On Friday, September 1, after most of the scheduled events and live performances were canceled due to the weather, Burning Man organizers closed routes in and out of the area, forcing attendees to stay behind and ration their food, or else find alternate routes out.
The rains turned Black Rock City and the surrounding desert, or the playa, into a sludgy wasteland and left tens of thousands of wealthy sojourners literally stuck in the mud. Even when it’s a punchline, there’s been something untouchable about those days in the desert.īut Burning Man’s reputation collapsed faster than a tent in a mudslide after this year’s annual gathering began with a controversial climate protest that blocked passage into the space and ended early with a dramatic rainfall that blocked passage out of it.
“If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.”) Or perhaps it’s because individual stories from Black Rock City, the temporary Nevadan city constructed every year to house the festival’s 80,000 “burners,” often make the fest feel like a Hunter Thompson novel come to life. (“Burning Man is Silicon Valley,” Elon Musk told Recode in 2014. Perhaps it’s because its longstanding ties to powerful tech bros - and their money - have made its mythos difficult to puncture. Perhaps that’s because its fans have zealously proselytized it as the transformative experience in an age of transformative experiences, a vibe so powerful it’s been the subject of academic research.
For most of its existence, Burning Man, the week-long desert experience that’s part utopian performance, part survival quest, and part drug trip, has dodged serious cultural pushback, beyond eye rolls or wry jokes.
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