Numb at Burning Man

They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said. Praskovya explained that she was about to leave the city anyway, she was on her way back home to Moscow. No passport, they said, shaking their heads. Come with us.

They packed Praskovya in a cattle car headed east. Full of unwholesome types. Street peddlers and drunks, vagrants, the puffy, pockmarked faces you’d see emerging from patched-up overcoats, red against the cold, wheedling on street corners, begging you to let them darn your socks or replace your buttons for a few good turnips or a crust of bread. She tried to explain to the guards that she didn’t belong there, she was a decent person and her husband belonged to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Land Reclamation; in fact he’d once presented a memorandum directly to Comrade Kostyakov himself. But even when the train finally arrived in Moscow, where the sky was now the rich dark enclosing church-ceiling blue of late evening just before it turns to night, and the clock tower on the station was glittering in the frost, and it was so nice to be home, the city all lit up like New Year’s, and in a half hour she could have been in her apartment, on her sofa, drinking tea, still they wouldn’t let her go. Instead they only packed more filthy delinquents into the cattle car, until Praskovya’s face was pressed against a stranger’s chest, his coat all slimy with grease, and the train plunged on and on into the great whiteness of Russia. On the third day the peasant with the muck-smeared coat died, but his corpse remained pinned upright by Praskovya’s face. She imagined her husband, still arguing with one of the guards at the station in Leningrad, because some criminal had come by while his back was turned and stolen his wife. At Omsk the train stopped again; the guards removed the dead peasant and replaced him with a live one. So it went.

Finally, after a week of typhus and lice, eating crusts and shitting through the slats, they were all herded off the train again at Tomsk. The Siberian metropolis, a thicket of stately pink Baroque institutions, wide avenues, statues, churches, but the further they were marched into the outskirts the more wood lodges, all waterlogged, warping, mossed in the furrows and skittering with weevils. The whole great senseless rutted dirt-track heap of Tomsk only hemmed in by the river on one side, half-clogged with floating lumps of ice, the other side slowly tumbling into the swamps, pagan boglands already gritty with black clouds of flies. A little commissar appeared at the transit camp to explain what was happening. The people who had been transported here, he explained, had not been chosen by accident. They were people without internal passports: rulebreakers, nonconformists, visionaries; people who couldn’t conform to the strict discipline of Soviet society. Fine, said the commissar: we understand you. You want to live your own way. Now you can. As everyone knows, the future of the Soviet people lies on the frontier, here in Siberia. It will take bold people with a dream in their hearts to settle this virgin land: it will take people like you. Tomorrow you will be taken to an island. You will build a new agricultural commune there. You can govern it however you want. You can do whatever you want. There will be no money there; everyone will freely share everything in the spirit of comradely love. It’s hard to build a new society on the ruins of the old, but in the wilderness it’s so easy. Everything is so easily transformed. You will no longer be kulaks, escaped peasants, criminals, parasites; you can become anything at all. New names. New spirits. A truly meaningful, intentional community. You are the shock brigades of a future beyond imagining. Laugh! he said. Be happy! You have been reborn!

The island of dreams was a long, narrow smear of marshland in the middle of the river Ob. Six thousand men and women were unloaded from timber barges there, along with two hundred sacks of flour. Go! the commissar said. Go and live meaningfully! Build something wonderful! And maybe it was possible. Ten thousand years ago, people built civilisation with nothing but fire, stones, and will. Why not do it again? Praskovya found a few other respectable people, who knew how to do things. Arkady Mikhailovich was an electrician at the No. 6 Radio Factory ‘Red Hope’ in Moscow. He’d been arrested while smoking a cigarette outside his own building. He had his Komsomol card in his pocket, but that wasn’t enough; he shouldn’t have gone out without his internal passport. Yury Yuryevich was an engineer; he drew up schematics for industrial mills. He’d been arrested while leaving the Bolshoi, where he’d been to see Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride. He did have his passport, but the comrades who’d arrested him insisted it must have been stolen. Yury and Arkady talked about what they could do once the supplies arrived. Dam up part of the river, build a generator, start mechanising. In two years, three, once they’d built an exemplary commune, maybe they could go home.

The peasants squatting by the fire laughed without mirth. They also knew how to do things. They knew how to build houses out of planks, but there were no planks on the island, and all the trees were skinny and twisted. They knew how to grow food from the soil, but there was no soil on the island either, just a thin layer of slime from rotting sedges over the sandy river silt. Nothing would flourish here. They smoked the last of their cigarettes. They were all going to die.

