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Burning man is both an intrinsic part of Silicon Valley and a DJ party in the desert. A place for rich people to party and nude hippies to dance around the fire.
But for the curious, allow me to try. Someone in line ahead of us tells us this line is actually short. We were the lucky few who escaped the storm that left thousands on the side of the road for 18 hours.
Already camp mates have been working hard to erect a giant shade structure, kitchen, water and power supplies when Ben drops me off at my camp around 10 pm. Tim West, part of the camp leadership crew, is a former Facebook chef and co-created the Future of Food Hackathon. Neither of us can help but notice how intrinsically intertwined tech is to the art and experience of this event.
Large art structures, several with LED lights, digital displays and other technical work pop up out of this dusty wasteland in every direction. The desert festival has a rep as something for dirty hippies on drugs.
The first Google doodle was an homage to The Man. Drew Houston , co-founder of Dropbox camped out this year and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit was there as well. Still, other tech leaders chose to stay away this time around. Musk, notably, came up with the idea for SolarCity while at Burning Man a few years back, then gave the concept to his cousins.
Attendance was down overall this year by a few thousand people, according to the latest Burning Man Census Report. Those numbers are from a census insider and not officially published yet. It should also be noted that BMIR, the official radio station of Black Rock City, reported that 10, people had already left the city before the man burned.
Part of this non-attendance could have been because of the earlier rain fiasco or the rumors that Burning Man had been canceled. As a counselor at Camp Grounded , a summer camp where adults go to purposely unplug, it makes sense that my use of tech while camping would annoy him.
But I kind of need these tools. Or I think I do. I need a way to communicate with the outside world in some way. Is unplugging part of it? Others just accept tech as part of the overall experience. Wolf, a tech entrepreneur-turned-fire-dancer, has been coming to Black Rock City since Wolf pauses, pulls out a pasty zinc sunscreen and plasters her lips in white before thoughtfully replying.
I talk about startups a lot, but usually not naked. Yet here I am discussing Facebook, Google and the latest startpus while waiting to get blasted by Dr. Bronners soap foam in a giant box with 50 other dusty weirdos. Burning Man started with a bad breakup. Founder Larry Harvey built a small structure resembling a man and burned it on Baker Beach in San Francisco 28 years ago. It was a symbolic gesture to help him get over the heartache and symbolically burn away his old self. The festival has since moved to the Nevada desert and has grown to an attendance of nearly 70, people annually.
Still others share in the Burning Man principle of radical inclusion for all, rich or not. I put up a simple question on the Burning Man Facebook Group about whether the rich people camps affect the burn experience or not. It had strongly worded opinions at last count. A bald man dripping with silver body paint who came to visit Ideate mentions one such camp to me, way out on the edge of town. Curious, I wander over with my aforementioned tall, blond tent mate to see what this camp is all about.
The camp is hard to find at first. Her camp, Lost and Found Hotel, looks swanky enough. Not anything like the camp we are about to see. She points the two of us to an ornate Middle Eastern looking structure hidden behind a bunch of semi trucks in the back.
I quickly find that, contrary to other reports , the camp is not a private, walled-in place only available to rich kids. We walk right in and are offered fresh fruit and beer. But it is definitely where the rich kids stay.
Plush couches and giant bean bags are placed about for anyone to lounge in. I ask a gal at the bar how much everyone paid to stay here. She is a member of the camp and not paid to bartend. Some of the camp members are entrepreneurs or in tech, she confirms. The vast majority of them are from the LA entertainment scene, though.
The camp also comes complete with hotel-style walled-off glamp tents with coolers in them for each of the members. Causey and I peak inside to find fluffy pillows and white comforters await each guest. Segways are available to each member for easy use and many camp mates flew in on private jets — all part of the package. The main bar is lined with top shelf vodka.
An ornate DJ stage hangs above. Causey asks for a drink at the bar from a petite woman wearing false eyelashes and a corset. Okay, so not everything is available to just anyone here.
We are once again directed to the fresh fruit and beer. There was also free water, electrolytes and coffee in back. His orgasmic wisdom is his gift to the playa. A fancy schmancy high end bus camper was headed down Darjeeling on Thursday morning as we were having our morning coffee on the crackly fresh playa lawn out front. I asked the universe for beer.
He stopped, walked around to the supply bay, reached in there and got us a 30 pack of Miller High Life beer. We gave him one of our Burner shirts from the free box we had in front of our camp. I think we can all get along.
You can see it when you look around at the amazing works of art that people are driving around. And the makers will remake the world in the digital age. Facebook friends can find each other using the Facebook Burner Map app. Some camps offer wifi and one even has a solar powered steam room. My own camp organized a speaker series.
Giant Buddha statues greeted burners as they wandered into camp to hear about building cities of the future, robots and government. Uhuru is another Burning Man camp made up of mainly San Francisco founders that broke off from Camp Ideate to create their own tech innovators group on the playa. Dennis Kucinich showed up for his talk in a blue dress shirt and khakis — surely setting him apart amongst a crowd of spandex and sparkly things.
Libertarian-leaning Republican Grover Norquist, who came to Burning Man for the first time this year, was also scheduled to speak at Ideate, but rumor was he had to cancel his appearance because of threats. Did it bother people that Dr. Any type of branding is frowned upon here. Someone even asked me to cover the logo on my own drinking cup earlier. The half-naked guy in a pony tail at the front of the line corrects me when I ask about the Dr. You might just lose it right there. You can hear the sobs among the quiet reverence within the wood cut walls.
I did take some time to reflect on my younger brother, killed in a hiking accident 11 years ago. I thought about his soul and mine and I felt a reverence in that moment. One single tear ran down my dusty cheek and then I was done. So many folks get married at dawn or sunset at the Temple they have to choose different areas on the outside for their individual events. Photographers and onlookers line up to see the bride and groom or groom and groom or bride and bride…or just the bride. The famous-for-being-tech-famous Julia Allison married herself this year.
I crashed an engagement ceremony of one of the Ideate founders. About a hundred of us sat on the dirt carpet, dressed in our finest feathers and leather and lace and whatever else we felt like while the groom and his bride-to-be relayed their engagement story.
Both his parents and a new age priest stood by their side to support them. They were standing in a rushing river, buck naked, wild horses running in the background, as he knelt down on one knee and asked her to be his forever. This was so Burning Man. It made me pause. People actually live this way in a weird, wonderful hippie fairy tale, surrounded by a loving community of family and friends. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep or that my mind had been overstimulated for the last 5 days straight, but it was there that I broke down and actually, embarrassingly, bawled my eyes out in front of a hundred or so people.
This universe existed and it was wonderful and I wanted to be a part of it. Black Rock City is neatly laid out neatly in a half disc with roads marked in time like 2: It criss-crosses alphabetical intersections from Antioch to K. The pop-up city boasts two public libraries yes, you can actually check out books during your time on the playa , a media center, police station, bars, clubs, pop-up restaurants serving poutine and grilled cheese sandwiches and even a makeshift medical unit complete with high-tech X-ray machines to check for broken bones and other maladies.
She told me she hopes to bring that same bit of magical thinking back to her own town.