Burning Man co-founder John Law says the desert festival has lost its soul

One of the people who built Burning Man spent the opening weekend of its 40th edition arguing that it no longer belongs to anyone who made it. John Law, who helped move the burn to Nevada's Black Rock Desert in 1990, published an essay in The San Francisco Standard saying the event has drifted beyond recognition.

"The festival is barely recognizable from what we made," he wrote, adding that Burning Man has lost its anarchist soul. His description of the modern event is of a sensory extravaganza assembled for wealthy Westerners and the creative class that works for them.

The specifics he cites are the ones that come up most often in criticism of the event: plug-and-play camps staffed with private chefs, stylists hired to put together outfits for the playa, and charter flights into the desert. Law also disputes the origin story behind the 10 Principles, which he says were retrofitted in 2004 onto a gathering that had never had a governing philosophy.

He dates the shift to the late 1990s, when WIRED put the event on its cover and Silicon Valley took it up wholesale. Law names Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos directly, and points to Google decorating its offices with playa photographs and treating attendance as a factor in a chief executive search.

What began as a self-organising confederation, he argues, became top-down, hierarchical and status-generating, and ended up functioning as a sanctioned release valve for technology workers. He describes what the event offered instead as a neo-pagan revival built on hedonism and crowned by a wooden deity that required no actual belief.

The commercial complaint has a legal history behind it. Law was involved in litigation aimed at pushing the Burning Man trademarks into the public domain, on the principle that nobody should own the event, and he points to the organisation's land purchases around the desert and in Gerlach along with the professional public relations operation it built in the late 1990s. He has not set foot on the playa since 1996. Burning Man 2026 runs through 7 September, and its place in the electronic and dance calendar is tracked on the festival tracker.