Last year was tough - it rained for hours 5 nights in a row and the first rain night was accompanied by 70 mile an hour winds that did a massive amount of damage to camp infrastructure throughout the city. The roads in half the city were ruined by emergency traffic that kept on running throughout the storms, and the result was a lumpy nightmare that shook things loose from cars and bikes at a much higher rate than most years. The mud absorbed and hid things and made cleanup a far more grueling process than it usually is. We endured and did our best to still find and remove everything - breaking up mud clumps and raking/sifting through the dirt at the end of the week to find all that embedded trash. There are no public trash cans, no event dumpsters, etc. I can say from having been there almost every year since 07 that this was by far the hardest year for "mooping" - the process of spotting and picking up any item that shouldn't be on the ground - but that the group mindset endured and we somehow still trended downward in terms of overall trash.
I think the main difference between this and 2023 (the previous "mud burn") was that this time we had all the rain in the first half of the event, and then had relatively great weather for the second half. In 23, it closed out with the mud and people fleeing, leading to a spike.
Theme camp based on an area famous for getting hit with hurricanes and other natural disasters here.
During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.
Two of my GP&E shifts got rained out. I had walk from Black Hole to 2&E one night with garbage bags over my shoes. The next time when they had to close the gate and all traffic over night, we had to come back in SxS with mud flying everywhere and in places it should not be. It was an experience, all good, still an experience to remember. The caked roads next morning were a sight :D
Since experiencing a deluge the day after the event ended in 1998, I know that the end of Burning Man will be a massive rainstorm at the wrong time.
Fortunately in 1998 it happened after almost everyone had left. It was Tuesday after the burn, and we were packing up. Clouds coming in from Gerlach were worrying, we could see the downpour happening over there and heading our way rapidly.
We closed the trailer door as the rain started. It came down so fast that by the time we were half way to the road it became almost impossible to drive in the mud, we were jackknifing with the trailer, almost losing control. There was an RV also racing to the exit that I witnessed doing accidental 360 spins in the mud, they totally lost control of the vehicle. I'm not sure they made it out.
I heard that the heavy rain continued for a few day, and the cars that were still there sunk into the mud. If you didn't get out before the rain, you were stuck there for weeks.
Now imagine this happens on Saturday, burn night. People have gone through almost all their food and water by then. Then the rain makes it impossible to leave, for weeks. All the vehicles sink into the mud. You can't even really walk through that mud to make it to the road, because it sticks to everything. "Playa platforms" are what you get when you try to walk through the mud. Now add 70,000 people, running out of food and water, and unable to exit the playa for possibly weeks? That's National Guard rescue territory. I doubt Burning Man would be allowed to continue after that.
Ever since 1998 I watch the weather closely, and you can bet I'll be the first one out of there if it's looking serious.
lol, yeah - we got really good at tearing down the public space and getting everything into the container truck and then pulling it back out and building again. Party for whatever portion of the day we could, and then speed-run the teardown when the first drops of rain started coming down.
I won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
I like this but doesn't Burning Man itself constitute a hugely inefficient use of fossil fuels and unsustainable material use? The name has "burning" right in it. The climax is a bonfire. What about the air pollution? Perhaps it would be better for the planet if Burning Man didn't exist at all.
The event produces a huge amount of trash too. Every year you can see videos on youtube of people taking their moop out of the playa and just dumping it wherever (shopping malls, parking lots, the side of the road) in Nevada and California. The ethos only happens at the event and then all bets are off. I say that as an ex-burner.
I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.
Right. "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
If it were that simple, then every FOSS project would be considered to operate under Anarchists principles. After all, the license and software forkability made it so that no one is forced to conform to whatever social structure is used to maintain a given project. But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
There may be plenty of good reasons for them to argue that, but none of them are "very simple notions" as your definition would imply.
That's one of those definitions that's so broad as to make the word being defined meaningless. It's always silly when one re-phrases their position into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
Exactly. Of course they're capable of it. That doesn't mean they will. They have a lot of incentives to behave badly, and there's no way to eliminate them all.
Even under our decidedly non-anarchic regime, people STILL find reasons to behave poorly. I can't imagine removing the disincentive of state punishment would benefit society very much.
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.
I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."
Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.
Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.
When I recognize this pattern (reducing one's beliefs to a line of common sense) in someone's writing, I usually take that to be evidence that they're not a quality thinker. I've skimmed the rest of the article you linked from Graeber, and I think my first impression holds up. Like, take this snippet:
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Woah, mindblown! If you think about it, aren't you kind of a huge hypocrite and elitist for doubting that others can control themselves? Well, no! We know that plenty of people do, in fact, decide to act criminally and selfishly of their own accord. This line, and many others in Graeber's article, are goofy and I wouldn't take him seriously on this topic.
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
It sounds great until you see what kind of actual people operate under the banner of anarchism. Then it might turn out their definition of reasonable fashion may be quite different from yours.
> almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation.
The Dispossessed has one of my favorite quotes, “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
I love this quote. It reminded me of a quote I heard recently:
"what a privilege to be tired from the work you once begged the universe for"
I'm not sure about the intent of the quote and its provenance. But for me the meaning is: To have wanted meaningful purpose and to get to look back and see that you have achieved that.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh
Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
And "eastern culture" is largely not hierarchical by heart?
Also, I have been to quite some anarchist places, but I did not found one without a hierachy. It is usually just informal. (But at times even formal and everyone pretends it is still not hierachy)
I’ve done this for a couple years now, cool to see it pop up here. I believe the scale is a touch larger; 3935 acres in 2025, plus a small amount outside the fence line.
