A red Ferrari with the top down swerved past on the winding dirt road, headingto what looked like a small Mars encampment. Helicopters landed on the side of the road and greeters darted across. At a farmers' market with overflowing baskets full of raspberries, watermelons, and focaccia, I asked for a mango, and the farmer started cutting it in half for me: "That'll be $7."

This weekend, outside Las Vegas, a group of Burning Man veterans put on a festival called Further Future, now in its second year. Across 49 acres of Native American land over three days, with around 5,000 attendees, the event was the epitome of a new trend of so-called "transformational festivals" that are drawing technologists for what's billed as a mix of fun and education. While tickets started at $350, many attendees opted for upgrades to fully staffed accommodation and fine dining. While Burning Man's hidden luxury camps on the edge of town are criticized by old time Burners who value labor on the desert, Further Future is a splinter group that's unapologetic about wanting a good, hard-labor-free time. "Unabashed luxury", the website reads. Burners are judged for using Wi-Fi or having private chefs; Further Future advertises its connectivity and personal festival assistant service. Nobu hosted a $250-a-seat dinner on the first night of the festival. Partiers included Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet; Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman; and top Facebook executive Stan Chudnovsky.

"It's the Burning Man 1%," said Charles, a documentary filmmaker with spikes pierced through his ears and a brainwave meditation startup. "It's curated." Eric Schmidt was backstage leaning against a tower of pallets and wearing an ornate top hat and a vest made of mirrors. He said he was at Further Future mostly because these were his friends. "It's well documented that I go to Burning Man. The future's driven by people with an alternative world view. You never know where you'll find ideas. " This was the cream of the Burning Man crop, he said. "This is a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs, and they tend to be winners. It's a curated, self-selected group of adults who have jobs," Schmidt said. "You can tell by the percentage of trailers." Did they provide the costume for him? "My own, of course. What do you think of it?" he pressed the glass panels and smiled.

Party planners at Burning Man are careful to hide their luxury dwellings behind large walls dressed as art projects, but Further Future had no such pretension. Behind a chain-link fence was the VIP neighborhood with airstreams ($5,000) and Lunar Palaces ($7,500) – 200 sq ft, 9ft high, custom-made luxury domes with wooden flooring and furnished to sleep four. These included something called an entourage concierge – "a personal, dedicated lifestyle manager and assistant ready to help you with any requirements or desires you may have. No request is ever unattainable." The lifestyle assistant, who makes sure you have the soap you like, will work with you on everything "from the green juice you enjoy every morning to the old-fashioned cocktail you sip on in the evenings". In a shipping container converted to control room, I found Russell Ward, the general show runner and publicist who's the mastermind behind the most popular "transformational festivals". "This is top-league networking and business folks are all here in the guise of having fun. It's designed around the music, but it's about the business," Ward said. "A ton of business will get done here. Entrepreneurs will get funded, investors will find their trajectories, service companies will meet and mix it up." Before running the tech world's hot new trend, Ward had an online gaming hedge fund. "The problem was it got hairy. It's a dodgy industry," he said. "We weren't doing anything illegal, but we got raided by the government, and I got spooked. So I had to decide where to plant my next seed, and I found this knack for festivals."

The aesthetic of the festival was "steampunk futurism" (latex underwear, fur coats, platform boots, metal headpieces). Ward was wearing a Hawaiian tank top, clear Gucci sunglasses, and a silver-coated bobcat claw on a chain. "Burning Man, and we have great reverence for Burning Man, but there's always an element of arduousness. Here, we have spa treatments and green juice," he said. "There's already enough in life that's tough." Further Future is only one of several "transformations" Ward runs, and they all overlap somewhat, especially MaiTai, the billionaire kiteboarding community centered around Virgin founder Richard Branson's island. "Kiteboarding is the new golf," Ward said. "Everyone's doing it. Branson, Elon, Sergey." Justin Shaffer, an early Facebook employee and now an investor, says he wants Further Future to answer a new set of questions: "What happens post-capitalism? Even post-democracy? What about post-employment, when we have universal basic income? "Physical proximity will become more important in a world where the first time you see the pyramids is in VR."

