“We are pleased to have fulfilled demand for our earlier sales and be in a position to offer greater access to more people as the event nears,” Marian Goodell, CEO of Burning Man, said in a press release.
CEO of Burning Man
Lmfao.
Washed up psycho Marian Goodell has a problem... the Burning Man festival is no longer "hot"
Allegedly, you don't need to buy a ticket if you skydive in. I wonder if that also covers paragliders
I can imagine some logistics issues with this one. I don't think you can skydive with multiple days of food and water on you. Upside is you can bring all the drugs you want if you parachute past security, so you might not need food if you're eating paper and shards for three days straight.
This will be a sneaking mission. You must not be seen by the enemy. You must leave no trace of your presence. Is that clear? This kind of infiltration is the FOX unit's specialty. In other words, weapons and equipment are procure on-site... that goes for food as well. You'recompletely naked, just as your name implies.
I mean the thing is huge and presumably securing rights to the playa, paying for all the people to staff the thing, lay out the roads, do communications and stuff is expensive. But should only be a couple bucks or so.
I understand it has been ruined by techbros from SF that roll in with exclusive VIP trailers, Elon musk types basically. Maybe even musk himself actually. And with those guys came an increased willingness to pay and presumably elevated prices, and more exclusivity. So the same fate that happens to anything quirky and artistic. Capitalist shitheads ruin it for everyone.
I've never been but I wish I had gone when I was younger. Apparently 20 years ago it was pretty cool.
Among other things there's a post office, air field, presumably grants for artists, they probably have to pay the cops the be there (lol), and a bunch of other shit.
Idk if it was ever actually cool. I think there have always been, and still are, cool communities and groups within BM, but to my eye the big picture event has always been cringe.
they probably have to pay the cops the be there
Why would they want cops there? Are they stupid?
why is it so expensive?
I was going to say paying off the local piggies and for use of the land, but I did some research and it seems no, at least pre covid that was only like 300k of a 45+ million USD budget. Until 2018 there are IRS forms online showing expenditures. Seems like they have a lot of staff judging by the payroll figures, probably way too many of them are year round employees. during 2020 they were reportedly already begging for donations saying they were running out of money from "running a global nonprofit without our primary source of revenue" (source https://redlib.northboot.xyz/r/BurningMan/comments/iv0uza/your_daily_reminder_that_burning_man_is/ )
It's much, much more than that. Just the permit from the BLM is north of $1 million. We're also required to directly pay the salaries of all the cops that are there, as well as provide food, housing, laundry, cooks, fuel, and other amenities to them. The vast, vast majority of the ticket revenue goes to permitting and law enforcement.
You're a comrade so I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say it's believable that it's gone way up, but do you have any more updated numbers?
because the most recent info/reporting I could find was from 2018 or 19 and seemed to indicate the cost of that particular permit and the cops combined was under a million, in a year when the revenue was at least 35 million, and the graph here, while including a lot more in the permitting and fees section, still doesn't seem to bear that out either https://burningman.org/expenses/expenses-2018/
Here's the 2022 Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/452638273/202313179349309051/full. Just permitting and fees are at about $4.5 million. Most of the stuff that falls under "wages" is also not to BMP employees, but rather to law enforcement, emergency services (we also run a full service hospital that does not change for any services), airport, and sanitation (loooots of porto-potty servicing). The costs on all those things has gone up since 2022 also; there's been an ongoing lawsuit between the org and the Federal government for charging us so much with basically no explanation.
This will be my 20th year going, and I'm in a leadership position on the volunteer side of things. I definitely have a lot of criticism of the organization (and the event), but financial mismanagement isn't really one of them. They pay the executive staff on the low side of comparably sized 501c3 orgs, especially given the office location in SF. I think Marian is pretty out of touch with the ordinary burner, but she's not really getting rich off of it.
Burning Man is definitely a problematic fave of mine, but I do think it still has a lot of great things about it. Happy to answer questions as best I can without going into enough detail to ID me specifically.
BRUNO'S COUNTRY CLUB LLC
lmao
is this where they put the piggies up?