On the technical side, we not only log but photograph everything, down to each clump of toilet paper. We check our progress by doing hundreds of tests identical to what the BLM does, both ahead and behind our main crew; bagging up any debris to be photographed on green screens where the pixels are counted to ensure we’re under the 2.29×10^-3 percent limit.
It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket. But it’s a hell of a feeling to be part of making sure we remain undefeated against an impossible task that the future of burning man depends on.
So a giant party can clean up after itself, but 4th of July in Tahoe for example is a toxic mess. I wish more people would practice these principles. It’s impressive how well this is cleaned up.
it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.
What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.
So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.
Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.
People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.
Burning Man isn’t really a festival, and you’ll likely have a bad time if you approach it that way.
Many people seem to think it’s some hippy Woodstock or Coachella-esque event, but It’s more like an anarcho-punk temporary city, where your survival is in your own hands.
American media loves to bash it, and Instagram influencers love to flaunt that they went, but it’s most certainly not for everybody.
I don’t recommend going unless you do your research and really want to go.
I’d also encourage any first-timers to go solo their first year.
It's not a music festival like the ones you listed for starters, and while those are like an all-inclusive resort in that you just show up with money, Burning Man is more like camping in that you take everything there (and back).
I was part of the temple build last year and cleanup is extremely serious. We spent two days cleaning after the burn with magnetic rakes looking for minute pieces of metal. We take samples of dirt at different spots and count the number of MOOP fragments to measure progress
Actually an enormous whitepill on Burning Man. Modest amounts of debris, real accountability, and improvement over time despite overall growth. You really can't ask for much more.
From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.
It's not a wasteland. Plenty of insects live in the mud. Plus the pattern of the playa is special on its own. I honestly hate that burning man ruins the ground. Never the same after so many cars and people drive on it.
Yeah, that was where I was coming from. I know very few people that stub out their ciggy and then put the butt in the pocket to dispose of later, but I do know a couple. You'll get responses arguing how the filters are degradable now so it's no big deal when in truth it would be much less of a big deal if people just didn't toss them willy nilly.
70,000 people during a week. It would be interesting to compare this with some other kind of event with the same duration and similar amount of people or perhaps make a
If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.
i've always felt like going to Burning Man, something just attracts me to it. but i'm a eurodude, going to the US just for a festival sounds idiotic and i currently don't want to visit the US anyways.
are there similar events in europe? you sound like an experienced oldhead :)
Look up whatever regional burns[1] exist in your country or neighboring countries, and attend one of those. Ideally, join whatever online community exists around it first, and then reach out to some of the camps that interest you about joining and helping with whatever it is they like to do. I love Burning Man, but I can honestly say that I've had a lot more fun at my local regional burns than I've had at the big burn.
When I was a kid my stepdad was big into amateur rocketry, so we'd go to a lot of launches, including at Black Rock. One of them (could've swore it was LDRS, but given the timeline it would've had to have been XPRS or maybe BALLS) was at the same time that Burning Man's MOOP crew was doing their thing, and that was my exposure to how much work goes into preserving the playa for future users/visitors (including us). It's impressive to watch, even from long distance via binoculars. Of course the rocket launches have similar requirements, but they involve a lot fewer than 70,000 people (but on the other hand, a much larger area of potential litter, given that rockets fly far and sometimes don't come down in one piece).
I live in Reno nowadays, and the locals either love or absolutely despise Burning Man, in the latter case for good reason: while Burning Man as an organization clearly cares a lot about “leave no trace” (as I've gotten to see firsthand), the Burners themselves have a tendency to leave pretty giant traces throughout Reno. A big one is bikes getting left behind (by people who don't want to deal with a bike caked in excruciating-to-fully-clean playa dust), and there's a whole supply chain of companies here that'll find those dumped bikes (or encourage Burners to bring them directly), clean 'em up, fix 'em up, and resell them (often back to Burners the following year; rinse and repeat). A lot of other, less-lucrative-to-refurbish-and-resell stuff unfortunately ends up clogging up every dumpster in town.
Sounds to me like there ought to be a MOOP cleanup deposit charged upfront, that only gets returned after this inspection. If the cleanup crew has to clean your site, you forfeit part or all of your deposit. Repeat offenders get charged increased deposits each time. Repeat inoffenders(?) get their deposit reduced.
There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.
For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.
An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.
Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.
If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.
Your claim is backed by psychology research. The most well known study is the "Israeli Nursery" one where a fine was introduced based on how late you were to pick up your kid.
Parents started treating "x shekel fine for y minutes late" as "buy an extra y minutes for only x shekels!".
This results in affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit, which creates so much trash it requires a lot more staff and time to clean up. Existing system works: you clean up your moop because you're a good community member, shamed on Reddit if you don't, and if you're a problem multiple times, out you go.
> ...affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit
This is why I suggested an increasing deposit for repeat offenders. Leave a huge pile of trash? Next year's deposit is $100k. Do it several years in a row? $10MM deposit.
This is how camps known as "Plug n Plays" work. Charge exorbitant camp dues, provide everything for your campers, and let them lead the most privileged lifestyle out there.
Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.
A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.
White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.
White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.
You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
This is definitely a concern. We've pretty much always been green, but it's hard to police after you leave, and usually we're gone before Temple Burn. (One year two of our camp mates stayed for Temple Burn and they ended up having to pack out two extra bikes that got dumped, in addition to having to deal with multiple people trying to camp in our empty spot. Maybe those people would've been fine, but given that they didn't understand the open camping situation, I'm unsure they understood LNT either.)
If people pay for something, they feel entitled to take advantage of it. I've literally seen people fail to clean up after themselves and explain it as "that's what janitors are paid for".
Requiring a clean-up deposit up front will encourage people who were already inclined to clean up to do so, and encourage people disinclined to do so to leave trash behind.