In the Wellness Tent, there's a fitness class with people jumping up and down in unison. Nearby, one woman advertises psychiatric services as "tools and technology broken down for busy professionals". Another advertises "smudgie aura cleansing". To the side of the main wellness stage, a man is getting a transfusion in his arm from a bright yellow bag of fluid (a liter of saline and vitamins called Push IV). The patient reclines, half asleep, until someone accidentally knocks the bag over, jolting the needle in his arm. An espresso line stretches 45 minutes long for lavender lattes. During a wellness panel on "Adventure Travel: Journey As Wellness", someone asks the instructor Fabian Piorkowski about privilege. "We're so privileged to come to these spiritual places – Further Future, Tulum – but not everyone can," the audience member says, asking Piorkowski how he should reconcile that. "It's all about balance. We are the ones meant to be the air, not the earth," Piorkowski said. "So you have this group who can travel. The purpose can never be to enable everyone to travel because that would create imbalance." On stage, entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur is wearing a whole fox as a headpiece and interviewing Schmidt, who answers questions about blockchain (he's for it), eugenics (he's opposed), and cellphones (he's worried about addiction). Schmidt is beloved. The woman behind me shouts that he should run for president. Someone else says: "Marry me, Eric." It was his birthday just a couple of days before, and everyone sings Happy Birthday. At dinner that night, everyone gets a slice of birthday cake.

Schmidt sat on the floor, smiling, his eyes almost closed. The dinner party included a beer tasting, and the bartender was frustrated because the foie gras torchon was too fatty for a proper beer pairing. Schmidt and his pack headed out into the night. Robert Scott, the 42-year-old cofounder of the festival, said you don't need to sweat to have an epiphany. "There's a lot of ways to find an epiphany. Being in the desert under hard conditions is one way to bring yourself into a receptive state, I suppose, but here, all these things are putting you in the same place gently," he said. We sat at a table after a rainstorm, his shaggy brown hair disheveled. "It's important what we do here," Scott said. "That's what we keep saying. We're shaping the future. These are the people who not only can do it, but these are the only people who can."

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why the rich love burning man...

The festival has become a playground for wealthy libertarians. Maybe it was never a socialist utopia to begin with

  In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make it a gift economy. Encourage members to bring the necessary ingredients of this new world with them, according to their ability.

 Introduce “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and “decommodification” as tenets, and designate the alternative society as a free space, where sex and gender boundaries are fluid and meant to be transgressed.

These ideas — the essence of Burning Man — are certainly appealing. Yet capitalists also unironically love Burning Man, and to anyone who has followed the recent history of Burning Man, the idea that it is at all anticapitalist seems absurd: last year, a venture capitalist billionaire threw a $16,500-per-head party at the festival, his camp a hyper-exclusive affair replete with wristbands and models flown in to keep the guests company. Burning Man is earning a reputation as a “networking event” among Silicon Valley techies, and tech magazines now send reporters to cover it. CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Alphabet are foaming fans, along with conservative anti-tax icon Grover Norquist and many writers of the libertarian (andKoch-funded) Reason magazine. Tesla CEO Elon Musk even went so far as to claimthat Burning Man “is Silicon Valley.”

