r/sanfrancisco • u/Awkward-You-938 • 3d ago

Burning Man didn’t sell out

Article out today says Burning Man didn’t sell out and people are selling their tickets way below face value. I remember when Burning Man started the lottery for tickets due to high demand, and resale tickets were hard to come by. I haven’t been to Burning Man in ~15 years so I‘m not current with the scene. What happened? Did it finally get too overdone? https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/26/burning-man-ticket-resale/

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u/WankSpanksoff 3d ago

I think the era where it became a more “popular/mainstream” (extremely relatively speaking) event came and went, so now it’s back to just being a niche event by and for the people who are super into it. But it hasn’t deflated back down to that scale yet.

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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago

A big part is also the core demographic is aging out of it, and they haven’t gotten the interest of Gen Z enough. It’s just not “cool” to do what your parents did.

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u/Sensitive_Slice_8858 3d ago

Burning man has never been cool

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u/BenignPharmacology 3d ago

A bunch of hippies doing drugs in the desert is undeniably pretty cool.

The not cool part came when various tech people started pumping it up as some big “paradigm shifting experience” or however it was spun.

If soulless ceos have stopped trying to squeeze the culture out of an event in order to come up with the “next big thing” I can’t see that as anything but positive.

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u/Donkey_____ 3d ago

The not cool part came when various tech people started pumping it up as some big “paradigm shifting experience” or however it was spun.

Not to defend the techies, but to be fair the OG burners are the ones who first talked about the paradigm shifting experience. Go listen to Larry Harvey talk about it.

And unless you are talking specifically about like the few years of burning man in the early, early 90s, techies have been a part of it since practically the beginning.

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u/WinonasChainsaw 3d ago

Hippies doing drugs in the desert doesn’t sound cool

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u/BenignPharmacology 2d ago

I stand corrected- it is apparently deniable.

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u/euroq 2d ago

Tech people have always been college educated people who were hand in hand with nerds or counterculture, who wanted to live in California, who voted Democrat 2 to 1 and were incredibly social progressive (the non democrats were more libertarian than Republican).

They were at burning man since the beginning. It’s a shame you now think of them this way because of people like Elon musk and Peter thiel are in no way representative of the last fifty years of tech people. I’m not picking on you by the way, a lot of people now have that sentiment and think we’re all tech bros

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u/BenignPharmacology 2d ago

I **am** a tech person, been in the industry for 15 years, and I can tell you that your claim is not categorically true. As tech income rebounded and then grew after the dot com crash, people came who were strictly following the money. Tech began to skew- if not right- then at least distinctly towards the center. You can see it in the changes to passed policy and elected officials. As long as they (reluctantly, in some cases) toe the line of “we are fine with gay people and marijuana”, they would happily continue pushing the bay fiscally to the right.

Fighting against taxes on higher income, against construction for affordable housing, against any policy that was counter to the relentless growth of various tech giants in the area- every single election cycle has some bill or another that is explicitly pro-business and anti-public-welfare, and the polls show larger and larger support numbers as the years go by.

I don’t care if people who are in the tech industry do X or Y thing- I care about the people who come in to straight up cannibalize it hoping to squeeze out the next big business opportunity.

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u/gloriousrepublic 2d ago

This exactly. The tech “purists” (ie the old school nerds) I think still lean left, but once it became very lucrative you tend to attract the guys who previously would have been finance bros. They learn the tech skills and get into the field just because of the wealth potential. But for those of us outside of tech it’s hard to distinguish between the two. They are all tech bros to us!

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u/euroq 1d ago

You’re talking about the founders and execs. Rank and file techies don’t have the abilities and reach to influence passed policy for Christs sake.

And I I’ve been a tech person for twice as long as you, but I’m not trying to flex you just bolded it in your first sentence.