(CNN) – The Burning Man festival, the desert party that descended into chaos over the weekend, is no longer the wild, free-spirited party it once was.
For many who watched Burning Man from a distance, the rain and mud that stranded 70,000 people quickly became symbolic of the festival’s departure from its roots.
Or more simply, how billionaires ruined the Burning Man festival.
The festival began in 1986 as a small gathering on a beach in San Francisco and eventually grew into a courageous countercultural community of “Burners” based in their makeshift city, which is built every year at the bottom of a dry lake called “Strand.” Avoid commercialization.
No money is exchanged on the beach; This is fundamental to the spirit of “decommodification” of the community. But there is more and more money at stake.
Attending the Burning Man festival is, in some elite circles, akin to climbing Everest or taking ayahuasca on a meditation retreat: a spiritually transformative experience undertaken with a considerable safety net of privilege.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, was a regular attendee of Burning Man and told Recode in 2014, “If you haven’t been there, you just don’t get it.” According to his friend and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg is for a day in 2012 flown in to serve grilled cheese sandwiches and even set up his own tent. In 2018, shortly after she was indicted on federal fraud charges, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes retreated to the desert and burned an effigy of her failed startup, she told The New York Times.
One of Burning Man’s ten pillars is “radical self-reliance,” and with that in mind, most revelers carry their own water and non-perishable food for the week and “rely on their inner resources” to survive, the website says. Organization website.
However, for the one percent of participants, self-care can be outsourced.
Super-rich people have been known to travel with private chefs during the week and pay up to $50,000 to camp in luxury tents, the New York Post reported in 2019. A Business Insider journalist also wrote about so-called posh camping on the beach with chandeliers, party rooms and outdoor showers.
“Burning Man is the perfect example of how many rich white people cause trouble in their free time because they are systematically immune to it.” wrote a user in Xformerly Twitter, this weekend.
Jet-set infiltration is the driving force behind the joy emanating on social media over video footage of festival-goers (some of whom paid $2,750 for a single ticket) stomping ankle-deep in mud and camp after unusually heavy exertion can’t leave rain.
“For me it’s a little violin emoji,” one TikTok user wrote.
While some festival-goers found the situation frightening (a “Lord of the Flies” atmosphere, as one attendee described it), many seasoned Burners took the bad weather and road closures in stride, offering food and shelter to those who needed it. While one person died at the festival, the death was “unrelated to the weather.”
Andrew Hyde, one of the festival-goers, told CNN that the rain and mud brought the event’s meaning back to its roots.
“You come here to experience severe weather and you prepare for it.”
– Nouran Salahieh and Holly Yan contributed to this article.