I've never been, mostly because it seemed to have been long since ruined by tech bros by the time I was old enough. so I've no skin in the game but even if not "mismanaged" by the standards of large nonprofits, there's a lot of worthy criticisms of most nonprofits about scoping and growth mindsets and such. I like wikipedia as a project for example but their foundation's scope has grown so far beyond what it needs to be to effectively run and even grow, wikipedia and related projects. So when the time comes every year for them to beg as though the lights are gonna shut off if I don't kick ol' jimmy $5 it rings pretty hollow. Burning man hopefully isn't that extreme in terms of the ratio between costs to build and run and maintain the core services and the overall revenue, but it might have something similar in kind if not scale? While I understand to some extent the urge to be successful and let more people "experience the magic" or whatever, a corporate-style growth mindset is a bad fit for a community driven event. (edit: Idk, maybe thats the only way to organize it at any large scale in the US under capitalism, but I still think it sucks)
still not sure from briefly perusing that filing if this is accurate:
The vast, vast majority of the ticket revenue goes to permitting and law enforcement.
But I'm definitely out of my depth and don't care that much.
BRUNO'S COUNTRY CLUB LLC
lmao
is this where they put the piggies up?
When they're in town, yeah (it's the motel in Gerlach). We also have to build, staff, and maintain a full compound on playa for them to use, complete with a 24 hour/day on-call chef. It's so fucking insane.
100% agree on the general criticism of non-profits. Burning Man isn't uniquely bad, but it's still a dog shit model for doing things.
Yes, lots of people are shitty and dump trash. It's also true that a lot of us give our time for free to pick that trash up all the way until October--both on playa and by the side of the road--though.
I knew both Bruno and Pat. RIP to both those legends indeed.
On their website they have something like 120 year round staff. These people are probably making good bank for the most part. $200k average? That's $24M there.
They build a temporary city to accomodate 70,000 people in one of the harshest, most inhospitible places on earth.
Also thunderdome fighting is so much fun. Idk about burning man but wasteland weekend has the whole set up from Mad Max so it's goofballs bouncing around on bungie cords whacking each other with foam bats while the crowd roars. It's good silly mostly harmless fun. If you don't know "Thunderdome" is a setpiece from the movie of the same name. The protagonist has to battle the deuteragonist to the death inside a large geodesic dome. Weapons of all kinds are strapped to the dome and the fighters are hooked in to bungie harnesses so they can "fly" around the arena. Meanwhile the crowd is climbing all over the dome shouting abuse and encouragement. It's a fun scene and larpers and related goofballs like to use it as a premise for boffer (safe foam weapons) fighting.
Well luckily the only people who go to burning man are boomers and psychopathic millennials whose brain is 50% stocks, 20% NYT, 20% real estate, and 10% voting
i don't see how anyone can look at the Burning Man Board of Directors and think that it is anything except another fucking corporate shakedown.
i mean, literally 10 years ago the criticisms of how elitist and infiltrated it was were so widespread that even i had heard them.
literally 10 years ago the criticisms of how elitist and infiltrated it was
10 years? Shit, those criticisms have around since about 2005, if not earlier.
There was a social media site called Tribe.net that was filled with mostly Burners since Tribe was hq'd in San Francisco. I remember looking in the Burning Man tribe of the site and seeing complaints of how "sold out" the event had become because techbros, going to the desert to drop acid and look at topless hippie chicks, had taken over their art event, and thus the organizers begun charging cash money, ridiculous prices for what used to be a free-ish event.
Thank you for that link. It was very funny to read through ghoul bios
Same. Can't imagine it got better during the last decade plus
I sincerely cannot understand why anyone would find the idea of spending a week in the scorching desert sun listening to the Grateful Dead's grandchildren playing their music before sleeping in a tent with just enough water to not die of dehydration fun.
I can, however, imagine a person who would find that fun, and now I can't imagine how that person would pay $1500/person to go to that.
For the burners I know it's a profound experience of community, connection, love, and wonder. They're genuinely kind, sorta dumb hippies who really do pour their heart and soul in to the art they bring out to Black Rock. They get to see all their friends, take off all the masks society forces them to wear, be wild and free from the day to day drudgery of a society that hates them for being weird. They move heaven and earth, bum rides, beg borrow and steal to get out there.