RADICAL SELF-EXPRESSION

The weeklong Burning Man festival takes place once a year over Labor Day weekend in a remote alkali flat in northwestern Nevada. Two hours north of Reno, the inhospitable Black Rock Desert seems a poor place to create a temporary sixty-thousand-person city — and yet that’s entirely the point. On the desert playa, an alien world is created and then dismantled within the span of a month. The festival culminates with the deliberate burning of a symbolic effigy, the titular “man,” a wooden sculpture around a hundred feet tall. Burning Man grew from unpretentious origins: a group of artists and hippies came together to burn an effigy at Baker Beach in San Francisco, and in 1990 set out to have the same festival in a place where the cops wouldn’t hassle them about unlicensed pyrotechnics. The search led them to the Black Rock Desert. Burning Man is very much a descendent of the counterculture San Francisco of yesteryear, and possesses the same sort of libertine, nudity-positive spirit. Some of the early organizers of the festival professed particular admiration for theSituationists, the group of French leftists whose manifestos and graffitied slogans like “Never Work” became icons of the May 1968 upsurge in France. Though the Situationists were always a bit ideologically opaque, one of their core beliefs was that cities had become oppressive slabs of consumption and labor, and needed to be reimagined as places of play and revolt. Hence, much of their art involved cutting up and reassembling maps, and consuming intoxicants while wandering about in Paris. You can feel traces of the Situationists when walking through Black Rock City, Burning Man’s ephemeral village. Though Black Rock City resembles a city in some sense, with a circular dirt street grid oriented around the “man” sculpture, in another sense it is completely surreal: people walk half-naked in furs and glitter, art cars shaped like ships or dragons pump house music as they purr down the street. Like a real city, Burning Man has bars, restaurants, clubs, and theaters, but they are all brought by participants because everyone is required to “bring something”:

Participation sounds egalitarian, but it leads to some interesting contradictions. The most elaborate camps and spectacles tend to be brought by the rich because they have the time, the money, or both, to do so. Wealthier attendees often pay laborers to build and plan their own massive (and often exclusive) camps. If you scan San Francisco’s Craigslist in the month of August, you’ll start to see ads for part-time service labor gigs to plump the metaphorical pillows of wealthy Burners. The rich also hire sherpas to guide them around the festival and wait on them at the camp. Some burners derogatorily refer to these rich person camps as “turnkeycamps.” Silicon Valley’s adoration of Burning Man goes back a long way, and tech workers have always been fans of the festival. But it hasn’t always been the provenance of billionaires — in the early days, it was a free festival with a cluster of pitched tents, weird art, and explosives; but as the years went on, more exclusive, turnkey camps appeared and increased in step with the ticket price — which went from $35 in 1994 to $390 in 2015 (about sixteen times the rate of inflation). Black Rock City has had its own FAA-licensed airport since 2000, and it’s been getting much busier. These days you can even get from San Carlos in Silicon Valley to the festival for $1500. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg flew into Burning Man on a private helicopter, staying for just one day, to eat and serve artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches. From the New York Times:

The growing presence of the elite in Burning Man is not just noticed by outsiders — long-time attendees grumble that Burning Man has become “gentrified.” Commenting on the New York Times piece, burners express dismay at attendees who do no work. “Paying people to come and take care of you and build for you . . . and clean up after you . . . those people missed the point.” Many Burners seethed after reading one woman’s first-person account of how she was exploited while working at the $17,000-per-head camp of venture capitalist Jim Tananbaum. In her account, she documented the many ways in which Tananbaum violated the principles of the festival, maintaining “VIP status” by making events and art cars private and flipping out on one of his hired artists. Tananbaum’s workers were paid a flat $180 a day with no overtime, but the anonymous whistleblower attests that she and others worked fifteen- to twenty-hour days during the festival. The emergent class divides of Burning Man attendees is borne out by data: the Burning Man census (yes, they have a census, just like a real nation-state) showed that from 2010 to 2014, the number of attendees who make more than $300,000 a year doubled from 1.4% to 2.7%. This number is especially significant given the outsize presence 1 percenters command at Burning Man.

 In a just, democratic society, everyone has equal voice. At Burning Man everyone is invited to participate, but the people who have the most money decide what kind of society Burning Man will be — they commission artists of their choice and build to their own whims. They also determine how generous they are feeling, and whether to withhold money.