The communal honor / shame culture that is in place is much more effective- people tend to care more about their reputation than they do money they've already spent.
This penalizes honest mistakes, or moop from prior years resurfacing, or wind blowing trash into camp, or any number of things that are outside of a given camp's control
The moop map, and community holding itself accountable, seems to be a decently functioning system.
Not to mention the administrative overhead, at the org level and at the camp level.
Frankly being a camp of 100+ people, not just taking dues but also handling this Deposit, and distributing the cost fairly?
Running a camp is enough of a pain in the ass without adding on this kind of thing.
Monetary incentive systems like what you're suggesting are just a way of enforcing culture. If culture spreads organically, why bother with the overhead of bringing money into the picture?
There's actually research that making people pay for noncompliance (either upfront or post-factum) leads to less compliance, because people that can afford it treat it as a service. And giving that these events are visited by literally billionaires and a lot of affluent SV tech folks, making it a pay service would bury the volunteers under the mountain of trash. If the rules are "you MUST clean up", you get some trash slipping by. But if the rules are changed to "you clean up, or you pay a small fee and don't worry about it" - the amount of things to clean up would raise exponentially, unless you make the deposit so high the vast majority of people can't afford it - which would kill the event completely.
> In 2025, lag bolts were by far the biggest problem. They anchor tents, art pieces, and other infrastructure into the ground, and can easily disappear beneath the dust.
I thought of a few potential solutions but then clicked through to the journal entry for last year and it turns out they're way ahead, the journal article is very interesting with some ideas: https://journal.burningman.org/2026/03/black-rock-city/leavi...
If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.
The best solution I know of is to get three-link segments of chain and put one on each screw as it goes into the ground. That not only marks the spot, it also gives you a flexible attachment point which is useful in all sorts of situations. (Two links would be pinned in a stationary fashion.)
Biggest problem is it’s a pain in the ass to chop up all that chain, and nobody sells them in pre-cut lengths.
Closest I've been to losing vision in one eye was creating these 3x chain links for Burning Man.
Naive thought: I could use a large bolt cutter to cut chain links. Started trying to cut a link, felt it was sketchy, went and put on some safety glasses.
Restart cutting (had these bolt cutters with like 1m long arms), apply full force, jaws slip a bit on the chain, jaws bite hard. Chunks of steel fly into my chin and face, metal chunks embedded in chin, cracked safety glasses. Dodged a bullet.
Ended using a small welded up jig so I could stretch the chain and then use angle grinder to cut the chain links. Still sketchy, but no flying metal chunks.
the moop map used to be a analog creation with pics of it uploaded every day of the resto(ration) process. some years ago they switched to digital tools and now they don't release it for several months after the event. huh.
The analog version still exists, and gets hand updated every day (though we don’t upload photos). You can visit it the following year at the appropriately named camp, Moop Map.
Mostly no. Dead leaves that were just lying on a trailer without getting cleaned in advance and bits of decorative plants that broke off are probably the worst offenders.
This is one principle and shared ethos done really well
Burning Man would get a lot less criticism if they dropped their 22 year old principles out of its 40 year run
Being part of a camp is the least inclusive social chore I’ve seen of any similar event, it is optional while making the “radically inclusive” trek a lot easier. Its a fairly high bar if you don't know the people
“Radical Self Reliance” can be interpreted in completely opposite ways when convenient. The person mooching off of everyone may call that self reliance to themselves, not realizing they are just attractive, while the person “gifting” resources to be around the attractive person can withhold it under the edict of expecting radical self reliance. Its a desert, are people really more or less prepared because that principle is taking up space on a list of commandments?
Larry Harvey didn’t expect people to make these things their whole identity. He was just having fun pontificating some guidelines in 2004.
The guidelines-now-principles are also outdated. Many “Regional burns” that have been inspired by Burning Man have added additional principles more relevant to the times, such as ones focusing on consent and shared consent frameworks.
They aren't referring to the regulatory requirement, but the response, I think?
Like if people can put in this much time and effort in a remote desert environment to meet regulatory requirements, and document their efforts so thoroughly, why can't corpos?
"Black Rock City is only allowed to return to the playa each year if it passes a strict post-event inspection from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM): No more than one square foot of debris can remain per acre (0.23 m²/ha)."
The authorities are saying they don't want to see any trash at all, regardless of volume. Imagine 100 sheets of paper vs 100 AA batteries. The batteries have much more volume, but the sheets of paper cover a much larger area so there's much more visible trash.
Burning man is the biggest recurring environmental disaster purportated by humans in the name of entertainment. A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given, in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
That seems pretty harsh. Have you been? If you go out after the rain has washed the playa flat again to hide the bike tracks through the soft powder, it looks like there has never been an event. As per the article, they do a fantastic job cleaning, unlike any event I've ever been too. Hardly "zero fks given", in fact quite a few were given and that's why we get to keep doing it.
Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?
> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given
Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)
> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing.
I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.
Now this is some next-level “I didn’t read the article, have no context, and understand little to nothing about the subject matter” type of comment. I’m actually impressed.
in a year where the world cup is taking place, counter-examples are readily available in numbers. I doubt FIFA will be releasing environmental impact datasets...
Last year was tough - it rained for hours 5 nights in a row and the first rain night was accompanied by 70 mile an hour winds that did a massive amount of damage to camp infrastructure throughout the city. The roads in half the city were ruined by emergency traffic that kept on running throughout the storms, and the result was a lumpy nightmare that shook things loose from cars and bikes at a much higher rate than most years. The mud absorbed and hid things and made cleanup a far more grueling process than it usually is. We endured and did our best to still find and remove everything - breaking up mud clumps and raking/sifting through the dirt at the end of the week to find all that embedded trash. There are no public trash cans, no event dumpsters, etc. I can say from having been there almost every year since 07 that this was by far the hardest year for "mooping" - the process of spotting and picking up any item that shouldn't be on the ground - but that the group mindset endured and we somehow still trended downward in terms of overall trash.