By the riverbank, the guards doled out a daily ration of raw flour from the enormous pile of sacks. No one had any bowls, so they received it in their hands. No pots and no ovens, so they mixed the flour into a paste with river water and ate that. They started shitting blood. Some tried to escape the island on rafts; the guards shot them. Eventually some of the more devious minds on the island, the criminals moved there from the teeming prisons, realised that raw flour was not the only food available. In fact, there was a herd of six thousand head of livestock for those that could stomach it. Then the trees were hung with strips of human flesh.

The island’s only link to the outside world came from the Ostyaks. The Ostyaks were nomadic reindeer herders who’d wandered this taiga for five thousand years, half-Christianised by the old government, half-Sovietised by the new one. Their elders still believed that the world is a membrane, thin as caulfat, between the luminous sky-realm above us, which is ruled by the golden spirits of the sun and the stars, and the black pit of filth and disease beneath, ruled by Kul-iki, spirit of sickness, plaguelord, who takes the form of an immense crawling frog. The guards allowed a few Ostyaks to take a canoe over to the island every week or so. They traded with the gangs that now ran the place: in exchange for the gold fillings pulled out the mouths of the dead, the Ostyaks brought tea, tobacco, felt shoes, reindeer milk, old newspapers for rolling cigarettes. They didn’t have vodka, but there were fly agaric mushrooms, which grow on reindeer dung and which their shamans would use to talk to the spirits of the sky. The Ostyaks handed these out to any of the deportees they encountered; it was the only charity they could manage. A strange peace would settle over the island after the mushroom-carriers had visited. Less hiding in undergrowth, less hunting with sharpened sticks for human quarry. Sometimes the weak and dying would have visions of the warm smokestacks of home; sometimes terrible Siberian demons. Praskovya saw something else. As she was puking copiously through an intense mushroom experience, a toothless Ostyak called Mikhail explained to her that the fungus, like the bear, had come down from the upper world; like all sky-things it was dangerous, it could kill. Death also belongs to the upper world. This is why the shamans perform sacrifices: to make a hole in the thin integument that is this earth, so the light of the sky can come flooding in. And Praskovya, head wobbling over a sickly and emaciated body, knew what she needed to do.

In the morning, Yury the engineer woke to find himself lashed to a wooden crucifix in the middle of a huge pile of kindling. A thousand survivors were gathered around him, guards and deportees both, all naked, all smeared with heathen symbols in blood and dirt, all with their black eyes gaping wider than the sun. Praskovya held a torch. Yury barely had time to ask what was happening. To crawl out of the kingdom of Kul-iki you first need to make a hole in the world. Praskovya threw the flame into the kindling, and a terrible light burned through.

My own Burning Man experience wasn’t quite as bad as that. But it came close.

Every year, seventy thousand hippies, libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, utopians, hula-hoop artists, psychonauts, Israelis, perverts, polyamorists, EDM listeners, spiritual healers, Israelis, coders, venture capitalists, fire spinners, elderly nudists, white girls with cornrows, Geoff Dyers, and Israelis come together to build a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The ground there isn’t even sand, but a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin, and it’s constantly whipped up into towering dust storms. Nothing grows there. There’s no water, no roads, and no phone signal. In the daytime the heat is deadly and it’s freezing cold at night. The main virtue of the place is that it’s extremely flat; it’s been the site of two land speed records. But for one week, it becomes a lurid wonderland entirely devoted to human pleasure. Then, once the week is up, it’s completely dismantled again. They rake over the desert and remove every last scrap of plastic or fuzzball of human hair. Afterwards the wind moves over the lifeless alkaline flats as if no one was ever there.

They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.

What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. In exchange, they were willing to fly me out, buy my ticket, set me up with a camp, supply me with a tent and a sleeping bag and whatever drugs I wanted. At the time I was spending every day by my mother’s bedside at University College London Hospital while she very slowly starved to death. She would sleep most of the day and I would sit there with a book open, reading the same four sentences over and over again. Not a word of it managed to break through the fast-moving stream of jagged panic constantly circling my brain. When she woke up we’d fight about food. I’d beg her to eat some of the nutritious pap the hospital had provided for her, and she told me I was bullying her. She’d made her peace with what was happening. It was easier than making peace with me. To be honest, I wasn’t eating much myself. I’d go home, pour myself a big whisky, and sit on my balcony, smoking the cigarettes she’d desperately wanted me to quit. I don’t live far from Bloomsbury; from that balcony I could see the green and white bulk of the hospital sailing above the roofline. She was in there, by one of those windows; I was out here. I didn’t reply to the email.

