Silicon Valley’s freak-out meets Katrina, with a bump
The writer had found an elusive internet connection, and reaching beyond exhaustion was finding words to record the madness around him:
“We are operating on something beyond tired, beyond care, beyond recognition,” he wrote. “You just keep going, because you have no choice.”
New Orleans? No, Burning Man.
The writer was describing America’s greatest party, although word only seeped through about the disaster unfolding in America’s greatest party city, 2,000 miles away.
The Burning Man festival is a survival experience by design, not force majeure. Each year around 30,000 throng to a Nevada salt desert for a week, bringing their own food and water with them to create “Black Rock City”, and endeavoring to leave no trace behind them. It’s a celebration of creativity, community and endurance that for many in Silicon Valley is the highlight of the year – around two thirds of Burners are from the San Francisco Bay Area. By no means the largest festival in the world, Burning Man is still a truly astonishing visual spectacle, and the intensity of the experience leads Burners to host “decompression parties” on touchdown.
This year, however, the decompression shock has been particularly severe.