After a treacherous five-mile hike in the sticky playa mud on Sunday, I got to the highway, hopped on a few different buses and made it home safely from Burning Man.
A lot of readers have written to me to see if I’m OK, or just to ask about the experience of leaving Burning Man at a time when flooding made it impossible to leave by car. I’m not only fine -- I had a blast. I’m excited to get back to work. I have lots of new reporting, and so much more to build out on this Substack. But let me write just a few quick thoughts about the experience.
Over the last few days, Twitter/X has oozed with schadenfreude, with hundreds of thousands of outsiders mocking the calamity at Burning Man with predictable scorn. The platform is filled with viral tweets gleefully ridiculing the “wealthy elites leaving people behind” and the failures of a “libertarian utopia.”
Earlier today, Jacobin, the self-styled socialist magazine, capitalized on the online furor and recirculated an older article decrying Burning Man as a "dark" event in which "high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians" spend a week in the desert creating a society in which "the people who have the most money" make all the decisions.