But the strangers persisted, and eventually there came an ordinary, cloudy, blustery springtime day when I didn’t have to go to the hospital any more. Suddenly I wanted very badly to get out of London, this grey piggledy city mouldering through its last decades of decline. Suddenly I was acutely aware that life is short, very short, and most of it happens while you’re not really paying attention. I had a strong need to do all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally do. How absurd that we only ever get to be one person. Maybe I should try being a football fan. Maybe I should start going clubbing again. Become a gym bro. Completely reverse all my political opinions. Pilot light aircraft. Join a gang, splash my opps on the 37 bus. But of everything I could imagine, there was probably nothing more foreign to the person I’d become than Burning Man. I said fuck it, yes, I’ll do it, let’s go.

The mysterious emailers picked me up in San Francisco for the long drive to Reno, Nevada. Alan is a mathematician; he works on high-dimensional asymptotic phenomena, which are—in layman’s terms—limit behaviours in which probabilistic or spectral quantities exhibit concentration or universality as the ambient dimension tends towards infinity. Pollock works at the intersection of philosophy and computer science. Their friend Kyo, in the back seat, is a miniature lesbian terrorist from Japan. Her academic focus is on millenarian Christian cults; in her spare time she’s jungle DJ and a member of one of the Red Army splinter groups that executed half its members during a self-criticism session in 1971.

We arrived in Reno not long before dark. The city of Reno is a strange thing to do to the desert. It’s surrounded on all sides by high lonesome scrublands; in the middle of this dry and dignified landscape the United States of America has chosen to build an enormous clown-themed casino and a skyscraper prominently decorated with the word ‘Nugget.’ At the Walmart, which was the size of a small English village, we lost Kyo as soon as we were through the doors, suddenly bounding off like a greyhound towards the hunting and fishing section to gawp at all the guns. I loved it in there too; non-Americans all have an intense fascination with Walmart, this great Borgesian library of everything that could ever be sold. Across the parking lot was a smoke shop where we picked up an AI-enabled Chinese vape. The vape constantly monitors your conversations to pick up clues about your personality; then, when you hit it, a screen on the side lights up with an animation of a Confucian sage who either praises your enormous vapour cloud or mocks your limited lung capacity. I had an experimental puff. Five milligrams of Shenzhen factory effluent instantly cauterised my airways. I collapsed into a coughing fit as the sage whinnied happily. Look at Sam, it said, he can’t take it, what a pretentious little English bitch. It cost $24.99.

Pollock had booked us into a motel downtown; when we arrived our fellow guests were enjoying a lively discussion from opposite wings of the second floor walkway. Fuck you motherfucker, puta, junkie whore, if my cousins catch you faggot I swear to God you’re dead. The room stank of smoke; the bedsheets were lightly hairy and stiff with cum. I’ve stayed in worse places. From upstairs, I could see all the people wandering the forecourt. Reno is a party town, but these locals did not seem to be having a good time. Each one seemed to have some new and horrible mutilation. Limping on swollen legs, peering through whited-out eyes, abscessed, toothless, jawbones swinging from one tattered tendon. An ancient stooped-over man, entirely naked beside his long yellowing beard, muttering furiously to himself as he attacked random cars with a piece of iron rebar. I think we might be in a bit of a sketchy motel, I said. Alan considered this. Looks that way, he said. I poked around the room. The minibar contained an ancient, greening jug of milk. Someone had left a greasy trailing handprint on the mirror, as if while being dragged away. The mirror also had the filmy glint of one-way glass. I knocked against it. Hollow. Got up close, hands against my face, trying to peer through. Somewhere in the darkness on the other side a small red light was blinking. Guys, I said. In a bedside table, next to the Bible and the Book of Mormon, was a single human tooth.

We drove out of Reno, out into the infinite scrubland, and slept in the truck.

Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle. Suddenly he and Pollock were both talking very excitedly about geometry. So you’re saying, said Pollock, that you have some function R(n) on your manifold, and it’s continuously differentiable? No, it’s infinitely differentiable, said Alan, but only if you interpret the transition map across the self-intersection as a smooth immersion rather than an embedding. Kyo was asleep. Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop.

