![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x5671-FPNG.png\"\/)
Suicide Club cofounder David T Warren lights the burning man in the Black Rock Desert in 1990. The first year had around 80 attendees, most of whom slept on the desert floor in sleeping bags.\n | Source: Photo by Judy Kokura<\/p>\n
Burning Man won\u2019t 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\u2019t set foot in the Black Rock Desert since 1996.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For years after I left, I avoided talking about Burning Man \u2014 I\u2019d moved on to other things. But people keep asking, so here\u2019s what I\u2019ll say: What it became makes me a little sad.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t pretend that Burning Man isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the festival is barely recognizable from what we made. Burning Man has lost its anarchist soul.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Suicide Club cofounder David T Warren lights the burning man in the Black Rock Desert in 1990. The first year had around 80 attendees, most of whom slept on the desert floor in sleeping bags.
\n | Source: Photo by Judy Kokura<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s event is a massive, kaleidoscopic extravaganza for the senses \u2014 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)<\/a>. You can fly in on a chartered plane (opens in new tab)<\/a>. It\u2019s become a commercialized escape hatch \u2014 a week when anyone with enough money can leave their real life behind entirely.<\/p>\n Early Burning Man wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s control. Nobody owned it. No one person directed it. There was no official ideology or set of principles handed down from above \u2014 just a group of people powerfully, if unknowingly, attuned to the exact moment they were living through. It wasn\u2019t an escape from reality. For those few days, it was realer than real.<\/p>\n The anarchist roots: How we conjured Burning Man\u00a0<\/p>\n San Francisco has always been a place people came to re-create themselves \u2014 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: \u201cIt\u2018s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The region\u2019s mythic attractions \u2014 sex, drugs, rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, and an uncritical habitat \u2014 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)<\/a>, surrealism (opens in new tab)<\/a>, adventure fiction, extreme cinema, Mad Max, Lawrence of Arabia, the Beats, the hippies, the punks.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 simply a newsletter of events its members dreamed up. But it became the cradle Burning Man leapt from.<\/p>\n There was no way to make a business out of it. It was antithetical to structure and hierarchy \u2014 a simple, beautiful concept for people to come together and create.<\/p>\n \u201cConfederation\u201d is a good word for it \u2014 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)<\/a>. 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\u2019s later writings on \u201cpirate utopias\u201d off the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean in the 17th century mirrored Burning Man\u2019s earliest years.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1988, artists Carrie Galbraith and Phil Bewley launched Cacophony\u2019s \u201cZone Trips\u201d: whim-driven expeditions to strange corners of the world \u2014 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 \u201cThe Romance and Sex Life of the Date.\u201d<\/p>\n Two years later, over Labor Day weekend in 1990, Cacophony organized \u201cThe San Francisco Cacophony Society\u2019s Zone Trip #4: Bad Day At Black Rock\u201d \u2014 and brought Burning Man with it. This desert event was conceived of and listed in the Cacophony newsletter by me and Kevin Evans. The first burn of a large wooden man had taken place on Baker Beach in 1986, organized by Jerry James and Larry Harvey and inspired by Mary Grauberger\u2019s earlier art-and-fire solstice gathering there. Cacophony moved the event to the desert. A caravan of Cacophonists camped, raced across the playa, and, on the final night, raised and burned a 40-foot wooden man. The Burning Man festival had begun.<\/p>\n The other crucial ingredient arrived in 1993, when Cacophony organized an informal Zone Trip to Desert Site Works, a solstice gathering at the hot springs around the Black Rock Desert created by photographer William Binzen. His idea was to bring together an intentional community of artists, performers, and musicians to create an immersive installation with no separate audience: Everyone present would help make and inhabit the experience.