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…
