In 2026, Burning Man attendees don’t have the best reputation. Where once the mind-expanding, clothing-optional gathering in the Nevada desert enjoyed a certain countercultural cool, these days the list of those who openly describe themselves as “Burners” reads like a roll call of the most insufferable people in the world: money-obsessed Silicon Valley tech bros, image-obsessed Instagram models, and Diplo.
The low regard in which Burners are held was made clear in 2023, when rolling storms and torrential rain transformed the annual Black Rock Desert event into a dangerous quagmire. Any initial concern for those in attendance seemed to disappear in a landslide of schadenfreude, with online commentators dubbing it “Fyre Fest 2.0” and falling over themselves to laugh at all the privileged party animals stuck in the mud.
There’s little doubt the event attracts a particularly obnoxious strand of reveler, so it’s at this point I have to make an outré confession: I love Burning Man. Some of the best times of my life have arrived on a bicycle festooned in fairy lights, or on the back of an old bus painstakingly transformed into a giant neon pirate ship.
What can I say? It’s totally unlike any other festival on earth, an art-filled temporary city built not by committees, corporations or commercial interests but by small, dedicated groups of friends sharing their mad ideas with other like-minded freaks. It’s vast, silly, playful, utterly ridiculous and occasionally profound.
Of course, while a philosophy of “gifting” inside Black Rock City renders money meaningless while you’re there, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have plenty of it in the outside world to help smooth your journey. It’s this tension between anti-capitalist ideals and many of Burning Man’s ultra-capitalist attendees that animates the compelling new four-part HBO docuseries The Man Will Burn.
Filmed over the course of five years, the series from filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi opens in 2021, a year on from the outbreak of Covid, when the organization that runs Burning Man was locked in a heated debate about whether to cancel the party for a second year running or to push ahead and risk staging the world’s most elaborate superspreader event.
When I speak to Noujaim and Gandhi over video call, they recall how, at the time, there was no guarantee the gathering might ever happen again. Virtual reality alternatives were being proposed, which, by their essence, rather missed the point of the real thing. “The very existence of Burning Man was on the chopping block,” says Noujaim. “They said, we’re probably canceling it, so there’s nothing to film. We said no, this is exactly the time we should be filming.”
Among those pushing hard for the Burn to go ahead was Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon and a longstanding Burner who had been attending for 25 years. The younger Musk had been given a place on the board after making a “significant donation” to the Burning Man Organization, and vocally used his position to advocate that organizers ignore the risks of Covid and let the festivities happen regardless. After all, isn’t it supposed to be anarchic? “Burning Man was never intended to be safe,” he announces in one meeting.
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Musk, who is interviewed for the documentary inside his palatial Burning Man tent, is exactly the sort of Burner who has helped shift the image of the festival from that of a subversive art gathering to a playground for the ultra-rich. Black Rock City, which grew out of a San Francisco art stunt in the mid-1980s and started to become more professionally organized in 1997, has found itself at risk of the same fate as so many other communities that flourished because of artists: gentrification by the wealthy.
In the end, Musk’s advocacy for Burning Man to go ahead in 2021 was overruled by the organization’s impressive CEO, Marian Goodell. Goodell took the job following the death of Burning Man’s co-founder, who was also her former boyfriend, Larry Harvey in 2018.
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Gandhi tells me he was impressed by her ability to balance the myriad competing interests. There are so many stakeholders who are sure that only they know best for the future of the Burn. “For a lot of rich and powerful and interesting people from around the world, Burning Man is like Utopia,” he says. “What is it like to be the mayor of Utopia? What a difficult and fascinating position to be in. You realize that she holds the keys to this place that so many people are fighting to keep going.”
After Goodell cancels the 2021 event, many Burners still turn up in the desert anyway. There are widespread fears that the so-called “Renegade Burn” will be a disaster, but the gathering goes ahead with little incident.
Musk, who is among the attendees, uses this success to push for a change in leadership of the organization, which is responsible for laying out roads, providing toilets and all the other unglamorous jobs that help a city of 80,000 people emerge out of the desert for a week before vanishing again without a trace.
While the likes of Musk argue that the “Renegade Burn” proves the organization is bloated, unwieldy and getting in the way of their fun, others point out that without the years of work done by Harvey, Goodell and the other members to create principles and put best practices in place, the event would have quickly descended into a dangerous free-for-all.
“I think it’s a funhouse mirror of the world we live in,” says Gandhi. “There are two major forces in our world: government and the wealthy, and you see the same options happening at Burning Man. When we were cutting the series, there were moments when Musk’s brother was in DOGE and it felt like there were resonances and similarities with that.”
Noujaim, who earned an Oscar nomination for her 2013 documentary The Square, says she saw parallels with her time covering the Egyptian revolution. “There you had Muslims and Christians with very different opinions, and the square became a place where debate could happen for the first time,” she says. “The debates over Burning Man show that disagreements shouldn’t disappear, but that we can make disagreement part of the creative act of building a shared world.”
So yes, it’s easy (and often fun) to laugh at Burners, but at a time when our planet could do with a few new ideas about how to organize itself, is it really so far-fetched to think that this chaotic and experimental desert city might be just the place to come up with them?
“Burning Man is like a living laboratory, a Petri dish where 80,000 people come together,” says Noujaim. “In this time when our world is increasingly divided and disconnected, it asks whether it’s possible to build a community together which is not rooted in uniformity, but in participation, imagination, and shared responsibility. So this is not only a film about Burning Man, it’s about what it means to try to create a society.”
‘The Man Will Burn’ streams weekly on HBO Max from 9 July