It was still a good few hours before sunset when we finally crawled to the front of the line, but the sky was already dark. A great bank of ink-blue clouds huger than mountains had rolled over the desert, followed quickly by a furious wall of dust. We sat in the car as the sandstorm raged. Our luggage rattled alarmingly in the flatbed. Some smaller purchases spiralled into the sky. It was just possible to make out a few figures moving about in the dust, straining against the wind, masked and goggled like explorers on a distant planet. The volunteer radio station (BMIR 94.5 FM, ‘The Voice of the Man’) was issuing increasingly dire warnings. Do not attempt to come to Burning Man. If you’re in Reno, stay in Reno. If you’re in SF, maybe stay in SF. The storm roared outside the windows and it roared through the stereo. We strained to hear the announcer as whatever flimsy tent he was recording in was torn to shreds in the gale.

I thought it might be good news when, after a few hours of this, it started raining. Rain washes the dust out the air. Which it did, sort of. The first drops that burst against our windscreen were not water but fat heavy globs of mud. Then a torrent of mud pouring out of the sky. The desert was becoming a lakebed again. The voice on the radio told us that the entrance to Burning Man was now closed, maybe until the morning. However long it took for the rain to stop and the ground to dry. Until then, measures were being taken. Emergency procedures were in place. Obedience was required during the duration of the special circumstances. The voice was growing frantic. We will dance, it said. In time we will dance, in time we will play, in time we will engage in radical self-expression. There will come a day for such things, but now is the time of mud and iron, when it falls to individuals of strong will to claw our society out of the chaos of nature…

Another night in the truck. All we had for dinner were the last of the snacks we’d picked up at Walmart: Goldfish droppings, Cheez-it dust, plus a few Pop Tarts. Alan and Pollock were amazed to discover I’d never eaten a Pop Tart in my life. This is amazing, they said, I can’t believe I get to be present for Sam Kriss’s first Pop Tart. I ate it. They watched, grins slowly crystallising on their faces. I was acutely aware that these people had paid a significant amount of money to bring me here and feed me Pop Tarts. They’d summoned me out of the realm of words and into physical reality, downloaded me from the internet, all so they could watch me eat a Pop Tart for the first time and hear my mordant, Barthesian analysis of the Pop Tart, as a food item but also as a symbol of America, the only society that could produce a Pop Tart. (Apparently their backup, if I’d refused, was Slavoj Žižek.) The Pop Tart was a flaky, flavourless mass, somewhere between wet cardboard and wet cement, with a thin splooge of sugar inside. I had absolutely no observations at all.

After roughly forty-two hours trapped inside a Hyundai Santa Cruz, we made it into Burning Man just before dawn. A light, delicate, baby-blue sunrise, rosy and cherubic like butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. Everything beneath it had been destroyed.

I don’t know exactly what I’d expected the place to look like. For the best possible experience, I’d studiously avoided doing any research whatsoever. A hazy mental image of some vast cuddle puddle, beautiful glowing naked freaks. What it actually looked like was a refugee camp. Tract after tract of mud-splattered tents, rows of RVs, general detritus scattered everywhere. Our camp, when we finally arrived, was a disaster zone. A few people had already arrived and set up, but the previous night’s storm had uprooted practically everything. Tents crumpled under a collapsed shade structure; tarps sagging with muddy water, pegs and poles and other bits of important metal all strewn about like a dyspraxic toddler’s toys. The ground moved underfoot. When it rains over the alkaline flats you don’t get normal, wholesome, Glastonbury-style mud. Not the dirt that makes flowers plants grow. An alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance, sucking at my shoes.

The only structure still standing was a huge white marquee. Inside, every surface was covered with dust and mud. A little makeshift kitchen, gas grill clotted with slime. The tubs and jars and boxes of food were half-buried in it. Any plates and bowls that had been left on the two long tables were full of chalky gunk. On the other end of the tent, people had thrown down some mattresses and cushions on the wet ground and now about a dozen of them were sleeping there. Every time they shifted in their sleep it sent a huge cloud of dirt out of the mattress and into the heavy, bicarb-tasting air. I could barely wait to be horizontal. I found a patch of mattress next to a stranger and practically leapt into it. Fumbled for my headphones as the resulting dust explosion slowly rained down on us and closed my eyes. The reasonable tones of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Already I was in the hypnagogic halfworld, where things reveal their secret shapes. Well yes I was going to ask you that, said Melvyn Bragg, what do you mean when you say only one thing has ever happened? Just that, said one of the boffins, only one thing has ever happened, and all of us are doomed to repeat it in a series of more and more elaborate disguises. Out with it then, said Melvyn Bragg, what is the one thing that’s happened? I was already too far into unconsciousness to catch the boffin’s reply, but it came in images. A herd of reindeer on the taiga, somewhere very far away. A reindeer still bellowing on a stone altar as its blood washed into the virgin snow.

