the 2010s it would regularly host more than seventy thousand. For the week-plus of its existence, Black Rock City is more populous than Hoboken, New Jersey.
But Burning Man’s evolution and growth followed a gentrification arc that anyone who lives in a desirable neighborhood might have foreseen.
The word “gentrification” perhaps isn’t quite right, as Burning Man isn’t a permanent neighborhood in the same way as, say, Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Yet the demographic and social shift that occurred in the Village is eerily similar to what happened at Burning Man.
The chronology of gentrification goes roughly like this. In big cities, neighborhoods with cheap rents, ample housing, and transit access start to see artists move in. These Bohemians abut the native working-class residents, though their social status makes them more desirable as tenants to landlords. Next, speculators see the bohemian presence as motivation to raise rents on the basis of there being more consumable “culture,” thus initiating a development cycle.
Over time, the hipness of the neighborhood, wrought by the initial presence of artists, increases the property values while displacing the neighborhood’s longtime residents. Eventually it becomes a fully gentrified neighborhood with few or no Bohemians or working-class people remaining. The signifiers of artists and working-class culture may remain, but the people who brought that culture are gone. Such is the fate of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the Haight in San Francisco, Echo Park in Los Angeles, and many other neighborhoods.
Notably, gentrification is not an inevitable process, as the landlords who spur it would like you to think: regulations on who can own housing, rent control, social housing, and cities with strong democratic controls over development can all prevent the displacement of working-class people. But in the United States, where most cities’ laws are engineered to favor developers and landlords, gentrification often feels unstoppable.
Because Black Rock City has no real civic regulations — it’s not a “real” city with a charter or an elected city council or propositions to vote on — gentrification was frictionless. The cultural cachet of Burning Man drew in more well-heeled attendees, who eroded the ethos. Ticket prices went up exponentially — from $35 in 1995 to between $575 and $1,400 in 2024. (There are “low-income” tickets, though you have to apply to get them.) The average income of its attendees increased steadily.
Meanwhile, wealth stratification became more and more visible, embodied in the differential between how the rich experience Burning Man and how you or I experience it. The last time I went — on a “scholarship” ticket I had to apply for, a program that no longer exists — we spent six hours in a traffic jam in scorching heat waiting to get inside. Food-wise, my friends and I mostly subsisted off of trail mix, warm beer, and canned beans. We camped outside, meaning that in the exposed desert, our tent was frigid the moment the sun set and a greenhouse the moment dawn hit. The tarp walls provided no sound barrier from the 24-7 thrumming of house and techno music from ersatz nightclubs and mutant cars’ stereos.
Meanwhile, the rich were flying into Burning Man on the temporary airstrip, bypassing the traffic jam. They didn’t have to set up tents, nor would they — an army of laborers was on hand to construct their luxurious digs. And as for climate control? The rich bring in generators, air conditioners, real mattresses in Instagram-worthy yurts with chandeliers. And no canned food — private chefs, food trucks, even lobster are more their speed.
This, too, mirrors the real-world experience of living in a rapidly gentrifying city like San Francisco or New York: the jarring proximity of the lower and upper classes, often just a few feet from each other, skyscraper next to co-op next to tenement next to homeless encampment.
With no way for attendees to democratically participate in civic life, Black Rock City isn’t a democracy at all. Being run by a nonprofit, the prerogatives of Burning Man are directed by its board — which, like most nonprofit boards, consists mostly of businesspeople, including Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk. Likewise, the physical layout of the temporary Black Rock City is dictated by those with means, who can afford to bring more and pay workers to build for them. There is no equality or democracy in how the city manifests and who enjoys the playa.
Bringing Capitalism — And All Its Ills — To the Party
Although Burning Man is a gift economy once you enter, that doesn’t mean stratification and exploitation are left behind. There’s a lot of labor happening at Burning Man, both for the wealthy attendees paying workers to make their camps awesome and for the organization itself. If you look through job listings in Northern California and Nevada right now, you can find plenty of ads for cooks and builders for private camps. And the workers who work for Burning Man itself, both paid and volunteer, often suffer perilous conditions — and in some cases are maimed on the job.
In 2014, Kelli Hoversten was working as a volunteer on the playa, part of a squad of “rangers” that help mediate issues and provide help if needed. While working near the central effigy, lasers aimed by unknown attendees blinded her in both eyes. Though she received immediate medical attention, the damage was irreparable. She is now legally blind.
Following her injury, Hoversten faced significant challenges in securing appropriate workers’ compensation. She says the company wrongly told her to file in her home state of Missouri rather than Nevada, and she missed the ninety-day filing deadline for Nevada claims. After a long struggle, she received worker’s compensation through the state of Nevada. Yet the Burning Man organization itself has never given her anything in the form of real restitution. They once offered her a meager $10,000 settlement — for a lifetime of blindness — only if she also agreed to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Hoversten declined.
“They do not care,” Hoversten told me in an interview. “My freedom is gone.”
Since the accident, Hoversten says she was promised multiple times by founders and staff members that there would be some kind of settlement from Burning Man. That never materialized. “They lied to me,” she says plainly.
The irony, she notes, is that the organization is exceedingly rich. “They’ve bought half of Gerlach, Nevada, since then,” Hoversten told me. “But there’s no money to help me keep my family farm. And [CEO] Marian [Goodell] makes a quarter million dollars a year,” she said.
IRS filings show Goodell’s compensation in 2022 was even more than a quarter million — $346,747. The filings also state that the Burning Man Project has $22.7 million in net assets.
