At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another | Hacker News Reader

At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another

nytimes.com

142 pointsZanyProgrammer57 comments

I've only been to Burning Man once but based on my limited experience, you can have whatever experience you're looking to have there. It's different for every attendee. Some go for drugs, some for yoga, some for music, some for the art (which was incredible and completely exceeded my expectations), some for the community, and some for many more varied reasons.

If you want your Burning Man experience free of techies, models, celebs, and billionaires — I assure you it won't be a hard feat to accomplish. There are myriad subcultures within the culture of Burning Man.

It feels in violation of the spirit of the event to have paid help in your camp, but otherwise Burning Man is for everybody.

Radical inclusion includes people with paid help.

Referred to as "Sherpas"!

I wonder if they picked that name ironically. Sherpas are probably best known for being porters and guides for Mt. Everest, a mountain that many in the mountaineering community consider to be, now, a playground for the rich.

Because I never get tired of this fun fact: the Sherpa people have a great tradition of building new homes as a community whenever a marriage occurs, as Sherpa families generally are quite large and live together until such marriages occur. This is generally a pretty intense process, since the culture has a huge emphasis on household deities and that kind of thing [^1], so houses (and land in general) is a big deal.

I'm not saying that being a professional mountain climber isn't super impressive, I'm just saying that if there was only one thing we could steal from their culture I wish it was less about making it easier to reach high elevations and more about building things together that last decades.

[^1]: I don't mean to be dismissive, I just don't know that much about their religious beliefs.

But it's not especially in keeping with Radical Self-Reliance or Participation.

And yet, nearly all of the subcultures shared a few commonalities. Some had better food than others, a few had air conditioning, and nearly all were cut off from the rest of the world.

I can easily see the motivation for some creature comforts, but the harsh circumstances of being in the middle of the desert and the lack of technology in general are what help make Burning Man so drastically different from everyday life.

It reminds me of Wired magazine -- it went from a good alternative business/tech mag (along the lines of Whole Earth Review) to straight-up business porn. There are a lot of things that seem to follow the pattern, where something cool and non-mainstream gets watered-down and diminished by becoming popular, so I don't think you can't really blame the rich guys.

It's also not a totally fair comment because I haven't read Wired in years.

It's true of everything "cool". Google, Apple, ESPN, Rolling Stone, Pixar, MTV, Starbucks, and so on.

You can blame some of the rich guys for this, but for different reasons (trying to commercialize them). Even absent that, it's probably intrinsically impossible to be perpetually cool.

You can also blame some of the rich for what's happened to SXSW, Cannes, Burning Man, climbing Mt Everest.. but that is more the dynamic of trying to fill a feeling of emptiness with experiences without regard for the truly understanding why those experiences are important.

Sometimes things are diminished in an "Eternal September" fashion, out of an influx of people and ignorance more than anything. Other times, like these examples, it's a slow gentrification.

BTW, thanks for the comment. I like how you tie it to a feeling of emptiness with experience... I've been really making an effort to cut out all the unnecessary junk in my life for a few years, and I've come to a similar conclusion about myself: that it's much more about how subtle feelings of emptiness and lack can "distort" my behavior, and cause a lot of pain and discomfort -- even things that are usually considered extremely positive can become painful. Even with a lot of direct effort to avoid it, I still fall into that trap. All I can do is look at myself and laugh a little!

Wired is a very mixed bag for me. It's "business porn" but every now and again they still publish some long interesting piece that at least hints back to the "golden age" of articles like Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board[1]. But it's the kind of magazine I only ever flick through these days, unless the front page is particularly compelling.

[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html.

Here's a more recent example, from 2008:

http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/...

This will be the first burn I've skipped in the last 7. Burning man has prominently featured the rich as long as I've been going. It was no more "for" the rich when I started going than it was last year. If you're wealthy, you can hang out on the cool toys you brought to the burn and people will be happy to ride on them with you.

That being said, burning man has never exactly been cheap, but it also has never exactly been expensive. You can spend as much or as little as you want each year. If all you get is a ticket, a used tent, and a weeks' worth of water & cheap food, it can easily run under $600 all told (last year our shared food budget for better than that was $150 each).

You make what you want of the burn.

