The Slave of the Future

Returning home from several days out of state, I played back the messages recorded on my answering machine. One was from my grocery store alerting me that some almond butter I had purchased recently was being recalled because of salmonella. One was inviting me to be a particpant in a poll on a politcal matter. And the last was from my ex-wife, a woman who divorced me approximately 25 years ago, calling to wish me a happy birthday. She was heading off to Burning Man, something, I am under the impression, that she does every year.

There was a good story by Nick Bilton in the Thursday Styles section of the Gray Lady entitled "A Line Is Drawn in the Desert: At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another." Bilton describes how the tech elite have turned Burning Man into a gated, sherpa-serviced luxury playground:

In recent years, the competition for who in the tech world could outdo who evolved from a need for more luxurious sleeping quarters. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting R.V.s, to building actual structures. 

“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!” 

His camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will collectively cost the partygoers over $2 million.

This is drastically different from the way most people experience the event. When I attended Burning Man a few years ago, we slept in tents and a U-Haul moving van. We lived on cereal and beef jerky for a week. And while Burning Man was one of the best experiences of my life, using the public Porta-Potty toilets was certainly one of the most revolting experiences thus far. But that’s what makes Burning Man so great: at least you’re all experiencing those gross toilets together. 

That is, until recently. Now the rich are spending thousands of dollars to get their own luxury restroom trailers, just like those used on movie sets. 

“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.” “It does have this feeling that, ‘Oh, look, the rich people have moved into my neighborhood.’ It’s gentrifying.” 

For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.

Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in. The rich are flown in on private planes, then picked up at the Burning Man airport, driven to their camp and served like kings and queens for a week. (Their meals are prepared by teams of chefs, which can include sushi, lobster boils and steak tartare — yes, in the middle of 110-degree heat.)

“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.” 

Mr. Hanson said he won’t be going back to Burning Man anytime soon. The Sherpas, the money, the blockaded camps and the tech elite were too much for him. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” he said. “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”

Speaking of "a mirror of society," one of the things I do every year when I make the trip to Southern Oregon to visit my mother is I get us tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSF commissions new work, and I always try to see these plays. Year before last it was the tremendous Party People. This year was the even better Family Album. Gray Lady theater critic Charles Isherwood pans the second act of the play. But the second act was the best thing I have ever seen in my life. The cultural references came so fast and furious, the music was so vital and true, I was transported to a transcendent place of organic perfection -- the kind of artistic experience you only read about in books as a schoolboy.

And what was the second act about? The enslavement of all things creative and familial to the Internet. An enslavement of our lives to getting "hits," which as every blogger knows is essentially fickle and arbitrary. Yet this is how we live our lives now. We know what we are doing. We know that it is artificial and random. Yet we keep on doing it.

Isherwood had a problem with the second act's avalanche of things"going viral." But the raising up of hyperreality was the whole point; it is how the characters achieve their emancipation. I hope playwrights Stew and Heidi Rodewald are right. I hope dialectically we can work our way clear of our present digital addiction and graduate ourselves to some sort of higher unity.

As I was trying to go to sleep last night in my Super 8 Motel room I was thinking about how the "good man" is necessary for society. (I say "good man" because it is still a man's world. The millennia of civilization have been overwhelming patriarchal.) There needs to be somebody who is good in order that others might aspire to something other than being bad. This is the priest. The celibate. This is who I have become. And we know what Nietzsche thought of the "good man." This is aphorism number 356 (1887-1888) from the The Will to Power (1901): "Modest, industrious, benevolent, temperate: is that how you would have men? good men? But to me that seems only the ideal slave, the slave of future."

While travel is burdensome, costly and exhausting, it is something that has to be done, if only to upturn the patterns that become so entrenched a person tends to forget that he has an identity independent of his everyday routines. I savored sitting on the bed alone in my motel room and watching the Seahawks preseason game against the Bears. I enjoyed running on the all-weather track of my high school in the cool morning sunshine, after which I walked the campus quad, transporting myself back to Carter- and Reagan-time. The Iranian Revolution and Bobby Sands' hunger strike in H-Block Long Kesh.