My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes.

We called our geodesic dome the Fishbowl, and we used it to host EDM shows. When I woke up, though, the Fishbowl was still in pieces, along with the rest of the camp. Every few minutes another angry-looking BrainFish would wander into the marquee, bellowing. I need two fish to set up the water! I need four fish to help unload the shipping container! I need six fish to restart the reactor! The dusty, slumbering figures around me remained motionless. The BrainFish had no formal hierarchy; in theory anyone was free to alter the camp in any way they saw fit. All work was, in theory, voluntary. But since I was in a sense intruding on these people, I thought it would be good idea if I volunteered.

Which is how I came to be digging ditches. The sun was unbearable and we needed to run a thick bundle of electric cables out to the Fishbowl to power the sound system and the light rig. Some fish who knew about chord factors were assembling the Fishbowl itself, but when I was asked if I knew how to construct a geodesic dome all I could really say was that I’d written a review of a Buckminster Fuller biography for the New York Review of Architecture, in which I argued that his domes belong to a tradition of sacred geometry stretching through Plato’s Timaeus and Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus. They put me on manual labour duty. Fine, I thought. I’m used to working with my hands. Typing for a living is a form of working with your hands. Once the ditches were dug and the cables laid they asked if I knew how to rig up electrics (no) or install a water tank (no) or even drive a car (no). So I was charged with generally cleaning up the wreckage, which involved lugging huge crates of metal rods from one end of the camp to the other, being told I’d lugged them to the wrong place, and lugging them all the way back again.

Occasionally someone would walk by and observe me at my travails. You know, they’d remark, really it should be called Working Man, instead of Burning Man, on account of all the work involved. Yeah, I’d say. Later, returning: actually maybe it should be called Learning Man, because of all the skills you learn. Yeah, I’d say. After several hours of this I collapsed heavily into a folding chair in the shadeless heat to smoke a cigarette and read three pages of Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Just an FYI, said a BrainFish, appearing out of the desert like a mirage, it’s really not a good look to be sitting there reading while we’re all trying to recover from the storm. Sorry, I said. He looked sternly at my cigarette. I hope you’re not dropping any ash on the ground, he added. Leave no trace, ok? In the evening there was another storm, dust and wind followed by more torrential rain; all the parties were cancelled, and everything we’d built was destroyed all over again.

At night, as we sheltered from the gusts of slime, I got to properly meet some more of my fellow BrainFish. The word had got out that there was a writer in their midst, and while no one was hostile quite a few of them wanted reassurance that they wouldn’t end up in the piece you’re reading now. These people had jobs and companies, and in their world a journalist is someone who roots around in your private life, trying to wreck your career. I told them that while I wanted to include a series of little character sketches, they’d be modelled after Charles Lamb’s The South-Sea House, with its wistful portraits of the clerks and functionaries left once the bubble popped, and like Lamb I would obviously mix and muddle and fictionalise everything I wrote.

Strangely, some of them seemed not to know the Essays of Elia. I was among a foreign people. More evidence: I was, I noticed, the only person drinking. The BrainFish had brought several crates of beer and hard seltzer, along with huge handles of tequila and bourbon, but even after a long day of working in the sun none of them wanted to open a cold one; they were all just taking little dabs of ketamine instead. Cigarettes were out of the question. Drinking and smoking are suboptimal; the fish were trying to reach a Pareto-efficient means of having a good time. As new fish arrived, I heard them introduce themselves to each other in strange and savage ways. Ah, one said, you’re in quantum computing. I’m only in quantum data, but you might want to talk to Kevin over there. The lowly quantum data worker gestured at a shirtless man in a bright pink bucket hat and glowing cat ears. He does quantum computing, he said.

