The short answer is it’s complicated.
When Burning Man first began in 1986, it was as a San Francisco beach bonfire. Held on the summer solstice with just a few people in attendance, the event centered around the burning of a scrap wood-based effigy, an act one of the founders has described as a spontaneous act of “radical self-expression.” As the years passed, the beach bonfire—and its effigy—grew, and when the city of San Francisco denied the organizers a permit in 1990, a series of “friend of a friend” type connections led the effigy to be relocated to a brand new, fairly ramshackle event being held in the Black Rock Desert, about 110 miles north of Reno, Nevada.
Only about 20 participants attended the event in the desert that first year, growing to about 100 the next, and costs were minimal. The group didn’t have a permit from the Bureau of Land Management until its second event, and participants mostly came to hang out, make art, and live life off the grid.
Since then, Burning Man has grown into an all-out bacchanal, drawing about 70,000 attendees to its playa in 2024 and earning a place in the collective cultural consciousness. Festival devotees or “Burners” preach the gospel of its virtues, while outsiders and naysayers throw around Burning Man jokes and memes about the fest’s countercultural bent. The fest draws more than just wacky artists and hippies now, too: It’s become a must-do for people in the tech industry and it pulls in a shocking amount of mega-wealthy people, from Elon Musk to Chris Rock, all of whom have a desire to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
And over the years, the festival has also lost a bit of its anarchic edge. The BLM has imposed increasing restrictions on the group in order to issue its permit, including the presence of a perimeter fence, a grid-like “city” layout to make emergency response easier, and a ban on both fireworks and cars inside the playa. It’s also made the fest’s permits increasingly expensive over the years, both because of the costs to patrol the growing crowds and because, frankly, it seems to know the fest’s attendees and benefactors (including people like Musk) will pay whatever it takes to be back at that site.
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All of which is to say: Is Burning Man still “Burning Man” if it’s not akin to a modern Mad Max? Can a festival that once relied entirely on community and everyone pitching in maintain its ethos and vibe if tech execs can hire someone to build their camp for them, or fly in a private chef to cook macrobiotic food that pairs perfectly with whatever mind-bending drugs they might have taken?
It’s complicated.
“[It’s] turned into a weekend snorting ketamine and sleeping with the Estonian sex worker that you flew into the site on a private airplane.”
While tech people have always been at Burning Man, early attendees were more likely to be world-bending, MDMA-loving programmers than they were fleece-wearing executives. Moshe Kasher—a comedian and actor who’s been to Burning Man more than 25 times and has written an excellent book about its culture—says that over the years, tech culture (and in turn tech workers) have become “lamer.”
“Tech went from being a counterculture to being the controllers of culture,” Kasher explains. “The people that were at the early days of Burning Man were weird tattooed hackers, freaks just like the rest of us. But then as Google and Facebook and Tesla and all these companies became like the sort of hegemonic controllers of our society, [the tech world expanded and] turned Burning Man into its corporate retreat. What used to be like a weekend in Hawaii at a luau turned into a weekend snorting ketamine and sleeping with the Estonian sex worker that you flew into the site on a private airplane.”
“The best quote I’ve ever heard about Burning Man,” he adds, “is that it’s gone from a place where weird people went to feel normal to a place where normal people go to feel weird.”
“It’s gone from a place where weird people went to feel normal to a place where normal people go to feel weird.”
There’s a monetary reason Burning Man has changed, as well. Permit fees keep going up—the BLM charges about $4 million a year now—and though Burning Man is run mostly on the backs of volunteers and attendees who bring in their own food, toilets, garbage cans, and whatever else, there are implicit costs to keeping tens of thousands of people safe in the desert. Since the festival eschews sponsors, merch sales, or other fundraising efforts used by festivals like Coachella or Bonnaroo, that means rising ticket prices.
Buck Down, a musician and producer who’s been going to Burning Man since 1997, says that while there’s no easy answer to why Burning Man’s gotten more expensive and more appealing to the mega-wealthy, the rising costs of housing in California have something to do with it.
“In the late ‘90s or early ‘00s, you could live in a warehouse space in downtown L.A. for pennies on the dollar and build out some crazy piece of art with your friends,” Down says. “You’d get a battered box truck when gas cost $1 a gallon and you’d drag your piece of shit out into the middle of the desert and blow it up for yuks without breaking the bank because living was cheap back then.” Tickets to the fest cost maybe $100, and if you could survive on SpaghettiOs and peanut butter sandwiches, you could make it through the whole festival on a shoestring budget.
Now, Down says, everything’s more expensive, from tickets to the event to rent around the state. With wealth and housing costs at an all-time high in California, he explains, “these people that [once] made up the core population and culture of the event are starting to get priced out of it,” whether because they’ve had to leave the area or because they don’t have as much free-flowing money for arty adventures. While there’s still a way for interested parties to attend on the cheap, volunteering and trading labor for a place to sleep, Down says that most non-volunteers spend somewhere between $3,000-4,000 on their Burning Man experience, factoring in housing, water, and the food and supplies you’d need to bring in from the outside.
It’s easy to spend more, too, with wealthier people paying to build out what are called “turnkey camps,” or areas with food, beds, and creature comforts, all built without the occupants’ sweat equity or ingenuity. Their very existence is counter to the Burning Man ethos, where everyone pulls their own weight and is part of the greater community, but Down says they’re also often occupied by Burning Man’s more generous donors, meaning the organization turns a blind eye to the infraction—not that it could really do anything about it, anyway.
But while Down and Kasher notice these kinds of changes, having cumulatively attended Burning Man for over 50 years, they both admit that festival newcomers might not.
“It’s still, by far, the best party I’ve ever been to and it’s still the coolest, weirdest place I’ve ever seen,” Kasher says. “I still think the people that go are largely pretty damn cool, too. But I also think that these days, there’s a lot less ‘I’m going to find my people,’ and a lot more ‘I’m going because this is the craziest fucking party in the world.’”
