Escaping the Online Discourse to Burning Man, Then Escaping Burning Man
Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2023
Twitter/X hate is a useful reminder of why people go to Burning Man in the first place.
Our friend stuck in the mud at Burning Man says everyone there is good, taking things in stride and don’t believe the media.
After a treacherous five-mile hike in the sticky playa mud on Sunday, I got to the highway, hopped on a few different buses and made it home safely from Burning Man.
A lot of readers have written to me to see if I’m OK, or just to ask about the experience of leaving Burning Man at a time when flooding made it impossible to leave by car. I’m not only fine — I had a blast. I’m excited to get back to work. I have lots of new reporting, and so much more to build out on this Substack. But let me write just a few quick thoughts about the experience.
Over the last few days, Twitter/X has oozed with schadenfreude, with hundreds of thousands of outsiders mocking the calamity at Burning Man with predictable scorn. The platform is filled with viral tweets gleefully ridiculing the “wealthy elites leaving people behind” and the failures of a “libertarian utopia.”
Earlier today, Jacobin, the self-styled socialist magazine, capitalized on the online furor and recirculated an older article decrying Burning Man as a “dark” event in which “high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians” spend a week in the desert creating a society in which “the people who have the most money” make all the decisions.
To anyone familiar with the event, the accusations are laughable. Once you’ve arrived at the festival, everything is free, except for ice. As you walk through Black Rock City — the makeshift town that Burners build every year – people left and right beg you to come into their camp for free smoothies, freshly baked cookies, or a cocktail. When you go to any party, workshop, lecture, or hangout, you are welcome. Strangers immediately dance with you and exchange high-fives. It’s hard for me, as someone who isn’t particularly extroverted. But the expectation there is a warm embrace of every stranger, and the culture is contagious.
The festival boasts a hippy, anything-goes ethos about drugs, sex, and lifestyle choices, but there are also communal rules rooted in shared responsibility that are followed by nearly all participants. It is a model of the kind of high social trust that progressives often valorize in social-democratic countries. If you see trash, you pick it up. If you find someone who may not be having a good time, even a stranger, you comfort them. You bring plenty of supplies and virtually everyone is ready for anything – even the rain storm.
In short, Burning Man is a community where intense, personal connectedness is palpable in ways that are rarely imaginable in the United States. It’s an especially stark contrast with the very online media universe, in which people remain huddled on screens and immersed in toxic political polarization, accustomed to existing in balkanized boxes where we are primed to hate each other for no good reason.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 
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