I think the main difference between this and 2023 (the previous "mud burn") was that this time we had all the rain in the first half of the event, and then had relatively great weather for the second half. In 23, it closed out with the mud and people fleeing, leading to a spike.
Hmm, group mindset...or moop grindset? Either way great work to leave no trace!
Theme camp based on an area famous for getting hit with hurricanes and other natural disasters here.
During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.
Loads of great moments by doing that.
Two of my GP&E shifts got rained out. I had walk from Black Hole to 2&E one night with garbage bags over my shoes. The next time when they had to close the gate and all traffic over night, we had to come back in SxS with mud flying everywhere and in places it should not be. It was an experience, all good, still an experience to remember. The caked roads next morning were a sight :D
Since experiencing a deluge the day after the event ended in 1998, I know that the end of Burning Man will be a massive rainstorm at the wrong time.
Fortunately in 1998 it happened after almost everyone had left. It was Tuesday after the burn, and we were packing up. Clouds coming in from Gerlach were worrying, we could see the downpour happening over there and heading our way rapidly.
We closed the trailer door as the rain started. It came down so fast that by the time we were half way to the road it became almost impossible to drive in the mud, we were jackknifing with the trailer, almost losing control. There was an RV also racing to the exit that I witnessed doing accidental 360 spins in the mud, they totally lost control of the vehicle. I'm not sure they made it out.
I heard that the heavy rain continued for a few day, and the cars that were still there sunk into the mud. If you didn't get out before the rain, you were stuck there for weeks.
Now imagine this happens on Saturday, burn night. People have gone through almost all their food and water by then. Then the rain makes it impossible to leave, for weeks. All the vehicles sink into the mud. You can't even really walk through that mud to make it to the road, because it sticks to everything. "Playa platforms" are what you get when you try to walk through the mud. Now add 70,000 people, running out of food and water, and unable to exit the playa for possibly weeks? That's National Guard rescue territory. I doubt Burning Man would be allowed to continue after that.
Ever since 1998 I watch the weather closely, and you can bet I'll be the first one out of there if it's looking serious.
Wetsuit boots, for scuba diving, are the cheat code for walking on muddy playa.
Yeah, last year we were calling it Building Man cause the first three days were just rebuilding the setup from the previous day's storm.
We called it "Continuous Improvement Man" because by the 3rd round of building our camp we had the process really dialed in
The Burning Man of Theseus.
Do you use the scrum methodology?
lol, yeah - we got really good at tearing down the public space and getting everything into the container truck and then pulling it back out and building again. Party for whatever portion of the day we could, and then speed-run the teardown when the first drops of rain started coming down.
*Rebuilding Man
I won't pretend I grok the underlying spirit of Burning Man. But I find it deeply fascinating to see the interaction between desires for counterculture, anarchy, free spirit, etc. and the benefit and ultimate necessity of organization, planning, rules... governance, essentially. And where there's those things, there's always maps and data.
It’s fun to read everyone's preconceptions about Burning Man. Its ten principles are published [1] and include stuff like “radical inclusion” and “civic responsibility” and “gifting” (the latter of which is taken very literally, there is almost no currency use on the playa and everything is gifted except ice and coffee at center camp).
Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists, but it’s hardly representative, especially when you include the family zone and all the specialized camps.
[1] https://burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/
A friend introduced my to CouchSurfing in ~2009.
The idea that a stranger would effectively be a free Airbnb host (back when Airbnb actually had hosts) was baffling. Turns out:
1. Travel is expensive in time and money. Hosting someone gives you a travel-adjacent experience without having to leave home.
2. People who are willing to host strangers tend to be cool/open/interesting/friendly people. Opting-in to CouchSurfing is a good filter for someone you might enjoy spending time with.
Burning Man is similar.
One of the mainstays of Burning Man is the Hug Deli. It's like a lemonade stand, but instead of sugary beverages, they serve affection. You can order hugs ranging from warm + fuzzy to long + uncomfortable, each for 2 compliments to your server. Want an extra pep in your step? Add a kiss or a spanking for an additional compliment.
The staff at the Hug Deli are all volunteers. You just roll up, toss on an apron, and start serving. (The guy who started it isn't particularly affectionate. He's a performer from LA who wanted a way to get strangers to try on characters.)
You would never stand in Golden Gate Park offering kisses to anyone who asked. Burning Man is a container that allows experiences like that to flourish, because opting-in to Burning Man is a good filter for the kind of people you might be willing to try stuff with.
One of my sluttier female friends made a habit of seducing her male CouchSurfing hosts.
As she tells it, a lot of people had a great time!
That sounds like illegal prostitution and sexual harassment.
That might be the worst take I've ever read on Hacker News.
It's just free hugs, but more theatrical.
Don't get me wrong, but on one side you have the gift culture, and on the other side the exception that one of the only things sold the the community in one of the hottest, most arid deserts in the world is ... ice ...
Got a chuckle out of me there.
There’s no in and out privileges to get ice elsewhere, so the organization coordinates huge ice shipments into the event. All the proceeds from the ice and coffee sales benefit the local schools and students, which is great because that area is doing pretty rough economically
They also sell fuel.
Not to any old so and so, only to mutant vehicle and art camps
I actually got to buy fuel there once. They were absolutely surly about it, too.
Why didn't you plan ahead and bring enough gas??!?
