In 2015, I got a peculiar LinkedIn message that had “scam” written all over it. It was from a (purportedly) Swiss business student who was asking for my email address so he could (purportedly) fly me to Switzerland to (purportedly) meet with Larry Harvey, the co-founder of Burning Man. While any of these elements might be red flags in isolation, collectively they were too strange and specific to qualify as a scam, at least in the normal sense of that word. Against my better online judgment, I wrote back to the undergraduate, intrigued.
It turned out it was all real: University of St. Gallen, an elite business school in St. Gallen, Switzerland, hosts an annual symposium called, appropriately, the “St. Gallen Symposium,” in which they invite 100 under-30 “leaders of tomorrow” to hobnob with the over-30 “leaders of today,” who are almost all corporate suits and financiers. To say I was out of place was an understatement: I didn’t even own a suit prior to attending, and I had no desire ever to do so.
How I ended up being flown there to hobnob with the one percent was due to a peculiar mix of luck and journalism. In August 2015, I’d written an article for Jacobin magazine, “Why the Rich Love Burning Man,” that had gone very viral; it ended up being one of their most-read articles for the year and resulted in reprints and invitations to be interviewed in all kinds of places I didn’t anticipate (including, weirdly, going on Meghan McCain’s radio show to explain to her why Burning Man had jumped the shark). At the time, I was but a wee freelance writer in a graduate literature program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
To this day I do not know who was responsible, but someone from the University of St. Gallen community nominated me as one of their 100 global “leaders of tomorrow,” based at least partly on that article’s publication. Knowing that Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey was to be in attendance, the Swiss had arranged for me to have a special meeting with him in an intimate setting, during which I’d be able to (purportedly) pepper him with questions.
After beating away my imposter syndrome, I was slightly perplexed and anxious at the thought of meeting Harvey. (He died this week in San Francisco at age 70, a few weeks after suffering a stroke.) My criticism of his anarchic desert party hadn’t exactly been gentle; indeed, my takeaway observation as an attendee was that because Burning Man was founded on vague principles of being “radical” and lacked any internal democratic apparatus, it was easily taken over by rich people, largely techies, who brought in exclusivity and pay-to-play camps — things that seemingly violated the event's original egalitarian and DIY ethos. In a final coup de grâce, the rich donors and camp-goers were in turn able to transform the supposedly anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical public festival into an elite, pseudo-private operation, with special camps that only the rich could access.
So I was unsure what I really had to say to Larry Harvey face to face. Moreover, I had no idea if he harbored any resentment towards me or if he had any sense of the resonating impact of that article. I found Burning Man faintly interesting but had written what I wanted to write about it, and I didn’t have much to ask him about it anymore. I was admittedly curious, however, why the business people running the symposium thought it was valuable to have him there.
On that rainy April afternoon in Switzerland, I trotted up to the loggia on the third floor of the university building to sit in an uncomfortable backless chair with Larry Harvey, his handler and a couple other so-called leaders of tomorrow. The table was adorned with Swiss chocolates and chocolate-dipped fruit; waiters hovered, offering us a taste of the $300,000 worth of alcohol that a consulting firm had donated to the symposium and that would fuel the expensive tastes of the attendees for the week-long shindig.
In person, Larry looked frail; he spoke softly and firmly but with a slight slur. Spittle frothed at the side of his mouth as he spoke. I was surprised that he was still in his 60s at the time. His health didn’t look great. I felt bad for him.
Unlike most of the other guests, he was clad in a leather jacket rather than a suit and tie; his handler would pat him on his shoulder periodically when he forgot to say something, as though to jog his memory.
My fear that he would identify me as his critic, and therefore his enemy, rapidly withered away. He didn’t know who I was — nor did his handler.
Like most white men, Larry loved to talk about himself. What was supposed to be a two-way conversation ended up being about 40 minutes of him talking about himself, telling his story of how Burning Man came about and what it meant. I was surprised to find that I was actually fairly inspired by his words: Larry was a true believer, deeply hated consumerism and saw Burning Man as a means of escaping what he saw as the horrors of consumer society. Several times during the span of his talk, he pulled out his smartphone. “I just got this thing a few days ago,” he said, “and it’s horrible. People walk everywhere with these things in their faces. Small TVs. I always hated TV, and now we carry them everywhere.” He wanted, he said, to create a space without TV or consumer goods, which is why Burning Man existed.
Later, when the plates were cleared and his aura had faded, I considered the irony of what Burning Man had become. Perhaps his intentions were to create an anti-consumerist, even “radical” space, but the festival had been co-opted by techies and the rich. Tech companies send their executives there to bond and brainstorm. Wealthy attendees build expensive “turnkey” camps built by hired hands that only they and their lackeys can afford, and some offer six- or seven-figure packages to guests as though it were a vacation destination (which to many it is). Burning Man has become a lifestyle product, another Instagram hashtag to add to a checklist of conspicuous travel consumption photos. If Larry Harvey wished to create a space free of vapid consumerism, Burning Man has become the opposite.
