Sending this out a day early as I have to go to the club during Fashion Week tonight to write a small story for [redacted.] More on that another time, but yeah I’m writing this on Tuesday and am preemptively tired. Also, the wonderful fellas over at Why Is This Interesting? adapted my piece on in-flight behavior this morning, give it a read.
So Burning Man, huh? Well at least God seems to have a sense of humor. A week before a dry lake bed in Nevada was turned into an impassable alkaline mud pit riven with alien looking shrimp creatures and Grover Norquist, climate protestors sat in the road to block access to Black Rock City before being rammed out of the way by Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe police, one of whom pointed a gun at the protestors. That’s a lot to process so here’s a meme (h/t to friend of the letter Ben on this one):
As a cultural happening, Burning Man is partially unique and partially a microcosm of what happens when rich people find out that the counterculture is pretty fun. I remember someone waxing poetic about the festival when I was in college, and I think I was mostly annoyed by the earnest kumbayahness of it all. Now that it’s been totally co-opted by Silicon Valley types who take acid in the hope it’ll make them better programmers, things like attendees begging for private aviation companies to come pick them up are grimly funny.
There’s more than a nibble of irony that we’re absorbing Silicon Valley on the edge of cannibalism through social media platforms, especially as the rightward lilt of California Liberalism continues. Consider Neal Katyal. It felt appropriate that he became something of the schadenfreude mascot during this whole thing: Katyal was an Obama Justice Department appointee before heading for the revolving door and becoming a partner at the massive corporate law firm Hogan Lovells where he argued such positions as “child slavery is ok actually” and “just because our talcum powder gave your kid cancer doesn’t mean you can sue us.” Naturally, he was also a prominent anti-Trump guy—until he wrote glowing endorsements of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. (Katyal had business before SCOTUS, naturally.) And listen the guy just kinda looks like an ass hole!
Twitter and TikTok are allergic to context, of course, and if we pull back from the dunks for a second, it seems like the communal spirit of some of the longtime Burners came out as people offered up food, water, and fellowship to the rest of the stranded masses.
But still, it’s a pretty wild development that Burning Man has gone from something derided for being incorrigibly earnest and smarmy to people actively wishing for those gathered in the Black Rock Desert to start eating each other. Some of that is because extreme takes generate engagement, but the reconfigured politics of the Silicon Valley types drawn to the festival in the first place are also to blame. The rank-and-file tech types are still largely centrist California Liberals—think the “hire 👏🏼 more 👏🏼 women 👏🏼 guards” meme—but industry titans have largely become Rand-adjacent weirdos who want radical self-reliance until their banks break or they get stuck in a desert outside of Reno.
Finding indulgence in the counter culture while simultaneously breaking the systems that created it is an interesting dissonance, though not a surprising one. These types don’t think about where pleasure comes from, but rather that it is exists as something for their to consume and exploit.
Speaking of which, Electric Zoo (sorta) happened and (totally) failed this weekend in New York. It didn’t dominate our eyeballs like what was going on at Burning Man, but there was a very specific current of schadenfreude running through the folks I was with at The Lot on Friday night when news started leaking out. I’m unsure what to make of EZoo, but I think much of it is related to what I wrote about the emerging cultural gaps on dance floors a couple weeks ago. There aren’t the same sort of generational blindspots at work here as there are in clubs,; things like rushing gates and overwhelming the security folks making $15/hr is more related to a sense of entitlement than an old raver making sure you hydrate.
I think we find both of these events falling apart so funny because we’re seeing people so deeply unfamiliar with pleasure in their daily lives have their annual opportunity for joy taken away from them. Fun seems wholly defined by external forces. I was told this should feel good, so it feels good. There’s a particular irony for the tech community, which for decades has turned countervailing thinking into piles of gold. The one thing they’re still struggling to disrupt is how to actually have a good time.
Some music
Ironically I heard this track because Diplo played it from a hot air balloon at Burning Man and I saw it on TikTok lmao
Some clothes
This olive green moleskin chore coat from one of the early Drake’s x Aimé collabs in 2020. Now if only this motherfucker on Grailed would message me back…