Burning Man traditionally ends with the titular incineration of a massive human sculpture in the middle of the Black Rock Desert. This year, the annual hedonistic fire festival became more of a Fyre Festival (get it …???) as unexpected downpours turned the dusty plain into a field of muck, causing road closures that stranded tens of thousands of attendees in the mud.
Some, like former U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, trekked for miles to the nearest paved road—they had responsibilities to get home to! Others stuck it out on the flooded playa and dealt with the overfull port-a-potties until the ground dried enough to drive on, rationing their food and hallucinogens for a few more days in the damp.
With every passing year, Burning Man becomes an easier punchline. What started out in the 1980s and ’90s as a gathering of hippies doing a gritty, orgiastic confab in the desert has, in the past decade or two, become a swarming hotbed of influencers seeking hourly photo ops, tech bros newly hip to psychedelics, brands chasing a veneer of authenticity, and multimillionaires with private jets and paid staff enjoying a tricked-out version of what purports to be a celebration of self-reliance. Today a ticket and vehicle pass alone run attendees about $800, before they even think about renting an RV, finding a bike, or buying camping supplies.
So, for those of us watching the mud pit from the comfort of our own homes, with our dry socks and fully stocked drug drawers, there was a bit of schadenfreude to be found in witnessing the economically privileged and aggressively positive contend with challenges of the natural world that they couldn’t buy or vision-quest their way out of.
Herman Wakefield, the pseudonymous proprietor of the @northwest_mcm_wholesale meme account on Instagram, was made for this moment. His memes poke fun at the malleability of taste in the internet age, the recurring impulse of rich people to cosplay as being poor, and the vagaries of modern-day capitalism, in which corporations are people and actual people form their identities by purchasing certain aesthetic signifiers. Tinned fish, mid-century modern design, Carhartt beanies, small-batch anything—it all comes in for a good-natured lashing.
Burning Man was a natural target. “Not gonna lie, I had this week circled on the calendar for months. I had at least 30 memes ready to go before the festival even started,” Wakefield told Slate in an email.
For Wakefield, the vibes of Burning Man have always been off. “I don’t like Burning Man art, I don’t like tech companies and tech culture. And most of all, I don’t like listening to affluent white people with dreadlocks lecturing me about social issues,” he said. Festival organizers and many attendees talk a big game about social justice and responsibility, but between the event’s gigantic carbon footprint, the ostentatious burning of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of art, and the fact that the festival takes place on land misappropriated from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Wakefield said, “the whole festival is just top-shelf hypocrisy to me.”
About a week ago, Wakefield’s memes began commemorating the event by skewering the usual Burning Man fare: the massive expense, the dumb “playa names,” the 12-hour traffic jam on the last day, the strong likelihood of being cucked by Diplo, the attendees who cloak their pursuit of pleasure in the faux-profound language of healing and growth and community, who insist that one becomes a better global citizen by spending a week on ketamine, covered in silver body paint.
When the torrential rains hit, Wakefield’s memes got darker. One shows a woman in neon festival braids maintaining Zen composure as Burners run out of food, water, and functioning toilets. Then, after the Burners run out of “instagrammable drug orgies”: panic! Another meme compares the reaction to the Titanic sinking (“Women and children first!”), with the stratified escape from the playa (“Billionaires and Diplo first!”).
“I did get some hate messages from Burners stuck in the mud. I just ignore those,” Wakefield said. “If you’re on Starlink satellite internet at a massive party in the desert, your life is probably pretty good.”
Speaking of Diplo: the bro-y A-list DJ figured prominently in the memes long before the mud incident. (“I think I Googled ‘annoying celebs at Burning Man’ and his name came up,” Wakefield said.) His selection turned out to be prescient. Over the past few days, Diplo has become a main character in the mud story as he chronicled his getaway on social media and in an interview on CNN. After the DJ realized that the road closures would prevent him from making it to a gig in time, he paired up with Chris Rock (… ?!), smeared his face with honest-to-God dirt like war paint, hiked several miles through the mud to the nearest paved road, hitched a ride on the back of a truck, and Venmo’d $1,000 to a random guy with a Sprinter van for a transfer to the airport.
This Diplo debacle neatly encapsulates why memes are the perfect vehicle to express non-Burners’ feelings about Burning Man, and the perfect way for them to consume news of its muddy misfortune: There are plenty of reasons to be legitimately annoyed by the borderline offensively indulgent event, starting with the fact that a one-week festival premised on radical generosity and the oneness of humanity generates roughly the same greenhouse gas emissions that about 22,000 gasoline-powered cars produce in a year. Using gas-burning generators to power Burning Man’s air conditioners for a week in the desert in the heat of summer—it positively reeks of hubris.
But it’s hard to get righteously angry at something so silly—a party at which dust-covered white people (incidentally, more than 80 percent of Burners are white) wear tutus and goggles, have sloppy sex in the shadow of on-the-nose art, and leave claiming to have gazed upon the deepest truths of the universe.
Memes help us process the dissonance between the lofty principles of Burning Man and the unpleasant reality of the portable toilets set up to service 72,000 people. They give us an outlet for the amorphous irritation spawned by wealthy people who pretend that their desert drug binge has some kind of virtuous purpose. (Last year, more than 40 percent of Burners reported an annual household income of between $100,000 and $300,000. An additional 16 percent made even more than that!) And memes also help us enjoy the fleeting moments when the ultrarich are forced to trudge through mud like commoners—leaving their “campsites” behind for who-knows-who to clean up—before they can throw $1,000 at a Sprinter van to make their problems go away.
Memes can even inject a droplet of joy into the sea of terror that accompanies the knowledge that this uncharacteristically rainy Burning Man is the result of the extreme weather patterns that are becoming the new norm in our rapidly changing climate. After tearing our hair out over rising sea levels and 100-year hurricanes coming every five years, we can have a little giggle at the venture capitalists in drum major uniforms, as a treat.
But Wakefield said that, despite his meme-ing, he took little pleasure in the Labor Day weekend bedlam on the playa. He was sincerely worried that people were going to get hurt or fall ill. As a “simple shitposter,” he said, “the chaos was stressing me out. … I’m sure some people were hoping Burning Man was going to turn into Lord of the Flies. Not me—I just wanted to make fun of their dildo-shaped steampunk art cars.”