It's incredibly sad. To them Burning Man is a kind of glimpse of paradise and most of them don't seem to recognize that they're the trained monkeys performing for the real audience of rich tech bros who inflict the very misery and poverty they're seeking to escape from. Or maybe they do know and don't care, seizing an opportunity for genuine community and belonging in spite of the crass larger picture of "the burn".
I think the appeal is there's usually a ton of free drugs there. And casual sex if you're hot enough.
Also, interesting art, novelty-aplenty, and the ability to say you did it.
I don't think there are too many people hot enough to make the casual sex itself hot considering it'll be sweaty, dehydrated, hot, dusty, smelly desert drug festival sex in a tent. Burning Man sounds fucking awful.
I'd rather just meet someone in my area after we shower.
From videos I've seen of it, there does seem to be a pretty high concentration of very conventionally attractive people wearing rather skimpy outfits. I think the event attracts a lot of California who work in fields that attract a lot of good looking people (media mostly). Also from what I understand previous events were better organized and generally did had adequate water and other resources to keep people from dying if dehydration, it's just the event last year was a cluster fuck due to unexpected weather.
None of this is to defend Burning Man, it's an extremely bougie event for rich hippies, but if you were a cringe ass rich hippy yourself it probably is a lot of fun.
Nah, not for me. None of it sounds good to me, even with casual sex. Plenty of beautiful, showered working class girls in cities to meet.
Stinky ass, dusty ass rich drugged hippies sounds fucking gross.
if you were a rich hippy
Honestly burning man just seems like a more pretentious version of a music festival.
Honestly burning man just seems like a more pretentious version of a music festival.
Isn't that what it's always been?
a few more years of this (scaring off the techbros) and burning man might be kinda cool again
Why hasn't Burning Man turned into a giant crypto grift by now anyway? Or has it?
It always was, it was just waiting for crypto to be invented. There's a sheer cliff of class divide between the rich techbros who fly in to party and the poor working artists who bring all the cool shit. But it's always been a place for tech bros to go slumming with the freaks and geeks. Having spent time with burners i don't think it was ever "good". The " good" parts have always been people who find community despite the hyperindividualist neoliberal cultural void of burning man at a high level.
Burning man is still a thing? Lol
I thought this was a thing that washed up rich folks spend their money on to buy 'cultural experience'. I'm surprised this is still a thing...actually maybe not.
The blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of Rachel Jake.
As time goes on, artists I know have been going to Burning Man less and less. I'm not sure it was ever great, but it seems it's become a lot more "rich Californian" and less "independent artist"
It's been trending farther and farther in to the depths of shitty tech bro orgy for decades. Idk if it ever was actually cool. I know a bunch of burners who are actual weird poor artists, and they have to all pool their couch money, bum rides, save, and "volunteer" to afford to go. Meanwhile wealthy people just buy all the shit they need and when they're done "leaving no trace" they dump tens of tons of trash in nearby cities and towns in Nevada. It's all an ugly, gaudy sham of hyperindividualism, exploitation, bougie gentrification of art as a concept, and dickbaggery. My weird burner buddies love it to death and all i can see is the hollow commodification of art by capitalism as incredibly rich people create this massive altar to hipocrisy where they bring in tons of weirdos so they can pretend to have culture while they do drugs and wander around naked then fuck off back to San Francisco to leave the artists who make it possible to starve and suffer for another year.
I feel like all the magic has flowed down into the smaller regional burns at this point. Those are obviously hit or miss depending on your local scene, and you don't get quite the same huge community pieces as the big burn, but there's usually plenty enough to keep you busy just checking everything out for the whole event anyways, let alone a thousand times that if you really get involved with volunteering/organizing. Hell in a previous state I lived in, there were a few smaller local burns and then a bigger state-wide one, so even then you could kinda pick and choose how big and crazy of a thing you wanted to attend/do.
I need to start looking at local options around here...
Yeh. I've only ever been to a regional one. It was a generally positive experience. Met lots of weird hippies, danced some, participated in a lingerie parade (fun fact, I do not fit well in lingerie), didn't get flooded out.
Guy who has a mud fetish buying a ticket only to be disappointed this year.
