What is actually going on at Burning Man?

The Burning Man fiasco is slowly coming to an end, so perhaps now is a good time to recap the Burning Man fiasco. If you’ve been living in blissful ignorance of Burning Man and its attendant ecological disasters, this one’s for you. (If you want to retain that bliss, click away now.)

Before we get to “What actually is going on at Burning Man,” your questions may begin with “What actually is Burning Man,” period. Burning Man is not a music festival; in fact, per the event’s website, it’s not a festival at all. It’s “a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience,” or in other words, “a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.” The event dates back to the late ’80s, and since the ’90s has taken place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

The community created over the week-long period is guided by some lofty principles (“radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy”) but it’s perhaps best known as a place to take party drugs, rave, and erect weird art installations. These days, it’s popular with celebrities, Silicon Valley types, and a generally insufferable segment of the wealthy elite. In 2018, Elizabeth Holmes went and burned an effigy for her fraudulent company Theranos. This year, the guy who argued in favor of child slavery on behalf of Nestle in front of the real Supreme Court set up a faux Supreme Court.

Burning Man was already under fire before the rain

Those types of attendees may be why there’s so much schadenfreude around Burning Man 2023 being so catastrophically disrupted. The event actually began with climate change activists blocking the road into Black Rock City in protest of Burning Man’s egregious carbon footprint (one of the biggest issues being the attendees’ private jets). The protesters couldn’t have had a more obvious demonstration as to the need for their activism than the torrential rains that decimated the campgrounds (per Axios, there was two to three months’ worth of rain within 24 hours). The weather turned the usually dry site into a muddy mess and left more than 70,000 people stranded. “The Gate and airport in and out of Black Rock City remain closed. Ingress and egress are halted until further notice,” event organizers posted to X/Twitter on Saturday. “No driving is permitted except emergency vehicles. If you are in BRC, conserve food, water, and fuel, and shelter in a warm, safe space. More updates to come.”

Outside of Burning Man, the situation prompted a lot of memes and misinformation. A joke on social media that the site was experiencing an Ebola outbreak quickly flared into a rumor that was put out by local officials. Inside the festival, they may not have had Ebola, but they apparently did not have functioning toilets, as there was no one to clean and empty the port-a-potties. President Joe Biden was briefed (on the whole situation, not just the port-a-potties): “We’re in touch with the local people,” he said.

Some Burners eschewed the shelter-in-place advisory and decided to trek six miles through the mud to escape, including Cindy Crawford, Kaia Gerber, Austin Butler, Chris Rock, and Diplo. The latter duo went viral after getting picked up by some fans on the way out. “For sure Chris is going to have a huge bit in his next special about Burning Man, because he was really bizarrely scared of what was going to happen,” Diplo told CNN. “He thought there was going to be cannibalism a day later and didn’t know if people were going to run on our camp and steal our stuff.”

Luckily no cannibalism actually took place, and the gates were opened for exodus on Monday afternoon, though event officials encouraged attendees to stick around for the annual burning of the Man. “You might be much happier hanging out in camp with your friends than sitting in a static line of cars for many hours,” organizers posted on social media. “Wake up refreshed on Tuesday and hit the road then.”

Instead, a lot of apparently belligerent Burners decided to get the hell out of dodge and back into the “default world.” Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen told The San Francisco Chronicle, “As usually happens in what burners refer to as the ‘default world’ people allow their emotions to override their reasonableness and they are lashing out at each other as they leave the playa and attempt to make it to their next destination. This behavior definitely does not fall within the 10 principles of Burning Man, but that is not the fault of BMP either, but is a societal issue.”

There was one death at this year’s Burning Man, confirmed by Allen to be 32-year-old Leon Reece; no cause of death has been released, but it is said to be unrelated to the weather conditions that plagued the event. Per CNN, an estimated 64,000 people remained at Black Rock City on Monday afternoon. Axios reports that the traffic wait time out of the encampment was five hours.