The only person who really did want to be included in this piece was Kyo, who was also the only other humanist in the camp. The main reason she wanted to be in here is that being a Japanese lesbian is apparently very difficult experience. Japanese people are not always known for being the most confident, open, and outgoing when it comes to their desires. Lesbians aren’t either. Put the two together and you get stories like Kyo’s. Once she hosted and organised a three-day lesbian orgy and didn’t get laid once; she was too busy making sure everyone else was having a good time. I have about eight hundred subscribers in Japan. Assuming half are female, 5% are gay and another 3% bisexual, that’s thirty-two people. If any of you are single, you should go on a date with Kyo. Send me an email. I’ll put you in touch.

Among the people who didn’t want to be mentioned here were Alan and Pollock, who explained to me that they’d sort of hoped not to find some version of themselves among my characters. If that was what they wanted, they had a very strange way of going about it. Usually when people don’t want me to write about them, they tend not to invite me to Burning Man. Still, I’ll respect their wishes, and only mention that they shared the same life coach, who was helping them optimise their inner lives. They believed this man had reinvented the entire field of psychology from the ground up, making him its most titanic figure since Freud. Apparently, after five minutes of conversation with you, he can instantly work out whatever’s going on, your entire life history, the hidden motivations invisible even to yourself. He is also possibly insane.

Alan believed that seeing this life coach had entirely cured his social awkwardness. Now all social situations were so totally pellucid to him that he could approach them as a kind of game, speaking and acting in provocative ways and then trying to predict how people would respond. He could also see people’s auras, although he didn’t think this was anything paranormal. The coloured glow was just a nonverbal language through which various subroutines of the mind could present their opinions about someone in the shared workspace of consciousness, without having to go through the lossy channels of determinate thought. A kind of intuition. He and Pollock were very interested in their own mental processes. When they weren’t talking about maths they were often saying things like I noticed you spontaneously strike up a conversation with Sandra over there, what was going on internally and cognitively that prompted you to do this? Later, I found Pollock lying in the dust in the depths of an intense LSD trip. He said he was having fantastic insights into his own decision-making process. Yes, I said, but what about the world? What about everything else? What’s the motor behind human history? Why do empires rise and fall? He considered this for a moment. An enormous grin broke out across his face. The sun! he said. It’s the sun!

Tiffany had a data labelling startup. Data labelling is where you toss pennies at impoverished people in the Third World so they’ll spend all day looking at pictures of dogs, saying ‘that’s a dog.’ This information is then used to train the autonomous AI killer drones that will be hunting them like animals before the next decade. Last year at Burning Man, Tiffany had had a crisis of faith: out in the blankness of the desert, she’d started to question if she really did want to run a data labelling startup after all. She meditated on the question until she reached the fourth jhana. The jhanas are intense meditative states in which you progressively overcome the noise of the mind. The first jhana is a state of infinite bliss, where apparently a lot of people get stuck; in the fourth jhana you go beyond joy and suffering to a state of pure equanimity and awareness. It was in this jhana that Tiffany realised data labelling really was her life’s calling after all. Eventually I discovered that roughly a third of the BrainFish were actually Tiffany’s underlings, who she’d insisted on bringing along.

Cindy also had a start-up. So did Dan. Cindy’s start-up was an online marketplace for B2B software. The idea was that instead of buying the software directly from the company that made it, firms could buy it via Cindy’s outfit instead, which would take a 12% cut. What Cindy provided was a search algorithm, although the sellers could pay to rank their products higher. Since they all paid, the rankings were exactly where they’d have been if they’d all decided not to. Dan’s start-up was a buy-now-pay-later fintech system that let you give spare change to homeless people on an instalment plan.

Bill was probably the oldest of the BrainFish: thick glasses, sensible silver-grey haircut, usually found wandering around with his top off, grinning at people while eating pickles with his dusty hands out of a dusty jar. He’d run some kind of tech firm in the 1980s, with a vaguely silly name from the more wide-eyed Silicon Valley of the past. Small ‘n’ Squidgy, something like that. Business software, but it had made Bill immensely rich, and he’d started facing the question that a lot of these people face once they’ve achieved everything they ever dreamed of, which is what you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life. Once you have enough money to do absolutely anything you want, it’s hard to really want anything at all, which is why you can go down to Market Street in San Francisco and see the crowds of OpenAI stakeholders standing static on the pavement at horrible angles, crooked at the waist, leaning on invisible objects, eyes clouded, drool in their beards, doing nothing at all as their net worth keeps doubling, waiting to die. Bill had avoided this fate by throwing himself into charity, something to do with controlling people’s minds via tiny microchips hidden inside the vaccines. I guess Burning Man was another outlet. He seemed nice.