Well what happened was, we stopped at the gas station in Wadsworth where we usually fuel up the RV before heading to the burn. I put the gas nozzle into the RV and flipped the nozzle auto-shut-off thing up while I went inside to buy some last minute stuff. I came out, the auto-shut-off thing had popped and I thought the tank was full. But no, it wasn't. The scene there was a bit chaotic, I was distracted. So we only got about 4 or 5 gallons into the tank, and that's only enough to get the RV about 40 miles, so we roll into BRC with an almost empty tank. I did not notice this until we were actually inside the gate and the fuel tank was really low. Give me a break, I was driving for 14 hours, I just didn't notice the fuel level.
So we had some fuel for the art car, which I was hoarding, but when I heard they were selling gas for the first time ever at BM, I dumped all the art car gas into the RV and then got on the art car and headed over to the gas station with every available gas can we had.
It's mostly yuppie culture as far as I can tell with it's hangerons and other cleanup artists, whatever. There's no such purity, but it's definitely not a flat organization.
As it has become so large, naturally you're going to get the hangerons. You also get all of the people that think it is trendy and go for the likes. All of the rich people that go out with custom RVs and all of that type of experience are just going to exponentially increase the hangerons as they have way more followers that want to follow the trends.
Again though, any time you get such large numbers the "core" group will tend to get dwarfed. That's about time when people start noticing it more and think the hangerons are the event so the original culture is sort of lost to the zeitgeist.
FYI - Coffee at center camp was canceled as of 2022
> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists
And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt... you get the idea.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-...
Are you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
Either of the mentioned was at one point of their career someone who would have been considered at least belonging to "counterculture".
Unfortunately, money and power corrupts, and lo and behold, one day you wake up to find you have become the very thing you once swore to destroy.
All of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
None of those people are your average citizen.
The idea that rich people are all right wing conformist republicans does not survive getting to know a few of them.
"Civic responsibility" is a ballsy claim from a bunch of first worlders exploiting child sweatshop labor, wasting resources on aura farming.
Burning Man is to the stated principles what Kraft singles is to cheese.
Just more empty American platitudes, advertising, marketing; watch! as rich capitalists role play rural community their capitalism tore apart!
The Party in 1984 is not just metaphor for a government but any group that puts its rhetoric before reality. Just some first world LARPers telling a story about themselves while the output is there for all to see.
Trashing the planet is mainstream. Taking care of it is counterculture.
I like this but doesn't Burning Man itself constitute a hugely inefficient use of fossil fuels and unsustainable material use? The name has "burning" right in it. The climax is a bonfire. What about the air pollution? Perhaps it would be better for the planet if Burning Man didn't exist at all.
The event produces a huge amount of trash too. Every year you can see videos on youtube of people taking their moop out of the playa and just dumping it wherever (shopping malls, parking lots, the side of the road) in Nevada and California. The ethos only happens at the event and then all bets are off. I say that as an ex-burner.
I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
The natural tension between chaos and order is one of the things that makes Burning Man so interesting.
It's actually pretty compatible with "capital a" Anarchy.
Right. "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
From: "Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!", David Graeber, 2009, https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-a...
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion."
If it were that simple, then every FOSS project would be considered to operate under Anarchists principles. After all, the license and software forkability made it so that no one is forced to conform to whatever social structure is used to maintain a given project. But in real life, Anarchists will still argue that a Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life governance approach is wrong, even if it applies to digital artifacts that have zero marginal cost.
There may be plenty of good reasons for them to argue that, but none of them are "very simple notions" as your definition would imply.
That's one of those definitions that's so broad as to make the word being defined meaningless. It's always silly when one re-phrases their position into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
I agree 100%, but it makes a mildly interesting jumping off point.
My first question is: but what if they don't?
Exactly. Of course they're capable of it. That doesn't mean they will. They have a lot of incentives to behave badly, and there's no way to eliminate them all.
Even under our decidedly non-anarchic regime, people STILL find reasons to behave poorly. I can't imagine removing the disincentive of state punishment would benefit society very much.
> Even under our decidedly raging conflagration, people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
The argument—to which I'm quite sympathetic—is that these non-anarchic institutions perpetuate the environment which incentizes "bad behavior."
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
That would require a government to enforce such heavy lifestyle restrictions on people.
As the person who posted the quote, gonna be direct: no idea.
I have to say, I don't identify myself as a anarchist (maybe a bit of a sympathizer), yet I'm middle aged and finding myself a little dissatisfied by many things I see around me, so if I see people making the equation anarchist = degenerate, my immediate reaction is "yeah let's slow it down shall we."
Isn’t that all political movements when described in general terms?
The same is true of all political movements when described dishonestly and over-simplistically, yes.
Fair. But I think that statement isn't meant as a strict and precise definition (eg. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or whatever), more like a "gateway" description directed at those who associate anarchism only with utter chaos and "burn the house down" kinda attitudes.
Now, I'm aware that when you need to say something is "gateway" that's a bit of a red flag, i.e. "milk before meat" (describing something as friendly and innocent at first, then only later showing the more aggressive indoctrination) is exactly what cults do. Having said that, I'd grant that the late David Graeber is quite the straight shooter so I think he's in the clear here.
When I recognize this pattern (reducing one's beliefs to a line of common sense) in someone's writing, I usually take that to be evidence that they're not a quality thinker. I've skimmed the rest of the article you linked from Graeber, and I think my first impression holds up. Like, take this snippet:
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Woah, mindblown! If you think about it, aren't you kind of a huge hypocrite and elitist for doubting that others can control themselves? Well, no! We know that plenty of people do, in fact, decide to act criminally and selfishly of their own accord. This line, and many others in Graeber's article, are goofy and I wouldn't take him seriously on this topic.
