John Law helped conjure something impossible into being on a Nevada salt flat more than three decades ago. Now he’s watching his creation from the sidelines, mourning what he sees as a hollowed-out shell of its former self. In a pointed essay released this week, the co-founder of Burning Man declared the iconic festival has been “co-opted by The Man,” transformed into what he memorably described as “a fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled.” The criticism stings, coming from someone who knows the event’s DNA better than almost anyone alive. Yet those of us who have found ourselves wandering the temporary city of Black Rock City understand that the picture is more complicated – and far more hopeful – than Law’s lament suggests.
The Founder’s Lament
Law’s essay, published in the San Francisco Standard, reads like a breakup letter to a former lover who got away. The original dream, hatched in 1990 alongside a handful of fellow idealists, was meant to be something raw and ungovernable – a temporary autonomous zone where the rules of mainstream society simply didn’t apply. No commerce, no hierarchy, no corporate sponsors peering over your shoulder. Instead, participants would build a city out of nothing, create art for its own sake, and exist in a state of radical self-reliance and communal generosity.
That vision, Law argues, has been steadily eroded by an influx of tech wealth and influencer culture. Air-conditioned RVs. Celebrity chefs catering private dinners. The sort of people who arrive by private jet and expect their desert experience to include the creature comforts they’d find at a boutique hotel. “It leaves me a little sad,” Law admitted.
He’s not wrong. The luxury camps with their plug-and-play packages – where wealthy attendees effectively pay someone else to handle the survivalist aspects of desert living – have become an increasingly visible presence. You can’t ignore the irony of a festival built on anti-consumerist principles attracting the sort of people whose presence itself represents the ultimate consumer experience.
A Week in the Void
My own introduction to Black Rock City came in 2014, and like any first-timer, I had absolutely no concept of what awaited me. Photographs and videos simply cannot prepare you for the scale of it all – a thousand square miles of nothing, the kind of landscape where land speed records are broken and rockets are launched. Only someone unhinged would look at that barren expanse and decide to stage an elaborate party. That’s precisely what makes it work.
The desert is a magnificent filter. Yes, the one percenters with their climate-controlled Recreational Vehicles dampen the atmosphere, as Law correctly observes. But the overwhelming majority of attendees in any given year are subjecting themselves to an intensely demanding form of camping. Every meal, every drop of water, every resource they consume has been packed in and must be packed out again. The only thing you can purchase on site is ice.
I was fortunate to find myself part of a camp that understood the drill. A motley collection of ravers, drag performers, and general hedonists who had somehow also mastered the practical arts of erecting shade structures, preparing nutritious food in extreme heat, and running what became the most riotous British pub on the playa each evening. When I ventured beyond our small community, I discovered countless other crews operating their own miracles – tea rooms, circuses, orchestras, grilled cheese stalls. Nightclubs, certainly, and the infamous Orgy Dome, if that’s your scene. But also unexpected wonders around every corner.
Built by Dreamers, Not Committees
The art cars alone justify the journey. Towering, neon-lit phantasms drift across the desert like something from a fever dream – full-scale pirate ships, enormous woolly sheep, mobile interpretations of the Golden Gate Bridge. They materialize out of the dust, invite you aboard, and carry you to places you never expected to go. Nothing about this is commissioned by a marketing team or designed by committee. Everything exists because someone felt inspired to create it and share it freely.
That spirit of unconditional giving defines the entire experience. At Burning Man, you will never be asked to pay for anything once you’re inside. The tickets aren’t cheap, and camp dues add up, but the week itself operates outside any commercial logic. You won’t see a logo, a branded activation, or a sponsored installation anywhere in the desert. Whatever catches your eye exists purely because someone wanted to bring it into being for the benefit of strangers.
This isn’t naive idealism. It works, remarkably, because the community polices itself. The survival challenges of the environment create a natural bonding mechanism. And the knowledge that you’re contributing to something unprecedented – a city that exists for exactly one week each year before being completely dismantled, leaving no trace – generates a genuine sense of shared purpose.
Admittedly, I haven’t returned since 2019. Life has intervened in the form of a wife, a dog, a child, and employment with predictable hours – none of which pairs well with disappearing to the desert for a week of deliberate chaos. And I’ve heard troubling signs that things may have shifted. Apparently, internet connectivity is now available on site, something that would have seemed absurd during my last visit. The Instagram posts about “off-grid apps” made me queasy. The whole point was supposed to be disconnection.
Yet even if the event has deteriorated since I last attended, I find comfort in knowing that somewhere in the Nevada wilderness right now, a first-timer is stumbling into an experience that will rearrange something fundamental in their understanding of community, creativity, and human possibility. The burners I’ve known over the years – including those who ran our pub on the playa and now organise club nights in London – remain changed by what they encountered in the dust. The sparks that ignite in Black Rock City spread outward into the ordinary world.
Why it Matters
Burning Man represents something increasingly rare in our algorithmically curated, brand-strategised existence: a space where human creativity operates without economic imperative, where strangers treat each other as collaborators rather than consumers, and where the measure of success is joy shared rather than profit extracted. That such an experiment has survived for more than three decades, despite the inevitable compromises that come with scale, matters enormously. In an era when the forces of commodification seem almost irresistible, watching a countercultural community persist – even while wrestling with its own contradictions – offers genuine hope that alternatives remain possible. Whether or not John Law’s darkest fears prove accurate, the simple fact that people are still willing to endure extreme conditions in pursuit of collective wonder suggests the radical spirit he helped kindle hasn’t been entirely extinguished. Perhaps it never will be.
