With the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert drawing near, an unusual thing is true of it this year: You can still buy tickets. Typically they would have been sold out long before now, but organizers are in the midst of an "unprecedented" last-minute push to unload them before the Aug. 25 start, reports SF Gate. It's possible that last year's muddy mess has put a crimp in 2024 sales, but a story at Bloomberg wonders if something bigger is going on. Simply put, "Has Burning Man peaked?" wonders the piece by Ellen Huet. Other outlets are exploring the question as well.
- "Maybe what Burning Man once offered—a way to live differently for a week—is gradually becoming, well, kind of normal," writes Huet.
- "They have lost day-to-day touch with the core community that has made Burning Man what it is," Itai Isenberg, leader of a Burning Man music camp called the Treble Makers, tells the San Francisco Chronicle.
And what is that "core community?" The festival has long been inextricably linked to Silicon Valley, as evidenced by its many tech-centric theme camps. A decade ago, Silicon Valley elites "were drawn to the way the Burn offered a stark departure from the 'default world,'" writes Huet. "Instead of using money," for example, "Burning Man relies on gifting." That mojo appears to have waned, for reasons that remain unclear, and not all Burn veterans are unhappy about that. Micah Weinberg, a San Francisco policy analyst, tells the Chronicle he attended in 2000, when the festival drew a relatively modest 20,000 people. That "felt about right," he says. "I don't know that it needs to be a 70,000 person event." (More Burning Man stories.)
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