> into something trivial that no one would disagree with.
Start a topic on democracy here and at least a handful will argue against regular people governing society and their own lives.
That’s more than no-one.
A core thing you should expect from anarchists is disagreement.
Some anarchists agree with Graeber's definition. A majority probably disagrees, in many different ways.
I expect this post will be met with disagreement. Wouldn't want it any other way!
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
That’s a narrow definition of a leader. Seems to me that a leader can be someone who others _choose_ to follow.
That’s “other means”
Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly. When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
> The Tyranny of Structurelessness
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
Whats the difference, from an anarchist perspective, of a leader making a rule or a group voting on a rule?
Consent
It sounds great until you see what kind of actual people operate under the banner of anarchism. Then it might turn out their definition of reasonable fashion may be quite different from yours.
Here's another excellent piece. Ignore the site please.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/03/butler-shaffer/lx-what-i...
> almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation.
People that don't mind SF might want to look at these for some examples of anarchy in fictional action:
The Day Before The Revolution, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Before_the_Revolution
The Dispossessed, U.K. LeGuin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
The Dispossessed has one of my favorite quotes, “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”
I love this quote. It reminded me of a quote I heard recently:
"what a privilege to be tired from the work you once begged the universe for"
I'm not sure about the intent of the quote and its provenance. But for me the meaning is: To have wanted meaningful purpose and to get to look back and see that you have achieved that.
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
It’s obviously possible to run without the internet. They did it for many years.
Honestly, that contrast is what draws me in. In the same way ultralight hiking forces you to think about and let go of extraneous weight, going to Burning Man and doing the whole camp thing and seeing the city work showcases the "dead weight" of "making things happen".
Yeah, well it's all fake really. Still filled with people that are terrible, from the organizers to the goers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0_u1ZvHOu4
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh
Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere
People think of anarchism as against organizations and rules, but its just against hierarchy. Western people in particular are so used to hierarchical thinking that its difficult to even imagine an organization that isn't hierarchical in nature.
And "eastern culture" is largely not hierarchical by heart?
Also, I have been to quite some anarchist places, but I did not found one without a hierachy. It is usually just informal. (But at times even formal and everyone pretends it is still not hierachy)
Hierarchy is “Western” now?
Western culture is hierarchical, hierarchy isn't inherently Western. Lots of cultures do it.
I’ve done this for a couple years now, cool to see it pop up here. I believe the scale is a touch larger; 3935 acres in 2025, plus a small amount outside the fence line.
On the technical side, we not only log but photograph everything, down to each clump of toilet paper. We check our progress by doing hundreds of tests identical to what the BLM does, both ahead and behind our main crew; bagging up any debris to be photographed on green screens where the pixels are counted to ensure we’re under the 2.29×10^-3 percent limit.
It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket. But it’s a hell of a feeling to be part of making sure we remain undefeated against an impossible task that the future of burning man depends on.
So a giant party can clean up after itself, but 4th of July in Tahoe for example is a toxic mess. I wish more people would practice these principles. It’s impressive how well this is cleaned up.
it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.
Participants also have to feel like they are part of the event rather than passive spectators.
There are volunteer opportunities to help clean-up after the 4th of July festivities in Tahoe.
My respect for Burning Man just went up a lot.
These big events usually leave a giant mess behind. Glad to see they take the cleanup and restoration so seriously.
To paraphrase Captain Malcom Reynolds: "My days of not taking Burning Man seriously are definitely coming to a middle."
What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.
So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.
fix oida
Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.
People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.
Burning Man isn’t really a festival, and you’ll likely have a bad time if you approach it that way.
Many people seem to think it’s some hippy Woodstock or Coachella-esque event, but It’s more like an anarcho-punk temporary city, where your survival is in your own hands.
American media loves to bash it, and Instagram influencers love to flaunt that they went, but it’s most certainly not for everybody.
I don’t recommend going unless you do your research and really want to go.
I’d also encourage any first-timers to go solo their first year.
It's not a music festival like the ones you listed for starters, and while those are like an all-inclusive resort in that you just show up with money, Burning Man is more like camping in that you take everything there (and back).
I was part of the temple build last year and cleanup is extremely serious. We spent two days cleaning after the burn with magnetic rakes looking for minute pieces of metal. We take samples of dirt at different spots and count the number of MOOP fragments to measure progress
Actually an enormous whitepill on Burning Man. Modest amounts of debris, real accountability, and improvement over time despite overall growth. You really can't ask for much more.
From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.
There’s a lot of fairy shrimp that live there and wait for the right conditions to come out. I think there’s a camp dedicated to them.
It's not a wasteland. Plenty of insects live in the mud. Plus the pattern of the playa is special on its own. I honestly hate that burning man ruins the ground. Never the same after so many cars and people drive on it.
the full map image for 2025: https://webassets.burningman.org/largeimages/MOOP_Map_2025_0...
Only 146 cigarette butts? That's amazingly much lower than I would have expected.
That's not just amazing, it's inconceivable! I can go on a hike on almost any trail in the SF Bay Area and pick up a half dozen in a couple hours.
Yeah, that was where I was coming from. I know very few people that stub out their ciggy and then put the butt in the pocket to dispose of later, but I do know a couple. You'll get responses arguing how the filters are degradable now so it's no big deal when in truth it would be much less of a big deal if people just didn't toss them willy nilly.
I think that’s how many were actually found over the limited testing areas. You would need to multiply by the testing area ratio
r/burningman moop map shame thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/1rtzumg/moop_ma...
> its release inevitably fuels a bit of public finger-pointing
Is this what's helping with that?
