Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake”. But she did provoke popular fury by building a model peasant village at Versailles, where she would retire to escape the pressures and opulence of court life, and even sometimes dress up as a milkmaid for picnics or parties.
If the 21st century has an aristocracy on a par with that of Versailles, it is surely the Silicon Valley tech elite. And their equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s toy farm is Burning Man: a utopian week-long summer festival in the Nevada Desert, whose culture captures a distinctive West Coast liberal ideal — and which is, in the modern context, every bit as artificial and tone-deaf as le hameau de la Reine.
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