Burning Man Co-Founder John Law Says the Festival Has “Lost Its Soul”
As Burning Man's 40th edition kicks off in Black Rock City, co-founder John Law published an essay arguing the event he helped create has "lost its soul" to Silicon Valley wealth.
As tens of thousands of burners set up camp for the 40th edition of Burning Man — running August 30 through September 7, 2026 in Black Rock City, Nevada — one of the people who built the thing says he barely recognizes it. Co-founder John Law, who helped move the event to the Black Rock Desert back in 1990, published a blistering essay in The San Francisco Standard over the opening weekend arguing that Burning Man has “lost its soul.”
Law isn’t a casual critic sniping from the sidelines — he’s a genuine founder who walked away after the 1996 event and never came back. In the essay, he describes the modern festival as “barely recognizable” from what he and his collaborators created, calling today’s version top-down, hierarchical and status-driven, a far cry from the anarchist free-for-all it started as.
His timeline for when things went sideways? The late-’90s WIRED cover story, which he says opened the floodgates for Silicon Valley. Law name-checks Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as the wave of tech royalty that adopted the event wholesale — followed by the plug-and-play camps, private chefs and charter flights that now define the playa’s wealthier corners. He even takes aim at the famous “10 Principles,” noting they weren’t some founding document at all but were added retroactively in 2004.
Does he have a point? The tension isn’t exactly new — every year brings another round of discourse about influencers and billionaire camps. But hearing it from an actual co-founder, published while the event is literally happening, hits different than another Reddit thread.
It also lands during an unusually bumpy run-up to this year’s burn. Attendees were already dealing with longer travel times from Hawk Fire recovery near Reno, and the dance music side of the playa looks different too, with Mayan Warrior pausing its legendary art car this year in favor of the new Discosmos camp.
Worth remembering: none of this seems to be denting demand. The event keeps selling out, and for a lot of first-timers, the version Law is mourning is one they never knew existed. Whether that’s evolution or erosion probably depends on which side of 1996 you first heard about Burning Man.
The Man burns Saturday night, September 5. The argument about what it means will outlast the embers — it always does.
