Festival was always about blowing money in pursuit of a unique experience. New scale of high-tech wealth simply shifts the dollar signs around “radical self-reliance.”
People who’ve paid attention to the Burning Man festival have watched the scale of the do-it-yourself spectacle, accommodations and controversy soar over the years. Debate over air conditioning and charter flights is nothing new.
What’s changed is that the reporting no longer notes the irony of an event built on “do it yourself” opening up to billionaires who insist on VIP treatment.
This year luxury and conspicuous consumption won. And if, as Elon Musk says, Burning Man is Silicon Valley, then we’re learning quite a bit about the evolving ethos of the technology industry’s working rich.
The sherpa economy
Musk has gone to Burning Man. The Google founders and current CEO are regulars. So are many key executives at Apple, Facebook, Amazon and other Silicon Valley giants. The week-long festival is a fixture of affluent West Coast social networking.
The rich have a different experience from everyday bohemian campers. When you’re earning $40-$80 million a year in the top echelon of a modern tech company, convenience trumps all reasonable costs.
At that level of wealth, it makes sense to pay another $1,400 per seat on a private jet flying straight to the edge of the campground or even charter the entire plane to ensure complete freedom from outside schedule constraints.
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg set the tone five years ago by taking a 2-hour helicopter ride in to visit a friend for an afternoon — even though it’s nominally a 9-day immersive event. “Community standards” and expectations just didn’t apply.
And when you make your fortune deconstructing conventional business processes, it’s practically a matter of professional pride to extend that logic to your personal labor around the camp.
Want help organizing the site so everything’s ready when you fly in? Outsource the work. You can hire all-inclusive concierge agencies to handle all the arrangements, effectively importing a temporary four-star hotel experience.
It’s no accident that the founders of both Uber and AirBnB are huge Burning Man fans. Combine the on-demand service model of the first with the on-demand hospitality of the second, and you’ve got a pretty good sense of how Silicon Valley elite navigate the festival.
Like Himalayan tourists, they rely on paid insiders they call “sherpas” to literally do the heavy lifting while they’re focused on taking in the view and maybe planting a flag.
Naturally the division into bosses and employees is a sore subject for campers who were initially drawn to the festival as a vacation from the wealth-based distinctions. They liked spending one week a year in a utopia where money didn’t matter.
But there aren’t any rules explicitly requiring every camper to do all the work personally. If anything, there’s a long tradition of camp leaders and camp followers — the only difference here is that money flows directly from the leaders to the followers.
That’s a natural dynamic for the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that now look to the festival as the pivot of the high-tech social calendar, as essential as summers in Newport were to the Vanderbilts, Astors and Morgans of a previous century.
They’re used to paying for service. As long as they can find or fly in people who are comfortable getting paid to take orders, there will be “sherpas” at Burning Man.
And these are people who routinely travel with an entourage of nannies, executive assistants, bodyguards, chefs and other staff, paying all the freight along the way. That’s their “tribe.” It’s not a democracy, but festival rules don’t distinguish between families and family offices.
Tickets get bought and fees get paid either way. If anything, since the festival started as a demonstration of creative destruction — spend the year building something vast and expensive, then burning it down — more money at the table theoretically allows for grander spectacles.
The Vanderbilts, Astors and Morgans funded their share of artists and museums in their day. If Burning Man has attracted that level of patronage, its posterity is assured.
After all, it’s really just another non-profit arts foundation, only now the annual gala is clothing optional and there’s a whiff of new age transcendence behind the dust clouds.
Whether that life-changing experience is negated if other people carry you into your camp and set it up with all the amenities of home, it’s up to the new tech rich to decide. Their wealth gives them the choice.
And if they’re just on the playa to burn cash, it’s not a whole lot different from a bender in Vegas or the Hamptons. Only the scenery changes.
A long way from start-up counterculture
I remember friends who were obsessed with the Burn in the late ‘90s. They were in the first dot-com boom, when valuations were comparatively conservative and venture capital placements were relatively small.
Back in 1998, even Bill Gates was only worth $50 billion while the eBay and Priceline founders were down in the $10 billion range. They have their own causes now.
But those are the CEOs. When Burning Man was young and an aggressively underground phenomenon, it was the low-level engineers and would-be start-up creators who spent their vacations there.
Twenty years ago, those mid-range bohemians felt smart negotiating a 6-figure salary plus stock options and a bonus. Maybe they took home $300,000 in a good year, enough to buy a 3-bedroom house in the Bay Area.
Today the Silicon Valley ladder stretches out of sight, taking the cost of both living and play with it. The rich are truly, spectacularly rich. The rest feel left behind.
Those are the people who resent it when their bosses crash “their” party — a party that was admittedly scaled for more modest and even aspirational levels of cash burn.
It always took money to build a mutant vehicle out of a schoolbus or walk onto the desert with a home-built water collection pack on your back, much less buy all those solar-powered flashing lights.
Maybe those people are still waiting to build their unicorn company and join the elite walled off in private zones in next year’s camp, sending staff couriers out to bring back trinkets and gossip.
And maybe they’re just stuck in the middle class now. That seems to be the way to describe the man who died running into the fire on Saturday night.
He didn’t have handlers to cushion him from the dangerous side of what’s still untamed wilderness and the dark urges he brought in with him. In a slightly different scenario, he could have signed on as somebody else’s sherpa.
The only flight out for him was an emergency airlift to a critical care center in Sacramento. It wasn’t luxurious but it was real.
The mega-millionaires will go on. So will the festival. The ways the festival has changed reveals a lot about Silicon Valley, but the fact that the millionaires still make an effort to come to the desert really only tells us about the millionaires and the desert.
The desert is where innovation is the only thing that blooms. Those who take the ideas out again and monetize them can become rich. That’s the start-up dream. You go in with nothing and you come out with the keys to success.
Those who bring wealth back to the desert simply have time and money to burn. That’s their good fortune. But the rules of the festival state that you have to bring out everything you take in with you.
As it happens, the festival organizers are working on a permanent year-round facility nearby. AirBnB executives and real estate developers helped make it happen. When it’s ready, junk and capital will build up. We’ll see which site attracts the most money.
