Burning Man is more powerful (and corporate) than ever

[KamaAina]

http://blog.sfgate.com/bottomline/2014/08/22/burning-man-is-more-powerful-and-corporate-than-ever/

Burning Man, which opens Monday, has become home to ”a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can,” reports The New York Times.

Custom-built yurts with beds and air conditioning, female models flown in by private plane from New York, $2 million gated communities, 5-star chefs preparing lobster and sushi, “sherpas” on hand to meet your every need. Plus a New York Times headline – ”A Line is Drawn in the Desert: At Burning Man the Top Elite One-Up One Another.”...

Apart from the wretched excess, she reported that Burning Man is a place where a lot of deals get done, and new businesses launched. It helps the local economy, including the tech elite’s financing of many of the enormous art projects. And the folks behind Burning Man are totally behind what has become “a little like a corporate retreat.”

“If you’re in the longtime Burning Man community, maybe it’s easy to frown on certain types of people coming,” the non-profit’s director of business and communications Marian Goodell, told Bowles. “But the more we have a variety of influencers – folks from London and New York – the better off we will be and the better off the Burning Man Project.”

So basically, it's now the Bohemian Grove of the 21st century.

edit: So I guess Grover Norquist will feel right at home. That's right, Grover Norquist.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025307672

[Beaverhausen]

1. I used to want to go

I'm sure it was great in the beginning years, but now it's so huge it has lost its original meaning.

[arcane1]

4. It seems as though that happens to everything. It gets too big, and then the yahoo quotient rises

[arcane1]

2. I was about to mention Grove but I see you beat me to it.

It will be interesting to see how that goes, needless to say!

[Cirque du So-What]

6. As I was reading the excerpt in the OP

I thought of Bohemian Grove too. Funny, considering that I had never made any sort of association previously.

[arcane1]

7. Oops, that's a typo, I meant to say Grover

But that's a good point about the similarity!

[WCLinolVir]

3. Co-opted. That really sucks, actually.

[onethatcares]

5. the fucking hippies were right

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