I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul.

Burning Man won’t let go of me. As one of the three founders of the festival, I am constantly approached by journalists and documentary crews, podcasters, and the odd publisher hoping to make a book about the festival I helped invent 36 years ago. Curiously, I get this interest even though I haven’t set foot in the Black Rock Desert since 1996. Everyone wants the same story: how a bunch of pranksters in San Francisco jumped into a bunch of janky vehicles headed for the desert, hauling weird props and camping gear and the components of a huge, man-shaped wooden figure, and accidentally built one of the most famous festivals on Earth. For years after I left, I avoided talking about Burning Man — I’d moved on to other things. But people keep asking, so here’s what I’ll say: What it became makes me a little sad.I won’t pretend that Burning Man isn’t fun. My friends who are still involved share their pictures and videos, and old-school crews still carry some of the OG punk-industrial flavor. But the festival is barely recognizable from what we made. Burning Man has lost its anarchist soul. Suicide Club cofounder David T Warren lights the burning man on fire in the Black Rock Desert in 1990. The first year’s festival had around 80 attendees, most of whom slept on the desert floor in sleeping bags. | Source: Photo by Judy KokuraToday’s event is a massive, kaleidoscopic extravaganza for the senses — a phantasmagoric, immersive spectacle built for the consumption of Western elites and the middle-class creatives who service them. It is a carnival. A fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled, all the while presenting itself as a serious artistic enterprise grounded in philosophical principles. You can buy into luxury camps with private chefs and have a stylist curate your outfits (opens in new tab). You can fly in on a chartered plane (opens in new tab). It’s become a commercialized escape hatch — a week when anyone with enough money can leave their real life behind entirely.Early Burning Man wasn’t a ready-made escape you could buy your way into. It was an anarchistic collaboration of equals, conjured into being by a few hundred people of goodwill, far from anyone’s control. Nobody owned it. No one person directed it. There was no official ideology or set of principles handed down from above — just a group of people powerfully, if unknowingly, attuned to the exact moment they were living through. It wasn’t an escape from reality. For those few days, it was realer than real.The anarchist roots: How we conjured Burning Man San Francisco has always been a place people came to re-create themselves — running from something, running toward something exciting and unknown, going as far as they could for a shot at a new life. As Oscar Wilde put it: “It‘s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.”I was no different. I arrived as a teenager in 1976, determined, like so many seekers who landed on the Left Coast to start life anew, to re-create myself.The region’s mythic attractions — sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and an uncritical habitat — bred an intensely collaborative scene free of the snobbery of East Coast art markets, where any idea could fly as long as it carried passion and transgressive appeal. Our influences were Dada (opens in new tab), surrealism (opens in new tab), adventure fiction, extreme cinema, Mad Max, Lawrence of Arabia, the Beats, the hippies, the punks.Out of that came a run of organizations and cabals. One of them, the Cacophony Society, grew out of the earlier, more secretive and transgressive Suicide Club, which staged pranks, urban explorations, and stunts (naked cable car rides, bridge climbs). The Cacophony Society was itself barely an organization — simply a newsletter of events its members dreamed up. But it became the cradle Burning Man leapt from.There was no way to make a business out of it. It was antithetical to structure and hierarchy — a simple, beautiful concept for people to come together and create.“Confederation” is a good word for it — the kind of temporary, self-organizing gathering Hakim Bey had already detailed in his writings, calling the phenomena a Temporary Autonomous Zone (opens in new tab). Small cabals of artists and free spirits would converge somewhere beyond ordinary control, collectively conjure a world in which they could do anything, then pack it up and vanish before the agents of control could squash it flat. Bey’s later writings on “pirate utopias” off the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean in the 17th century mirrored Burning Man’s earliest years. In 1988, artists Carrie Galbraith and Phil Bewley launched Cacophony’s “Zone Trips”: whim-driven expeditions to strange corners of the world — never dressed up as culturally important, just collaborative adventure for its own sake. The first went to Covina and the greater L.A. basin, where the itinerary memorably included a two-hour drive to the Shields Date Garden to drink date shakes and watch a 30-minute promotional film called “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”John Law (left) with Tristan Harvey at Burning Man in 1990.