Revolt against 'rich parasites' at Burning Man Festival | Hacker News Reader

Revolt against 'rich parasites' at Burning Man Festival

telegraph.co.uk

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$390 + $80 vehicle pass + fees.

Get real, they are ALL jet-setters & rich kids.

It's the red hats vs the blue hats. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0684186/ The haves vs the have mores.

Yes I'm a little bit down on the whole burning man thing.

You want peace & love? Have a solar panel installation party. Plant trees party. Pick up sea trash party.

Not a check out my dreads, tattoo & flashy bicycle party.

Oh yeah, because being able to afford $470 is a sign of decadent wealth.

And getting there, and preparing everything, and taking time off of whatever work you have to do. It certainly isn't decadent wealth but it's probably more money than a lot of people can responsibly spend, especially if you aren't within, say, 500 miles of black rock

IIRC it's cheaper if you apply earlier .. the oldschool/regular attendees therefore get super cheap admission .. latecomer hipster types pay extra :)

  You want peace & love? Have a solar panel installation 
  party. Plant trees party. Pick up sea trash party.
  Not a check out my dreads, tattoo & flashy bicycle party.

You have zero idea what burning man is. If you think it is a 'hippie' festival, then you are severely mistaken. I am absolutely amazed that a critical and entirely inaccurate comment such as this is first.

I believe OP is quoting the first sentence of the article.

Did you read it before commenting?

Any sufficiently large group will eventually develop sub-groups. Those sub-groups may become sufficiently polarized to generate conflict among them.

Reading about this Burning Man dilemma, I'm reminded of the People's Front of Judea battling the Campaign for a Free Galilee to the death over who first conceived of the plot to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife [0].

Human beings will fight over anything.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Life_of_Brian

This is more complex.

More complex than what, exactly?

Than the parent's depiction of this situation as simplya case of fraternal squabbling.

I don't recall where, but I once read that the largest number of people that can be gathered in a group without splitting into factions is something like 7.

Quite a harrowing thought.

I've always had the notion that a festival that you arrived at and departed completely naked, carrying nothing just as you do in the world would be awesome. Burning man became more about what you could shlep into the desert to show off than anything.

And as a poor kid growing up, nothing pissed me off in quite the unique and wonderful way as "show and tell" at school.

> I've always had the notion that a festival that you arrived at and departed completely naked, carrying nothing just as you do in the world would be awesome.

Some people do this at Burning Man, but it's a good thing they're in the minority. The alternative would not be "awesome" but a horrifying week of crises as naked people died en masse in the dust.

Eyyahh. Not really suggesting you show up to Burning Man naked. This is a bad idea.

I was thinking perhaps of a hypothetical festival where you show up naked but the festival itself provides everything to everyone equally. Walk in the door and there's 53' trailers full of goodwill-like clothing, tons of raw food ingredients for the cooking, hand tools and wood for building etc. In short, everyone arrives in a new "world" as equals and makes of it what they can. Bonus points for not allowing real names or talk of who you were on the "outside".

Oh crap. I'm kind of describing prison. So umm... like jail but not so sucky.

>like jail but not so sucky

Maybe that's the whole point. It is the intentions of the participants that define the experience. After all monestaries are just like prison with spartan conditions and rigid routines, but completely different in how the participants experience it. Voluntary vs. Involuntary. Searching for an experience vs. Counting down the days. Etc.

Enjoy being hungry and suffering from exposure to the elements.

Let me see if I can explain all of this, as someone who has been 9 times since 2004.

There is a huge debate if rich people and their rich people only camps are a good addition to Burning Man. The rule is, your camp can not be closed and if you camp on the main street, Esplanade, you are definitely not a closed camp. Meaning, that anyone can walk in and hangout and you can make new friends or share alcohol and all that. You are suppose to have regular event that welcome outsiders. Esplanade spots are coveted locations and some camps spend years at semi-coveted locations off the Esplanade trying to prove to the Burning Man Org they good enough to be a Esplanade camp.

The problems with rich people camps like White Ocean (The camp that was vandalized) is they tend to be closed, they pay others to cook for them, they did not shop for their food, the camps are full of large RV's, they flew in, they did not build anything and they don't welcome outsiders into their camp. White Ocean pays people to do all their dirty work, include constructing their camp art. Some of the rich people camps are also for profit camps, which is completely against the rules (Not saying White Ocean is).

What makes it worse is there are plenty of stories of people walking by a rich camp while they are having a party and walking in and then bouncers tossing them out. That runs against every thing that Burning Man is and stands for. You can't not have private parties with bouncers and you should not even have bouncers for your camp. There are also a number of stories of people who signed up for work at Burning Man then not getting paid. Which not only is working at Burning Man illegal, so is not paying people who do.

On the flip side of the coin, a lot of the large art projects and major sound camps are sponsored by rich folks since the art project and sound camps can have budgets that are upwards to a million dollars. Ya, no joke. The ugly truth of Burning Man is that it needs rich people but it does not want its culture.

Let me just add, celebrities going to Burning Man is a non-issue. No one gives a fuck who you are off the Playa. No one does. Plus, all of the celebrities wear masks, so you don't even know they are there. You could be standing next to Katy Parry in the coffee line in Center Camp and not even know it. The only issue I see is that someone like Paris Hilton did nothing to get there. She got her assistant to buy a ticket off Stubhub and then flew in on a private jet or helicopter. She did not setup her camp, buy her food or sit in line. She just showed up and she won't add anything to Burning Man.

Edited: $390 + $80 is still cheap considering you are there for 7 - 9 days and you can't see what you see at Burning Man when you are not at Burning Man.