Later, Harvey gave another speech in a large conference room at St. Gallen, in conversation with the Swiss philosopher Dieter Thomä. Dr. Thomä had never been to Burning Man but had read my article and consulted with me beforehand on what to ask Harvey; I told him to ask Harvey what Burning Man had evolved into and the type of people and culture it attracted, and whether he saw this as differing from his original intent.
As with our one-on-one, Harvey mostly gave a monologue to the group of business people in attendance. However, Thomä did ask him about this, briefly. As to “the question of how Burning Man relates to our regular world,” Thomä asked Harvey if perhaps Burning Man was not a “counter-world” but “a mirror of our own world.” What if “it’s not different — Silicon Valley being there, they spend money not by contributing but by showing that they are rich? [Maybe] it’s not really a counter-world, but in a way, the mirror of a society that is commercialized through and through, and so powerful that it sucks in this utopia. What do you think?”
Harvey had a defense ready, though it wasn’t wholly coherent. “There are a lot of billionaires there from Silicon Valley,” he said. “They have a certain kinship with us; they were working on the frontier. They tend to believe in collaborative processes. They thought it was radical in the sense that it was exploring a new world.” Harvey said that they were “solving issues in the world” and mentioned something about Burning Man philanthropic projects, then mentioned that billionaires donated a lot of money to them.
Thomä persisted in his line of questioning. “What about the implications for the future world?” he asked Harvey. “If you had to choose, is Burning Man nice to have as a vacation, or is it a counter-world, a serious experiment in organizing our world in a different way?”
Here, things got interesting. “It’s a vacation,” Harvey said, but “not a luxury vacation.” But it is also “a way of inculcating values, not through anything that we preach, not through media or anything. And it can be very persuasive . . . at the right moment. If you lay down enough leaves on the ground.” Then, unprompted, Harvey said, “No one believes in communism anymore. How did that happen? It was absorbed.”
It seemed as if Harvey was performing a classic move of self-justification, discarding ideas that might make him question his own. Capitalism was all there was because “no one believes in communism,” as he said. Therefore, his consumerist anti-consumerist desert party, beloved by the one percent, was the best humanity could do. It reminded me an awful lot of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, “There is no alternative” — a creative piece of rhetorical spin that functions as both a mantra and a work of propaganda to prevent dissent. If there’s no alternative, why bother trying to change things?
The business crowd, for what it’s worth, lapped up his words. “It’s a great growth model,” said one businessman during the Q&A. This was telling: whatever so-called “radicalism” Burning Man possessed could be folded into his management philosophy without contradiction.
In the end, Burning Man didn’t become the revolutionary force of anti-consumerist change that Harvey or its early Situationist-inspired founders likely imagined. Instead, any sense of radical imagination it may have had was completely absorbed into the folds of consumer capitalism. LSD went from a mind-bending threat to the social order (at least according to the feds) to a casual drug that techies take to make them more creative and efficient workers, and Burning Man followed a similar arc: Now Silicon Valley techies make pilgrimages there to hobnob with founders and make business deals. Elon Musk has said that “Burning Man is Silicon Valley.”
Larry Harvey may have held radical views on society at some point, but as Burning Man morphed into an extension of the Google campus, he seemed unable to accept that the festival he co-founded had failed when it came to changing existing social relations. I finally was able to ask him as much, sitting in the loggia. “Despite your polemics about the horrors of consumerism, television and smartphones, do you feel that it is ironic that Burning Man became a must-attend hangout for the people who make precisely those kinds of ‘evil’ consumer products?” I asked him haltingly.
Harvey didn’t balk at this, but gave a roundabout non-answer: He told me about the time that he had dinner with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, and what a great guy Brin was, and then how Brin gave a gift of hundreds of communal bicycles to Burning Man. The story concluded with a description of the “love in the room.”
“I was looking at [Brin] and his wife, and he was looking at me and my wife, and there was just so much love there, and I thought about how the room was just full of so much love,” he said. So that was that: Billionaires can feel and express love. It was flimsy, but then, so were Harvey's other justifications.
Ultimately, Harvey wasn’t really the court philosopher for Burning Man so much as its eager hype-man. Whatever the festival meant to the rich people who supported it, he was there to lend credence to their needs and beliefs.
Upon his passing, I think it's fitting that we remember Larry Harvey as someone who threw a really big party in the desert that was enjoyed by a lot of people. Maybe it didn't quite end up the way he intended -- but you could say that about a lot of parties.
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