Playa Fire

Deeper in the Dust

By Carl Teichrib

Note: This is the week before Burning Man 2025, and to assist in understanding this event, its culture and broader impact, I’ve adapted a section of text from my book, Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment. I have also included other elements of interest in this report.

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Black Rock City, 2010.

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On the evening of the summer solstice 1986, a handful of friends carried a wooden 8-foot tall human effigy to the shoreline of Baker Beach, a strip of oceanfront along the southwest side of the Presidio in San Francisco. A small but curious crowd assembled to watch as the figure was raised, set in place, and then doused with gasoline. At sunset the effigy was torched.

From its humble beginnings, Burning Man has become an annual, world- recognized gathering that starts on the last weekend of August and ends on Labor Day. Attendance has dramatically increased: less than two dozen in 1986, 300 in 1989, 1,000 in 1993, 10,000 in 1997, and over 25,000 by the Millennium year. More than 69,000 people attended in 2013, and since 2015 the number of paying participants has been capped, officially, at 70,000.

Beyond the growing numbers, the artwork and cultural footprint of Burning Man has become legendary, so much so that in 2018 the Smithsonian dedicated its entire Renwick Gallery to the Burn experience. Academic researchers study its ethos and cultural spread, and social engineers and change agents use the platform to cross-pollinate ideas.

Personnel from technology companies flock to the Burn. This makes sense as the West Coast tech sector is interlocked with the 1960s counter-culture.¹ So much so, that the tech industry carved out its own Temporary Autonomous Zone [see Game of Gods, chapter 14 for a discussion on the TAZ concept] known as the annual Digital Be-Ins, a cyber-psychedelic spin-off of the 1967 Human Be-In, with presentations by Timothy Leary and sponsorship from Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo.² During the 1997 Digital Be-In, Larry Harvey – the co-founder of Burning Man – compared his event to the digital world, painting the Burn as a “compelling physical analog for cyberspace.”

His was an appeal for a new kind of social network,

Both Burning Man and the Internet make it possible to regather the tribe of mankind, to talk to millions of dispersed individuals in the great diaspora of our mass society. Living as we do, without sustaining traditions in time and ungrounded in a shared experience of place, it is yet possible to transcend these deficiencies. We must use technology to create space stations here on planet Earth, islands of intense and living contact. It is time to come home.³

And come home they did.