<\/p>\n What happened there remains one of the most profound, immersive experiences of my life. Fifty or more artists built an amazing array of interactive installations, including an underground sweat lodge, a ritual pavilion, and a 300-foot neon outline of the mesa, while Paradox Pollack and Ape Theater staged a 48-hour ritual trance performance across it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two months later, we brought that sensibility \u2014 and artists including Pepe Ozan and Paradox \u2014 to Burning Man. Until then, the event had been relatively thin on art. Over Labor Day weekend in 1993, it absorbed the immersive installations, ritual, performance, and collective world-building of Desert Site Works. The Burning Man people now know began to take shape.<\/p>\n Years later, Burning Man cofounder and mouthpiece Larry Harvey would claim that a grand philosophy had animated the event all along. In 2004, he produced a list of (opens in new tab)<\/a>10 Principles (opens in new tab)<\/a>. (Today, Burning Man even has an official Philosophical Center, charged with preserving the event\u2019s \u201croots, values and impact.\u201d) But that is untrue. There was no grand philosophy behind Burning Man, no Ayn Randian vision born of brilliant theorizing. It was hands-on, real-life collaboration and adventure.\u00a0<\/p>\n The closest thing we had to a founding text was far less solemn. In 1977, Suicide Club visionary Gary Warne began writing his 12 Chaotic Principles \u2014 a running, self-deprecating response to event experiments that had gone sideways. They were practical guidelines for immersive ideas that had to survive contact with the real world: \u201cDivest yourself of expectations,\u201d \u201cYou will never be totally in control.\u201d The first desert run included over a dozen Suicide Clubbers and maybe 25 more Cacophonists. Sometime in 1990, I gave Harvey an old Suicide Club newsletter containing Warne\u2019s principles. I can\u2019t prove a direct line from one document to the other, but I have always suspected that this was the seed of Harvey\u2019s 10 Principles, which is treated as holy writ by the more cultic of Burning Man\u2019s devotees.<\/p>\n How Burning Man became a corporate spectacle<\/p>\n Those early years were small and scrappy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then Burning Man blew up. The first year was around 80 attendees, most of whom slept on the desert floor in sleeping bags and maybe small pup tents. The primary revels were a formal dress party, driving very speedily across the playa to the various hot springs, and proto \u201ctheme camps\u201d such as the Bolt Action Rifle Club, whose members dressed in 18th century garb and shot targets with antique rifles.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the fourth year, 1993, the entire thing assumed the more involved ritual, performance, fashion, and artistic influence of Desert Site Works and was soon to be invading the day dreams of the Silicon Valley elite, as well as thousands of less career-oriented seekers, artists, ravers, new age wannabe guru types, bored suburbanites, and many, many others. The party was on!<\/p>\n Blame the concurrent rise of the internet in the \u201990s for much of what came next. By the time Wired put Burning Man on its cover in 1996, there was no stopping its growth. Attendance rose from roughly 70 people in 1990 to 25,000 in 1999. What had begun as a strange desert expedition became the vacation of choice \u2014 and eventually something close to a required pilgrimage \u2014 for the emerging Silicon Valley elite.<\/p>\n Interconnected as it became with the Ayn Rand devotees who captained the new, technology-infused culture, Burning Man became a very different kind of animal. The captains of the new internet economy \u2014 Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos \u2014 adopted the event as their own. Google decorated its atrium with photos of employees at Burning Man, bused staff to the playa \u2014 sort of a reward for slaving away in their keyboard pens for the other 51 weeks of the year, and made Burning Man attendance (opens in new tab)<\/a> a consideration in its search for a new CEO.\u00a0<\/p>\n Great societies have always needed ways to mollify their worker populations \u2014 to provide, as Karl Marx might say, a release valve for exploited workers to blow off steam, so they remain otherwise docile. It\u2019s hard to imagine a better one for the youthful computer workers of Silicon Valley from the late 1990s through the 2020s: paint yourself blue, drop designer hallucinogens, make passionate love with a stranger, and spend a week under the biblical weather-gods of the playa. What better corporate-sanctioned therapy could be imagined?