> art project and sound camps can have budgets that are upwards to a million dollars. Ya, no joke. The ugly truth of Burning Man is that it needs rich people but it does not want its culture

Super flashy art installations and professional quality music acts aren't integral to the burning man core ethos, while radical self-sufficiency is. One might even contend that large-budget things condition people to act as consumers of culture, which is certainly anti-burning-man.

Seems like a microcosm of the gentrification controversy. I'd like to see BM fork, just to see a social experiment play out, as it might be instructive for other issues that are not so conducive to experimentation.

Have a BM2 where the original ethos is more strictly enforced, and see if all the rich people now find BM1 too phony and want to move to BM2 where they can get a more "authentic" experience, then proceed to ruin that with their money for the "artistic class". Or maybe everyone just prefers nicer things. Honestly curious.

For once, I find myself agreeing with the write-up. They really were parasites (without the quotes) and the others really were hooligans. None of them seemed to understand the spirit of the event.

About jet-setters at least, there is little that can be done. Fork the event?

Burning man has been too big for about a decade. It's subsumed much of indie festival culture, and replaced it with something 'too big too fail', with all the trappings of main stream accessibility that the vandals in this article are reacting poorly too.

FWIW, the first time I went a bunch of long-term burner friends were all "Man, this all gotten too big and has sold out! You should have been here 5 years ago!".

There were about 7,000 people there that year, 1998...

Repeatibility is hard. I'm in the same mountain town, two summers in a row, and it's a completely different experience. Many things are identical, in fact I'm surrounded by it. But the experience I'm having is very different. I think sometimes there's too much attachment to replicating things of the past.

Attend your local Rainbow Gathering until Vice starts writing about it?

Fork the event and then do not talk about Fight Club!

(He said, hypocritically, having first gone to Burningman as a result of the '96 Wired article on it...)

I think the solution is to lock the event early in the week and close the airstrip. That would mean if you want to be there for the weekend, you have to drive there (from Reno, at least) and stay at least 5 days in the desert. Those that want comfort and convenience need to get the message that Burning Man isn't for them and yet Burning Man should still be inclusive to everyone who's willing to embrace the principles behind it.

But I'm also extremely sympathetic to the vandals if the stories of bouncers are true. My favorite part of the years that I went was wandering into random camps and starting conversations with strangers. I met a lot of amazing people and still call some of them friends. There was something about Burning Man that allowed people to discard social conventions which keep people separated that was truly magical. If this aspect of the festival has been lost, or is being lost, I can see a lot of people being justifiably angry at the people responsible for that change.

I have worked at the Airport a few years and I am starting to see that what the problem is, is the Airport. Originally, it was so that people who owned airplanes could fly their planes there. Which for many years worked out really well. The Airport is self sufficient, a team of Volunteer's operate it and they smooth out all the necessary BS with BLM and FAA.

However, the Airport is the way that the people who don't contribute anything to Burning Man get into Burning Man. They need to go back to non-commerical flight only.

I went to Burning Man in 2012 and had a blast, but there was definitely an air of "us and them". The poor nerds in a 99' camper bus versus the wealthy in their camps, with air conditioning, food, drugs, and women. I'm sad that the vandalism occurred, but happy the conversation has started. These people are parasites, and they're trying to recreate Burning Man in their own image of wealth and decadence. It's time for a change and I really hope the organizers listen.

It's only the wealthy that have women or drugs or food at Burning Man? Whatever. Pretty sure everyone has drugs, for starters, and "women", leaving aside you considering them a commodity, don't exactly seem scarce either.

OP is most likely referring to camps flying in models, in which case women are quite literally being treated as a commodity.

Any festival that becomes an institution will be invaded by wealthy parasites more concerned about tweeting and posting photos on Instagram than being there. Burning Man has become a place where you need to show off, just like Coachella, yeah remember when Coachella was "underground" and was a reaction against commercial festivals and ticketmaster ? lol ...

I have never been to burning man but heard about it from friends who have been going for years. They say that people who are used to having closed boundaries around them, for example the Paris Hiltons of the world, have impacted on the bohemian nature of the event.

Well the rich need that extra protection. This incident reinforces that fact. If anything, this shows that the wealthy should build fences with barbed wire on top.

Or maybe increase the BM entry fee so that fewer of these hooligans can afford to come.

>Or maybe increase the BM entry fee so that fewer of these hooligans can afford to come.

Or perhaps someone should create a new festival that is more exclusive (but exclusive based on personality rather than how rich you are). No boring people who shut themselves in, no pretentious twats, no hooligans. Only creative, interesting people would be invited, and it would be completely free and very relaxed.

Or you could be rich and just, you know, camp out like everyone else. I think part of the problem is that they want to "rough it" like the traditional Burning Man culture without actually having to rough it, and keeping people out, which is anathema to the people who go there for the inclusion and unity.

Oh, but banning paid private event staff is uninclusive towards people with limited outdoors experience!

"The Burning Man Festival" has reached "The People's Front of Judea" phase. Funny stuff, or why we need a World War for people to get real.

Jumps Hey - look down there! Check out the sharks! Cool!

I don't understand why this is a problem.

Wealthy people should just build an electric fence around their section, install security cameras and hire guards to patrol the perimeter. Problem solved.

No, that is the problem. Esplanade camps are suppose to be open to everyone, not just camp members. If you don't like that, then you don't camp on Esplanade, you camp farther back.

Here are some facts:

-Is whiteocean a plug and play elitist camp - yes absolutely. -are they inclusive? No they are not. -Is burning man's mantra radical inclusion? - Yes.

The jist is burning man has a mantra to radical inclusion and even if white ocean is a plug and play camp or elitist they have to be included. So by logic the act is wrong and I say this as someone who despises them.

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