Hoversten said she has given up the dream of keeping her parents’ farm, as she cannot work anymore. Macabrely, Burning Man does give Hoversten a free pair of tickets every year and reimburse some travel costs, though she says some years they forget to send them.
The paid staff who work for the nonprofit, and who are involved in the physical labor of setting up the base infrastructure, have for years reported mistreatment, brutal conditions, and unfair dismissals of people who were involved in labor organizing. And the manual laborers who build such basic infrastructure that makes the party possible allege that Burning Man’s parent nonprofit doesn’t pay benefits or provide healthcare outside of an on-site medic — and makes sure their contracts only last six months or shorter to avoid having to pay unemployment benefits. (Burning Man staff did not respond to my requests for comment.)
Ricardo Romero did manual labor for Burning Man for nine years, from 2008 through 2017, helping with infrastructure for the event. Romero told me that he saw numerous workers fired for complaining about being mistreated or for standing up when they saw coworkers being exploited. After he started organizing the workers to form a union, he was asked not to return for the 2018 season.
Romero believes he was fired for labor organizing, though the company denies it. Romero filed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint and ultimately won: the NLRB agreed that he was retaliated against and paid out a settlement.
But the most egregious statistic regarding worker conditions is the number of workers who have died either of suicide or from deaths of despair. Seven of Romero’s coworkers died of suicide between 2009 and 2015 — a shockingly high per capita rate given that workers and volunteers numbered only one thousand, as Romero and his coworkers noted in an open letter sent to management.
Given these working conditions, Burning Man seems not so different from the “default world” it supposedly critiques: a nonprofit that survives off the largesse of the wealthy, caters to their whims, and mirrors their proclivity for worker mistreatment and exploitation.
A World Without Rules
In my time at Burning Man, I’ve seen some fantastic art. Car-size walking steel robots whose drivers let me sit in the cockpit, as though I were a MechWarrior copilot on an alien planet. A geodesic dome ringed with climbing spectators watching gladiator fights in the center, a play on Mad Max’s Thunderdome. A bar that was ten feet off the ground, only accessible via stilts.
It was refreshing to see adults play, to share in these kinds of rare, joyous experiences. What these experiences weren’t, however, is revolutionary. The claims frequently made by Burners — that Burning Man is a model for a postcapitalist, egalitarian society, that it would somehow remake normies into radicals — are clearly misplaced. It is a fun art party and an ideal environment to do drugs. But the event is distorted by wealth and who can afford to bring a good time to the playa. Its anarchic nature makes it a pretty good illustration of the shortcomings of libertarianism.
The most laissez-faire fundamentalists among us aspire to a world with no social welfare, no government at all to build roads or provide social services. This is what the Black Rock Desert is for ten months out of the year: a blank slate. After workers like Ricardo erect the basic infrastructure, attendees bring everything else — the structures, art, vehicles, food, shelters, and experiences are all contributed by participants who drive, fly, or (occasionally) bicycle in.
To a libertarian, this epitomizes some idea of equality: a landscape with almost no rules, constructed by individuals solely through their own hands, in a world where all labor is weighed equally. Sounds utopian, right?
But in practice, it doesn’t work that way, because not everyone has the same means. Billionaires and millionaires arrive and distort the festival with their power — they don’t have to ever get their hands dirty, as they can buy others’ labor. And they are never satisfied with the “normal” experience. They’re wealthy, and being wealthy means that people serve you, and that you possess a degree of free movement that others don’t. And because Black Rock Desert is intentionally a place with no rules, there’s been little anyone can do to stop them from reshaping it.
Without the distorting effects of wealth, Burning Man might look different. It wouldn’t be perfect or egalitarian, but it would probably be more of the kind of party that the longtime Burners pine for.
I once met the late cofounder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, and asked him about this contradiction. This was in 2016, in Switzerland, where a group of business students brought me to St. Gallen to meet Harvey. They had read my 2015 Jacobin article on Burning Man and wanted to talk.
Sitting in the loggia at St. Gallen University, in a circle of academics and students, Harvey railed against the evils of consumerism and smartphones, implying Burning Man was a sort of antidote to our socially stunted world. I asked him if he found it ironic that Silicon Valley’s elite — the kind of people who make a living distracting us with smartphones, encouraging consumption — love Burning Man so much.
Harvey told a story about having dinner with Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife. He seemed rapturous when recalling the moment at the end of the dinner when Brin donated some bicycles to Burning Man.
“I was looking at [Brin] and his wife, and he was looking at me and my wife, and there was just so much love there, and I thought about how the room was just full of so much love,” Harvey said blissfully.
I’m sure the experience was meaningful for Harvey. But his justification felt hollow and very weird. The people who donate things are nice and loving, therefore they are okay. He was very far from remotely answering my question, much less really reckoning with its implications.
I’m sure some billionaires are nice to sup with, but that doesn’t mean they’re not destroying the planet. And I know Burning Man is a great party, but that doesn’t mean it treats its workers well.
That’s not to say that it isn’t still a trip and (for some) a good time — even a profound, revelatory experience. That’s something all of us need sometimes. Something like Burning Man almost certainly could never be created today without corporations sinking their greedy talons into its DNA. All comparable festivals, from Coachella to Bumbershoot, are spectacles of advertising and corporate sponsorships, highly surveilled and regulated spaces run by cynical and greedy entertainment CEOs.
A pyrotechnic art party in the desert without any soda advertisements, with no money, no lines to get a bracelet to buy $14 beer? There is something there, even if it’s just a welcome distraction from humdrum everyday life. It would sure be a lot more fun in a world without exploitation, one without any billionaires at all.