> the most striking trend is that the community has steadily improved at Leave No Trace
Probably not only? But shame and avoidance of shame can be good motivation
70,000 people during a week. It would be interesting to compare this with some other kind of event with the same duration and similar amount of people or perhaps make a
grams of garbage per humanhour unit
If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.
i've always felt like going to Burning Man, something just attracts me to it. but i'm a eurodude, going to the US just for a festival sounds idiotic and i currently don't want to visit the US anyways.
are there similar events in europe? you sound like an experienced oldhead :)
Look up whatever regional burns[1] exist in your country or neighboring countries, and attend one of those. Ideally, join whatever online community exists around it first, and then reach out to some of the camps that interest you about joining and helping with whatever it is they like to do. I love Burning Man, but I can honestly say that I've had a lot more fun at my local regional burns than I've had at the big burn.
[1] https://burnerguides.com/europe-burner-events
oh wow, there's one in my country in a region which i've never visited but always wanted to go to, maybe that's a sign :D thanks!
https://burningman.org/global-events-groups/
My respect for Burning Man just went up a lot.
great approach
Thank you for not "mooping" around.
When I was a kid my stepdad was big into amateur rocketry, so we'd go to a lot of launches, including at Black Rock. One of them (could've swore it was LDRS, but given the timeline it would've had to have been XPRS or maybe BALLS) was at the same time that Burning Man's MOOP crew was doing their thing, and that was my exposure to how much work goes into preserving the playa for future users/visitors (including us). It's impressive to watch, even from long distance via binoculars. Of course the rocket launches have similar requirements, but they involve a lot fewer than 70,000 people (but on the other hand, a much larger area of potential litter, given that rockets fly far and sometimes don't come down in one piece).
I live in Reno nowadays, and the locals either love or absolutely despise Burning Man, in the latter case for good reason: while Burning Man as an organization clearly cares a lot about “leave no trace” (as I've gotten to see firsthand), the Burners themselves have a tendency to leave pretty giant traces throughout Reno. A big one is bikes getting left behind (by people who don't want to deal with a bike caked in excruciating-to-fully-clean playa dust), and there's a whole supply chain of companies here that'll find those dumped bikes (or encourage Burners to bring them directly), clean 'em up, fix 'em up, and resell them (often back to Burners the following year; rinse and repeat). A lot of other, less-lucrative-to-refurbish-and-resell stuff unfortunately ends up clogging up every dumpster in town.
Sounds to me like there ought to be a MOOP cleanup deposit charged upfront, that only gets returned after this inspection. If the cleanup crew has to clean your site, you forfeit part or all of your deposit. Repeat offenders get charged increased deposits each time. Repeat inoffenders(?) get their deposit reduced.
This would lead to less compliance.
There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.
For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.
An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.
Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.
If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.
Your claim is backed by psychology research. The most well known study is the "Israeli Nursery" one where a fine was introduced based on how late you were to pick up your kid.
Parents started treating "x shekel fine for y minutes late" as "buy an extra y minutes for only x shekels!".
I wonder how well that replicates between different cultures with different attitudes about money.
This results in affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit, which creates so much trash it requires a lot more staff and time to clean up. Existing system works: you clean up your moop because you're a good community member, shamed on Reddit if you don't, and if you're a problem multiple times, out you go.
> ...affluent people leaving all of their moop because they don't care about the deposit
This is why I suggested an increasing deposit for repeat offenders. Leave a huge pile of trash? Next year's deposit is $100k. Do it several years in a row? $10MM deposit.
This is how camps known as "Plug n Plays" work. Charge exorbitant camp dues, provide everything for your campers, and let them lead the most privileged lifestyle out there.
Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.
A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.
White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.
White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.
You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.
Seems likely this would result in a lot of disputes over windblown debris and neighbors dumping their stuff on your spot after you leave.
This is definitely a concern. We've pretty much always been green, but it's hard to police after you leave, and usually we're gone before Temple Burn. (One year two of our camp mates stayed for Temple Burn and they ended up having to pack out two extra bikes that got dumped, in addition to having to deal with multiple people trying to camp in our empty spot. Maybe those people would've been fine, but given that they didn't understand the open camping situation, I'm unsure they understood LNT either.)
If people pay for something, they feel entitled to take advantage of it. I've literally seen people fail to clean up after themselves and explain it as "that's what janitors are paid for".
Requiring a clean-up deposit up front will encourage people who were already inclined to clean up to do so, and encourage people disinclined to do so to leave trash behind.
The communal honor / shame culture that is in place is much more effective- people tend to care more about their reputation than they do money they've already spent.
This penalizes honest mistakes, or moop from prior years resurfacing, or wind blowing trash into camp, or any number of things that are outside of a given camp's control
The moop map, and community holding itself accountable, seems to be a decently functioning system.
Not to mention the administrative overhead, at the org level and at the camp level.
Frankly being a camp of 100+ people, not just taking dues but also handling this Deposit, and distributing the cost fairly?
Running a camp is enough of a pain in the ass without adding on this kind of thing.
Monetary incentive systems like what you're suggesting are just a way of enforcing culture. If culture spreads organically, why bother with the overhead of bringing money into the picture?
There's actually research that making people pay for noncompliance (either upfront or post-factum) leads to less compliance, because people that can afford it treat it as a service. And giving that these events are visited by literally billionaires and a lot of affluent SV tech folks, making it a pay service would bury the volunteers under the mountain of trash. If the rules are "you MUST clean up", you get some trash slipping by. But if the rules are changed to "you clean up, or you pay a small fee and don't worry about it" - the amount of things to clean up would raise exponentially, unless you make the deposit so high the vast majority of people can't afford it - which would kill the event completely.
