How Burning Man Failed

Today’s economic constraints may be enforcing a degree of sobriety, but even before the pandemic, the easy money was clearly concealing a stagnation. This is the thesis of the Umami essay: that material progress had plateaued, leaving us to manipulate symbols and create the mere illusion of value (this is also what David Graeber argues in his “we w

But the counterculture was about more than getting laid and getting stoned. It was also a pursuit of transcendence, even if it would turn into a transcendence of horror, another phantasmagoria.