It might seem silly to quibble over the lack of democracy in the “governance” of Black Rock City. After all, why should we care whether Jeff Bezos has commissioned a giant metal unicorn or a giant metal pirate ship, or whether Tananbaum wants to spend $2 million on an air-conditioned camp? But the principles of these tech scions — that societies are created through charity, and that the true “world-builders” are the rich and privileged — don’t just play out in the Burning Man fantasy world. They carry over into the real world, often with less-than-positive results. Remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to help “fix” Newark’s public schools? In 2010, Zuckerberg — perhaps hoping to improve his image after his callous depiction in biopic The Social Network — donated $100 million to Newark’s education system to overhaul Newark schools. The money was directed as a part of then–Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s plan to remake the city into the “charter school capital of the nation,” bypassing public oversight through partnership with private philanthropists. Traditionally, public education has been interwoven with the democratic process: in a given school district, the community elects the school board every few years. School boards then make public decisions and deliberations. Zuckerberg’s donation, and the project it was attached to, directly undermined this democratic process by promoting an agenda to privatize public schools, destroy local unions, disempower teachers, and put the reins of public education into the hands of technocrats and profiteers. This might seem like an unrelated tangent — after all, Burning Man is supposed to be a fun, liberating world all its own. But it isn’t. The top-down, do what you want, radically express yourself and fuck everyone else worldview is precisely why Burning Man is so appealing to the Silicon Valley technocratic scions. To these young tech workers — mostly white, mostly men — who flock to the festival, Burning Man reinforces and fosters the idea that they can remake the world without anyone else’s input. It’s a rabid libertarian fantasy. It fluffs their egos and tells them that they have the power and right to make society for all of us, to determine how things should be. This is the dark heart of Burning Man, the reason that high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians — love Burning Man so much. It heralds their ideal world: one where vague notions of participation replace real democracy, and the only form of taxation is self-imposed charity. Recall Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s op-ed, in the wake of the Obamacare announcement, in which he proposed a healthcare system reliant on “voluntary, tax-deductible donations.” This is the dream of libertarians and the 1 percent, and it reifies itself at Burning Man — the lower caste of Burners who want to partake in the festival are dependent on the whims and fantasies of the wealthy to create Black Rock City.

 Burning Man foreshadows a future social model that is particularly appealing to the wealthy: a libertarian oligarchy, where people of all classes and identities coexist, yet social welfare and the commons exist solely on a charitable basis.

Of course, the wealthy can afford more, both in lodging and in what they “bring” to the table: so at Burning Man, those with more money, who can bring more in terms of participation, labor and charity, are celebrated more. It is a society that we find ourselves moving closer towards the other 358 (non–Burning Man) days of the year: with a decaying social welfare state, more and more public amenities exist only as the result of the hyper-wealthy donating them. But when the commons are donated by the wealthy, rather than guaranteed by membership in society, the democratic component of civic society is vastly diminished and placed in the hands of the elite few who gained their wealth by using their influence to cut taxes and gut the social welfare state in the first place. It’s much like how in my former home of Pittsburgh, the library system is named for Andrew Carnegie, who donated a portion of the initial funds. But the donated money was not earned by Carnegie; it trickled up from his workers’ backs, many of them suffering from overwork and illness caused by his steel factories’ pollution. The real social cost of charitable giving is the forgotten labor that builds it and the destructive effects that flow from it. At Burning Man the 1 percenters — who have earned their money in the same way that Carnegie did so long ago — show up with an army of service laborers, yet they take the credit for what they’ve “brought.” Burning Man’s tagline and central principle is radical self-expression:

The root of Burning Man’s degeneration may lie in the concept itself. Indeed, the idea of radical self-expression is, at least under the constraints of capitalism, a right-wing, Randian ideal, and could easily be the core motto of any of the large social media companies in Silicon Valley, who profit from people investing unpaid labor into cultivating their digital representations. It is in their interest that we are as self-interested as possible, since the more we obsess over our digital identity, the more personal information of ours they can mine and sell. Little wonder that the founders of these companies have found their home on the playa. It doesn’t seem like Burning Man can ever be salvaged, or taken back from the rich power-brokers who’ve come to adore it and now populate its board of directors. It became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core; and, without any semblance of democracy, it could easily be controlled by those with influence, power, and wealth. Burning Man will be remembered more as the model for Google CEO Larry Page’sdream of a libertarian state, than as the revolutionary Situationist space that it could have been. As such, it is a cautionary tale for radicals and utopianists. When “freedom” and “inclusion” are disconnected from democracy, they often lead to elitism and reinforcement of the status quo.

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