Yeah, this is a weird article. The author mentions going there as if to establish their credentials, then holds up these billionaires attending as if they're fish out of water.

Not sure about Zuckerberg, but I can find a reference of Elon Musk attending in at least 2004 and Google famously had their first doodle when they were all out of the office for Burning Man in 1998[0], more than a decade before the author attended. Burning Man might be changing, but these people aren't exactly interlopers.

[0] http://www.google.com/doodles/burning-man-festival

Burning Man can be done on the cheap (somewhat) if you're able to camp in a tent, or sleep in your car, or share a shelter with friends. Also, ticket discounts are available ahead of time for low income people, and grants are available ahead of time for artists who create projects.

Here's a good writeup of some of the artists' projects this year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30/burning-man-2014-ar...

Check out ToorCamp, it's a lot newer and smaller than Burning Man which are huge pluses in my mind. The last couple times it's been held in a beautiful part of Washington with perfect weather. The atmosphere and people that attend are what make it great--it's folks who actually want to make things and share experiences together, not people looking to buy status/culture. Next one is in 2016: http://toorcamp.toorcon.net/

These articles need to go away. Burning Man has always featured wealthy participants. Radical Inclusion is one of the 10 basic principals of the event. We welcome ALL burners, whether you've flown in your private plane to the BRC airport (yes, we have our own airport), or you've rented an RV with your friends, or you've arrived by bus and are camping in a simple tent. Everyone makes their experience as they choose, and as they are able.

That being said, it's not cheap, and it's never been cheap. Getting out to the middle of nowhere tends to be like that. Your gear can get trashed, you might require a storage unit each year, the ticket is $350+...but you know what else is expensive? A European vacation, and quite frankly I'd rather go to Burning Man. :)

So yeah, don't believe what you read in these articles, which seem to pop up 5-10 times every year just before the burn. At nearly 70,000 attendees you would be hard pressed to make a general statement about any one group, including the "rich bay area tech millionaires" that are ruining the event. We welcome them with open arms! Let's hope they brought some cool gifts for everyone.

)'(

> These articles need to go away. Burning Man has always featured wealthy participants. Radical Inclusion is one of the 10 basic principals of the event. We welcome ALL burners, whether you've flown in your private plane to the BRC airport (yes, we have our own airport), or you've rented an RV with your friends, or you've arrived by bus and are camping in a simple tent.

What if the people BM includes don't want to include others?

From the article:

> Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in.

If Burning Man was permanent, I feel like it would become a desert version of the "Raft" from Snow Crash. It's close enough for people from SV to jet in and out without too much fuss, but with enough counter culture vibe to attract all the hippies and hanger ons to give it flavor.

This kind of already exists with Slab City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City

Who's going to live in the middle of the desert permanently?

Plenty of people already do. It's warm, dry, and usually low in population density. It also tends to draw people who are a little odd.

s/odd/eccentric/

Has a more positive connotation.

That would be genuinely interesting.

At this rate, in another 10 years, it'll become George Bluth's "Sweat & Squeeze".

But, let's not say this is any surprise. It's the trajectory of nearly everything that is initially super-cool/elite. It gets to the rich elite who aren't cool, then it gets mass produced & mass-marketed, then it gets uncool.

I'm reminded of my favorite quote from Larry Harvey, "It wouldn't be a real community without assholes." :)

From what I understand going from 2008-10 and talking to the more experienced that it was mostly over by about '95-'97 after someone died and they had to make a bunch of rules.

Nothing is immune to the eternal september.

I don't think Burning Man will ever have a true September. There's no amount of money that can make it perfectly safe and comfortable, and it takes rather a large amount to make it even modestly so, at least by the standards of the wealthy.

Driving in is slow and boring. Flying in is fairly dangerous. Even if the event itself can be made perfectly comfortable with enough money -- and it really can't -- at least the journey will always suck a little, one way or another.

Maybe, but some things are still in springtime right now.

Why camp if you don't like sleeping in a tent?

[edit: the rhetorical point I was trying to make was not about tents!]

I love the outdoors. I love peace and quiet. I love hiking and seeing the stars outside the city. All of that is great.

I hate tent-camping. My wife and I own a little camper and we haul that thing all over the place. I don't see the problem with it.

