> Every year there are articles about how Burning Man has 'lost' or is 'done'.
Yeah, I wonder what the earliest article about that is. I did a brief search for the decline of Burning Man found a Wired article from 1997[1] (and of course numerous people talking about the decline later, like this blog post from 2004[2]).
It reminds me of all those "I'm 13, is it too late for me to start learning programming/body building/learning the guitar/studying Japanese/etc." type posts. If you don't do something you're interested in because you think its too late, there's a good chance that a decade later you'll be kicking yourself for not having done it.
As Warren Miller, the late, great ski movie filmmaker always said about attempting that challenging run or trick or whatever: "If you don't do it this year, you'll just be another year older when you do."
The older I get, the harder it is to accept being bad and new at things, and it's a constant fight to remind myself that it's okay to suck.
I heard about it from a friend in '96, read that article in '97, attended first time in '98. There were already people saying "Man, this thing has sold out. You shoulda been here back when it was good, before there were, like, 7,000 people here most of who don't know 'the principles' the event is based on..."
Pretty much every year between then and when I last went (in '14) there were new rules which people claimed "ruined the evnt forever!!!" - in '99 Steve couldn't run The Drive-By Shooting Gallery again because they banned guns. Erin's camp stopped being allowed to use theirliquid fuelled flamethrowers in around '03 or '04. The Lawrence Livermore Labs guys got told they couldn't bring their big lasers out and paint animations on the mountain range in '10 or so... But at the same time, there was always some amazing new thing to see. I don't regret any of my trips out there. I still plan to get back there again one day.
I was thinking the exact, same thing as I read that. Burning Man has become what every human endeavor does once it gets "popular".
Exploited.
Seeing this in city after city across the USA as well.
Formerly affordable cities used to grow, attract and keep artists and ground-up, bootsrapped creatives in business. This made these "B-list" cities a cultural hub and (for search of a better word) "cool".
Wealthy people (many of whom were silver-spooned trustafarians) started venturing into the "cool" parties/scenes, loved the culture like everyone else there did — except they moved in and gentrified the city (some with good intentions and many others who didn't give a shit). Some (if not most) of these wealthy people just couldn't truly relate to the prevailing, scrappy culture and didn't really contribute anything to the dynamic and basically killed it. Only the cultural reputation remained and was kept as a corporate marketing ploy, but the core substance of the city (its working class creatives) were unceremoniously and tragically removed.
The artists and truly bootstrapped creatives can no longer afford to live directly in the city, so they move to the run-down industrial outskirts. The city becomes sanitized, gains a lot of national corporate chain conformity and loses a lot of local, novel culture that made it attractive in the first place.
Next thing you know, the industrial area becomes the cultural center and the "hip", cool place to hang out is at artsy, underground events and parties within the area.
The wealthy, of course, end up there because it's the "cool" place to be. While they're there, they eyeball the industrial spaces as future fancy, high-ceiling lofts they can gentrify. They kill off the affordable spaces and the artists and creatives are now left with no where to go but leave the metro area entirely or become another corporate working stiff with no time for art and risky creative endeavors involving small business.
That's where we are today and some of the last stragglers are jamming themselves into dangerous, crowded situations that led to the horrific fire at the CA space (in my opinion).
Moral of the story is many (not all) trustafarians suck the life out of good things because they were raised in such a way that they can't possibly relate to working people or even care to do so.
I'm not sure there's an easy answer to this short of a revolution of sorts where working people unite and demand a more level playing field instead of gross inequality and corporate greed.
That's why I support organizations such as the Justice Democrats and things such as single-payer healthcare. I don't want equality of outcome, just more equality of opportunity. I think that's healthy for society and for a culture that produces more makers instead of mere consumers. The path we're on now is unhealthy and downright dangerous. It's got to change or we're headed toward misery for all of us (including the trustafarians down the road).
But I also can't help but think that it ascribes an unnecessary purity of purpose/intent to the "working people" of the city.
Do they think they have common cause with the "working people" of a rust belt town or exurb? Do they (or for that matter, the trustafarians) think the rust belt iron worker's lifestyle or neighborhood is hip and cool?
Lovely comment. I can’t exaclty relate to the last conclusions because they’re quite US specific. It was a bit different for me, but I certainly feel the “getting kicked out” by the corporatization of the city, a city I’m not so sure I want to hang around any more with all these trustafarians roaming. I even regret not being an efficient planner - like those internet darlings showing off their precocious teenage efficiency - and not being rich enough today to keep up, even if I wanted to.
It's called ecological succession[1], and yes there's no way around it. You can slow it, or you can follow the gradient to stay in the kind of environment you like, but you can't stop it.
Every year there are articles about how Burning Man has 'lost' or is 'done'. Every year its still there, inspiring a new generation of these articles.
"The event is flawed as hell and always has been" is my new response to people who are consider going and worry they missed the party