I have gone to Burning Man several times, but its founder, Larry Harvey, was not someone I knew very much about. Harvey, who was born in 1948, was raised outside Portland, Oregon, by adoptive parents. After a stint in the Army, he moved to San Francisco, in 1969. His brother Stewart Harvey remembered him then as someone in search of a calling, “looking diligently for something elusive and hidden towards which to apply himself.” He worked as a carpenter and landscape gardener and was briefly married and had a son, Tristan, in 1982. Harvey started Burning Man in 1986 with a friend, Jerry James, as a celebration of the summer solstice and for catharsis after a breakup. “I had a heartbreak,” he said in a speech in 1997. “I had a midlife crisis.” Harvey and James gathered a group of friends and burned an effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The burning man never symbolized any particular thing, but it was an annual event until 1990, when the authorities shut down the original happening. Harvey and members of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, a group devoted to public pranks and theatre in the spirit of the Diggers or the Merry Pranksters, moved the ceremony to the Black Rock Desert, in Nevada. There the annual ritual grew over the next twenty-seven years into the weeklong festival of seventy thousand people that it is today.
Most of Burning Man’s ceremonies, traditions, and language emerged organically, in the practices of the people who attended and returned each year. At a time when the failure of the new communalism was still fresh in historical memory, Harvey and the event’s other leaders intentionally deflected attempts to portray them as gurus, or suggestions that Burning Man was a cult. But it wasn’t just a gathering, either. As the years passed, a philosophy began to emerge. Harvey saw Burning Man as a movement to restore community and creative expression in a time of homogenized mass culture and societal anomie. His reputation was less as charismatic leader than keeper of the word. (His title since 2013 was “chief philosophical officer.”) In 2004, as a network of regional offshoots of the festival began operating under the umbrella of the official organization, Harvey wrote down the ten principles of Burning Man as a guiding ethos.
By 2013, when I attended Burning Man for the first time, these ideals had been assimilated into the culture of the event. Harvey was influenced by Lewis Hyde’s 1979 book, “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” and argued that the purpose of exchange should be to form connection and foster creativity rather than a mere transfer of goods. Burning Man’s principle of “Gifting” informed the absence of monetary exchange in Black Rock City (though exceptions are made for the sale of ice and coffee). “Radical self-reliance” encouraged people to bring all the supplies they would need. “Civic responsibility” and “Communal effort” encouraged people to take care of each other. “Leaving no trace,” which came from wilderness camping, meant everything from a cigarette butt to a sequin left on the ground would be considered “matter out of place,” or MOOP. “Participation” and “Immediacy” encouraged human interaction over mediated exchange. “Decommodification” kept out commercial advertising, corporate sponsorship, and the coöptation of Burning Man to sell things. At the event, brands on clothing or rental trucks are frequently altered with tape or otherwise defaced—U-Haul becomes RuPaul or U-Fall; Budget, Fudget; et cetera. As I wrote in a piece for the London Review of Books, the obvious critique of these well-meaning principles is that there’s a hypocrisy to embracing them while on an expensive vacation from rules that people in the real world have to obey.
From 1998 to 2013, Burning Man was organized by Harvey and five other leaders, some of whom had been there from the Baker Beach days. They negotiated permitting and managed finances and changes to ticket prices; their discussions extended to the safety of using lasers and drones, or what to do about the V.I.P. “plug and play” camps that have set up shop at Burning Man in recent years. The Burning Man leadership sometimes generated controversy, as in 2014, when the festival became a nonprofit, with payouts to Harvey and the other founders who handed over control. That they made money off of the thing they had created seemed fair to me; had they allowed corporate sponsorship at the event or licensed its brand, they could have made a lot more.
As Burning Man has grown in recent years, criticism of the event has gone beyond the cliché of the dusty Burner, back from the playa with his mind blown and never shutting up about it. Harvey was increasingly asked to answer the same questions that a lot of Burners were asking themselves: What privileges earn a particular group the right to create a “Temporary Autonomous Zone”? Were the festival’s do-it-yourself ideals corrupted when people paid others to build their camps and pack out their trash? To what extent were the principles of “Immediacy” and “Participation” lost as images of the event started to be endlessly replicated on social media, where companies sold advertising against their members’ “Radical Self-Expression”? As the festival’s population grew to the tens of thousands, the umbrella of “Radical inclusion” covered not only crystal healers, sex workers, and anarchist crust punks but also Mark Zuckerberg. But even as the conservative activist Grover Norquist attended, Harvey drew distinctions between the event’s self-organizing principles and those of Ayn Rand. “The only reason this works, this individual liberty, is that it’s so communitarian,” he said, in 2017. “And libertarians don’t even know what that is.”
Larry Harvey died last Saturday, at the age of seventy, after having a stroke on April 4th. In the aftermath of his death, Burning Man’s leadership directed its community toward some of the speeches and writing that Harvey had done over the years. Going through some of this was a reminder to me of the difference between the gathering itself and its depiction in the media. Since 2013, I have noticed how Burning Man tends to reverberate around the Internet in lamentable ways. There have been knockoffs like the Further Future Festival or the Summit Series, events that offer a similar mix of yoga, lectures, self-help, and partying with much higher price tags, where you don’t feel compelled to labor in the sun to build your own infrastructure or chat with the pantsless leather daddy offering you strawberries. Getting a gift does create a bond, but, as Harvey once said, “If you’re buying gum from someone in a subway, you just want gum, and you want to get on your train. You don’t want a connection.”
For Harvey, it started with the punks, whose imperatives he summarized as “Never sell out, make your own show.” Harvey disagreed with the libertarians, but he always welcomed the techies, who had been going to Burning Man since its earliest years. In 1998, in a speech he gave at Burning Man, he said that he had a theory about why “the Internet people” liked the gathering: “These people’ve been inhabiting a world on the Internet which is non-hierarchic, radically democratic, essentially populist in character, in which you create your own reality and move where you want, and you wouldn’t be judged for it.” What a quaint vision of the World Wide Web. Twenty years later, the ideal of Burning Man as a movement really depends on what its participants do when they leave. Harvey wanted Burning Man to continue for a hundred years. For many people, including me, the contrivance of the gathering gave us an immersive model of community and experimentation. For a week in the desert, a group of people tried their best to adhere to a different set of guidelines than the ones that govern their everyday lives. The principles themselves were Harvey’s gift.
Sourse: newyorker.com