That said something about a $2 million dollar campsite at burning man seems very wrong to me. There's a time and a place to throw money around, but Burning Man definitely isn't it. It's an established culture and a closely held idea of how the world should work. If you don't want to actually participate in Burning Man, why even go?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/experience/weekend/my-weekend-... People are weird.

In this case, it's more a matter of "look what I can do with my money".

On a much smaller scale, I do the same thing by paying my two employees a little above market rate, and then brag about it on the internet, so there's that :)

For status and bragging rights. I flew to Monaco to shop on Monday, and by Wednesday I was "camping" at Burning Man, being all counter-cultural and stuff.

This kind of reminds me about the case of a rich Chinese woman who took a helicopter ride to Mount Everest.

> Non-tech Burners who have been may “get it” but don’t like all this excess, and are starting to push back.

This is probably the most telling quote of the article to me - "tech" is now code for people who live excessive materialistic lives, so I'm going to rant about that for a bit. I work in tech and do well for myself, but its very disheartening to constantly be compared by popular press to trust fund kids trying to find new and exciting ways to burn all their money while the rest of the world suffers.

But there is a ring of truth to it - there is a definite and huge change in culture when you're hanging out with groups that make on average over 6 figures. I've watched as friends who are stuck in poverty or low end jobs aren't invited to as many parties or events, because its uncomfortable to talk about flying out in your friend's private plane for a week when that person is looking forward to saving up for a new video game. The worst part is watching people become convinced that its some moral failing of people to not have as many resources as them. And then they just don't talk forever. That definitely exists, despite a lot of very good things happening in "tech".

Its worse. I do C++ programming for E&M and am told I don't work in `tech` because I don't make 150k+.

sometimes it is acceptable to tell your clueless family to fuck off

My take on it is that this is just another instance of people trying to join the Cool Kids' Club -- or, in this case, to redefine an existing thing to make it a Cool Kids' Club that they can join (or buy their way into). That makes talk about "radical inclusion" (or its opposite) beside the point, because they're not trying to be included in the experience, they're trying to redefine it into an experience that can be purchased and that automatically awards you with Cool Kid Points. I'd like to see Elon Musk's quote in context, but out of context it comes across like the latest guy to buy into the country club complaining about all that trash outside.

Burning Man has _always_ been for the rich. Poor people do not have that kind of spare time.

I know a few train hopping hobos that have no money and plenty of spare time.

I doubt you've actually been to burning man. If you have actually been, I don't think you spent enough time looking around or talking to people.

People that shouldn't be there (financially) still find a way to go; it's no different than many of the diversions we pursue in life.

How much do you think it costs exactly? Historically, as little as a few hundred could get you there. Less than the air fare many people spend to fly home for the holidays.

Anyone who flies home for the holidays is rich, not poor.

LOL, there are plenty of people at BM that can afford to do LITERALLY nothing else. Regional burns too.

Your perspective of poverty may be a bit skewed. You think junkies can AFFORD a heroin habit?

The definition of "poor" is subjective; I know people that have gone to burning man that met the federal definition of "poverty". Is that "poor" enough for you?

You also seem to be ignoring the people that can't afford to go that are sponsored by others as a gift.

We're clearly going to have to agree to disagree.

While it's certainly not for the least privileged amongst us, I've met quite a few people who saved up for months in order to afford the trip.

I haven't been in years, so my opinion may be a bit out of date. But one of the things I loved was the way everybody was a maker, a performer, a contributor. I loved how whatever insane thing I saw, it was a bunch of passionate individuals doing the work. It was beautiful, and I loved the shared sense of triumph over obstacles. Hearing about this would make me second-guess everything: was the thing I was seeing an impressive personal achievement? Or just paid for?

This article is looking at a small segment of burners and generalizing the entire bunch.

Burning man is just The Gathering of the Juggalos with better corporate sponsors.

Counterculture has to some extent won, which means it has now merged with the system and is part of "the man".

If you have to buy tickets to experience it, counterculture hasn't really won.

In that area I think they hit reality-- nothing is free, nor can it be, at least not until we achieve some kind of true post-scarcity state.

This sounds a lot to me like "Do you even burning man bro?"

> And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.

I think he means salvia

Really, I thought he was referencing free love.

Its not free if you're flying it in for the week from New York.

Heh, that's how I read it too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com