> In 2025, lag bolts were by far the biggest problem. They anchor tents, art pieces, and other infrastructure into the ground, and can easily disappear beneath the dust.
I thought of a few potential solutions but then clicked through to the journal entry for last year and it turns out they're way ahead, the journal article is very interesting with some ideas: https://journal.burningman.org/2026/03/black-rock-city/leavi...
My camp, while doing our moop sweep in 2023, found lag bolts from prior years!
2023 was a weird one, because of the heavy rain and so many people not being used to it.
But it also seriously churned the Playa, revealing what was hidden for a whiiile
Marking whiskers, as mentioned, seem like a good solution if you can keep them attached. They are designed to be easily visible on the ground.
As long as they really stay attached and don't come apart, otherwise you're now creating plastic debris.
If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.
The best solution I know of is to get three-link segments of chain and put one on each screw as it goes into the ground. That not only marks the spot, it also gives you a flexible attachment point which is useful in all sorts of situations. (Two links would be pinned in a stationary fashion.)
Biggest problem is it’s a pain in the ass to chop up all that chain, and nobody sells them in pre-cut lengths.
Closest I've been to losing vision in one eye was creating these 3x chain links for Burning Man.
Naive thought: I could use a large bolt cutter to cut chain links. Started trying to cut a link, felt it was sketchy, went and put on some safety glasses.
Restart cutting (had these bolt cutters with like 1m long arms), apply full force, jaws slip a bit on the chain, jaws bite hard. Chunks of steel fly into my chin and face, metal chunks embedded in chin, cracked safety glasses. Dodged a bullet.
Ended using a small welded up jig so I could stretch the chain and then use angle grinder to cut the chain links. Still sketchy, but no flying metal chunks.
Wish I had a plasma cutter.
Or just count them before and after. Know how many you're supposed to bring home.
The problem isn't that there aren't solutions, the problem is getting everyone on board
the moop map used to be a analog creation with pics of it uploaded every day of the resto(ration) process. some years ago they switched to digital tools and now they don't release it for several months after the event. huh.
The analog version still exists, and gets hand updated every day (though we don’t upload photos). You can visit it the following year at the appropriately named camp, Moop Map.
I want to know more about this analog upload! :-)
what sort of tool they use?
Hmm, great work
I wish I had gone before the billionaires discovered it
Is "plant matter" weed?
Mostly no. Dead leaves that were just lying on a trailer without getting cleaned in advance and bits of decorative plants that broke off are probably the worst offenders.
Worth noting: Plants, living or dead, are banned from Burning Man because they turn into moop really easily, but some always end up there anyway
You think they’re leaving any of that behind?
If it was that'd be an absurd amount of weed being left behind to make a mark on the map.
Burning Man is just polyamarous glamping for the Coachella set...
This is one principle and shared ethos done really well
Burning Man would get a lot less criticism if they dropped their 22 year old principles out of its 40 year run
Being part of a camp is the least inclusive social chore I’ve seen of any similar event, it is optional while making the “radically inclusive” trek a lot easier. Its a fairly high bar if you don't know the people
“Radical Self Reliance” can be interpreted in completely opposite ways when convenient. The person mooching off of everyone may call that self reliance to themselves, not realizing they are just attractive, while the person “gifting” resources to be around the attractive person can withhold it under the edict of expecting radical self reliance. Its a desert, are people really more or less prepared because that principle is taking up space on a list of commandments?
Larry Harvey didn’t expect people to make these things their whole identity. He was just having fun pontificating some guidelines in 2004.
The guidelines-now-principles are also outdated. Many “Regional burns” that have been inspired by Burning Man have added additional principles more relevant to the times, such as ones focusing on consent and shared consent frameworks.
Time for a new arc
Imagine if environmental regulation, pollution, etc looked like this.
This is an environmental regulatory requirement by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.
They aren't referring to the regulatory requirement, but the response, I think?
Like if people can put in this much time and effort in a remote desert environment to meet regulatory requirements, and document their efforts so thoroughly, why can't corpos?
for the curios or those that skipped over it:
"Black Rock City is only allowed to return to the playa each year if it passes a strict post-event inspection from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM): No more than one square foot of debris can remain per acre (0.23 m²/ha)."
K, but what’s a square foot in metric? And percent would be better here. Or per Mille to be annoying.
Read it again, it says right there in square metres.
Isn’t it strange to mesure this in surface rather than volume?
The authorities are saying they don't want to see any trash at all, regardless of volume. Imagine 100 sheets of paper vs 100 AA batteries. The batteries have much more volume, but the sheets of paper cover a much larger area so there's much more visible trash.
Not much difference between a 12" and a 18" lag bolt for the purpose of "how much trash is visible and impacts terrain".
Surface feels a bit fairer in that sense. Or at least, easier to measure.
I fairly obviously meant outside of this specific instance, if pollution etc were policed and responded to in such a manner.
This is driven in part by regulatory pressure.
Burning man is the biggest recurring environmental disaster purportated by humans in the name of entertainment. A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given, in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
That seems pretty harsh. Have you been? If you go out after the rain has washed the playa flat again to hide the bike tracks through the soft powder, it looks like there has never been an event. As per the article, they do a fantastic job cleaning, unlike any event I've ever been too. Hardly "zero fks given", in fact quite a few were given and that's why we get to keep doing it.
> in the name of entertainment.
Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?
> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given
Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)
> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.
Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing. I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.
Now this is some next-level “I didn’t read the article, have no context, and understand little to nothing about the subject matter” type of comment. I’m actually impressed.
this is so far from the truth its baffling.
in a year where the world cup is taking place, counter-examples are readily available in numbers. I doubt FIFA will be releasing environmental impact datasets...
Read the posted article before commenting.
It's literally written to refute your point.