Burning Burnout

The party's dying:

This year, the forecast for the weather is clear, but ticket sales are looking cloudy. Whatever they're blaming - extreme weather events or the economy - people aren't forking over the cash. Burning Man, the annual desert bacchanal that last year became a mud-soaked quagmire, has released a last-minute pool of around 3,000 tickets in response to sagging sales. Attendance has faltered post-pandemic due to extreme weather events, from heatwaves to flooding, which last Labor Day Weekend sent many burners, including comedian Chris Rock and DJ Diplo, fleeing from the Nevada desert. While it’s not unusual for a pool of tickets to be released in the weeks before festivities, the festival’s organizers have usually required those who want last-minute tickets to pre-register earlier in the year. Organizers have also reopened their ticket aid program, giving people access to lower-priced $220 tickets, to encourage newcomers and returning burners who were turned off by their experience last year. Those who snapped bunches up in the early rush to try to scalp those usually tough-to-get tickets later? They're getting burned badly. Demand for tickets at Burning Man — the notorious Nevada desert festival beloved by Silicon Valley elites — has cooled, with the event failing to sell out for the first time in years. The festival usually attracts artists, activists and revellers, known as Burners, to a sprawling stretch of the Black Rock Desert for a week of uninhibited celebration. Free love and drugs are said to be warmly embraced among the hedonistic crowd and each year reports of an “Orgy Dome” raise eyebrows among those unfamiliar with the festival’s excesses. I'm not sure if organizers looked around before setting prices and crowd expectations, but Silicon Valley has had a rough year of it. From thousands upon thousands of tech workers at all levels losing their jobs to companies leaving the Bay area and taking those salaries with them to the failure of a number of tech-related Silicon banks. ...The 44,900 tech layoffs in the Bay Area consist of about 10,300 job cuts in 2022, nearly 21,600 layoffs in 2023 and about 13,000 staffing reductions by the high-tech sector during the first half of 2024, according to the WARN letters on file with the state EDD. Have they seen downtown San Francisco lately, or is it too dangerous for them to go anymore? I don't know that I'd blame the weather for their little party losing its glow.

Burning Man seems to have lost his fire...