<\/p>\n If early Burning Man was a confederation of anarchistic free spirits, the event that emerged from its explosive growth was top-down, hierarchical, status-generating, and controlled. It became a massive hippie, new age, tech-hipster hoedown, a magnet for well-heeled seekers and dilettantes searching for something to fill the colossal God-shaped hole left by the decline of religion in America. Belief in Jesus and virgin births isn\u2019t easy to rationalize in the wired age. What the festival offered instead was a neo-pagan revival built on hedonism, tempered by self-referential new age concepts, and crowned by a pagan-lite wooden deity that required no messy actual belief. It was a temporary cure for the existential ache carried around by so many agnostic white-collar workers.<\/p>\n Today, the event has become so wrapped in celebrity and red-velvet-rope exclusivity that it projects an image as glossy as anything emanating from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. Of course, many of the more proletarian attendees, and not just the P-Diddys or Diplos, continue to attend in order to build cool art, organize their own theme camps, and meet up with old friends from across the country and the world. What many old-timers would consider a decline in value, meaning, and creativity is no such thing for most of the new attendees. It remains one hell of a party.<\/p>\n It is also an extraordinarily expensive one. By the late 2010s and 2020s, the event\u2019s own organizers still insisted that Burning Man wasn\u2019t a \u201cbusiness\u201d and that no money changed hands there. Anyone who looked at it with a critical eye knew otherwise: With ticket prices approaching $1,000 and the enormous expense required to provision for and travel to the event, it\u2019s absurd to claim money has nothing to do with it. Wealthy attendees run closed, plug-and-play camps \u2014 exclusive enclaves that cost thousands for package deals featuring celebrity chefs, luxury accommodations, and craftsmen and artisans who design and fabricate their costumes and art cars.<\/p>\n The Burning Man organization has bought up land all around the desert (opens in new tab)<\/a> and in the town of Gerlach (opens in new tab)<\/a> and has developed some trappings of a major commercial institution, starting its professional public relations department in the late 1990s. From its humble if ambitious temporary autonomous-zone beginnings, Burning Man has inevitably been absorbed in important ways into the capitalist celebrity-entertainment complex.<\/p>\n As someone who has aimed to live a free life, I see in Burning Man today an instrument of top-down control. I was always opposed to the commercialization of the event \u2014 and was involved in litigation for the purpose of releasing the trademarks to the public domain at one point. To me, the point was fundamental: No one should own this thing.<\/p>\n None of that makes Burning Man a fraud. The pleasure people find there is real. For the people who go, it can be the most affecting, immersive, fun week of the year.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it isn\u2019t what we made.\u00a0<\/p>\n Early Burning Man was an anarchist confederation of equals \u2014 thrown up out of nothing but nerve and collective will. Nobody owned it. Nobody ran it. This camaraderie, collective creation, hard work, and harder play is precisely what made it real. There were no pretentious \u201cprinciples\u201d or annoying philosophizing about how this giant hedonistic party was changing the world. There were no billionaires. Everyone made their own costumes, art, and art cars. Early Burning Man was an emanation of the firmament of that place in time. And as a result, we captured the zeitgeist in a way that today\u2019s Burning Man, with all its budget and its billionaires and its plug-and-play camps, could never hope for.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnything worth doing is worth running into the ground.\u201d \u2014 Stuart Mangrum, director of the Burning Man Philosophical Center<\/p>\n John Law is the cofounder of the Burning Man festival and a longtime SF underground instigator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Burning Man won\u2019t let go of me. As one of the three founders of the festival, I am…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[13014,839,129158,101,103,102,104,106,105,995,47272],"class_list":["post-500802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-burning-man","tag-festivals","tag-ideas","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-tech","tag-tech-bros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x2567-FPNG.png\"\/)
John Law, left, and Tristan Harvey at Burning Man in 1990.
\n\u200b | Source: Photo by Judy Kokura<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x5548-FPNG.png\"\/)
Law on the playa in 1991. | Source: Photo by Sebastian Hyde<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x3823-FPNG.png\"\/)
Elaborate costumes are widely seen at Burning Man. | Source: Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x2605-FPNG.png\"\/)
Source: Photo by Judy Kokura<\/p>\n