Burning Man purges one-percenter camp that charged up to $100K, littered like crazy, and ripped off its attendees

Burning Man has long struggled with the tension between its commitment to "radical decommodification" and grifters and their ultra-high-net-worth marks who organize "turnkey camps" where you can pay giant sums to pretend to be a Burning Man "participant" while being looked after by paid "sherpas" (including, rumor has it, sex workers), in luxury settings designed to repel non-paying attendees (sometimes guarded by private security guards).

The Burning Man Organization (affectionately: "The Borg") has struggled to craft policies to address this phenomenon. They have been hampered by their own divided sensibilities and by the difficulty of cleanly distinguishing between turnkey camps and camps that are simply very large and complicated (I know of a multi-hundred person camp where a few attendees are compensated for taking a month off work to organize the kitchen prior to the event -- are these "paid staff" or "compensated volunteers?").

The Borg announced a crackdown on turnkeys in 2015, but it was clear to attendees that this was a largely ineffective exercise. As noted, some of this was clearly related to the Borg's own divided sensibilities: founder Larry Harvey (who died last year) defended the idea of the super-rich attending amid a certain amount of luxury, on the basis that everyone experiences Burning Man in their own way.

And the super-rich have a wealth (heh) of resources to deploy to get around policies intended to ensure participation: some one-percenter camps have "solved" the problem of building welcoming public spaces without surrendering their exclusivity by simply attaching an elaborate stage or bar to their private-security-guarded high-net-worth camps, and then paying performers or bartenders to appear in these public spaces. Read the rest