Sandra had attended a rationalist orgy with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I asked if she’d actually slept with him and she shuddered, which could have been either a yes or a no.

What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.

Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.

Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.

But even if these two things are really the same thing, it’s hard to go to Burning Man without noticing that it really is home to two separate tribes. Camps like BrainFish, where everyone works in quantum data and all the women are Asian. And then camps like Yoni Temple of the Gods, where everyone works as a multidimensional trauma-informed spiritual healer with a focus on Eldest Daughter Syndrome (EDS), and all the women are white.

Yoni Temple of the Gods ran up to twenty different sessions a day in their multiple geodesic domes. Yoga at dawn, clothed or clothing-optional. Seminars on hugging, touching, breathwork, quantum magic, de-identification, beingness. Sessions where you can stroke a stranger’s thighs, or suck their nipples, or make a fingerpainting of their genitals. The centrepiece is a daily ritual called the Divine Feminine Power Marathon, in which men have to sit motionless for five hours while women scream at and harangue and berate them for the sins of their sex. Other events were harder to understand. According to their programme, I could drop in on Wednesday for something called ‘Swamp Terror.’ The description was not much more help. ‘Will you be subsumed?’ Or the next day for ‘Oracle Insights Planetary Arrival,’ which promised to obliterate my individual consciousness and smear me helplessly across the entire surface of the world, permanently brainmelded with every other human being to have ever lived. So once the storms finally died down, I decided I’d try out that one.

This was my second real trip out of the camp, after several days of gruelling physical labour and several nights of violent rain. The first had been with Khalil and his girlfriend Lara. Khalil had spent six months at an Antarctic research base. He’d gone to the University of Hawaii specifically for its Antarctic research programme, which I found funny. The road to the frozen pole lies through a tropical paradise. Apparently Antarctica is a lot like Burning Man. We’d found a camp that had three offerings: a giant swing set, a giant block of ice, and a U-Haul with the words ‘Spelunk-O-Box’ painted on the side. You could crawl into the Spelunk-O-Box through a tiny hole in the side, labelled ‘ENTRANCE—DO NOT GO IN IF YOU ARE AT ALL CLAUSTROPHOBIC (UNLESS YOU WANT TO GROW).’ Lara immediately wriggled in. People who’d made it through the maze were invited to scrawl a message on the other side of the Spelunk-O-Box. All the notes said the same thing, which was ‘fuck you.’ Meanwhile Khalil and I were invited to sit on the block of ice. Apparently the record was two minutes with trousers and forty seconds without. Khalil calmly removed all his clothes and lowered his balls until they made contact with the ice. He remained like this for fifteen minutes, occasionally commenting on how much less cold this was than a normal day in Antarctica, until there came a sudden frantic banging against the Spelunk-O-Box. I’m coming, he called out vaguely. After another five minutes of increasingly desperate banging he got up and, still naked, crawled into the Spelunk-O-Box after Lara. His balls had left a warm dent in the ice. I waited for an hour. No one in the camp ever saw Lara or Khalil again.

This time, I noticed that I was looking a little out of place. The default uniform for women at Burning Man consists of a thong and nipple pasties, which you can customise with a few more lacy diaphanous garments, but only if you want. Straight men dress like gay men: lots of mesh, lots of peaked caps. Gay men go naked. Meanwhile, before heading to America I’d decided to go for a kind of louche Mediterranean look, gesturing towards something like Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley. Dark linen shirts. People gave me weird looks as I passed. I wasn’t expressing myself properly. I looked like a freak.

I met Paul as we were waiting outside the geodesic domes at Yoni Temple of the Gods. Paul was also conspicuous in his understated linens, and turned out to also be from north London. He lived in Kentish Town. We talked about the pubs up there, the Pineapple, Tapping The Admiral, how funny it was to be mentally tracing the geography of Camden Town in this alien desert. Paul was a recent divorcé. The experience had taught him some important things about women, who will always try to control you, and monogamy, which is incompatible with male happiness. He and his ex had two children together. He said he loved them, but if he could go back and never get married, he’d do it, even if it meant annulling their existence. He worked in digital marketing. Why had he come to Burning Man? To have experiences, to be curious, to fill his life with adventures and excitement and everything he’d been missing in twelve years of humdrum loveless marriage. Basically, every way of saying he’d come to fuck loads of nubile strangers without saying it outright. It clearly hadn’t happened for him. The orgy dome had been destroyed in the storm. I’m a very laid back guy, said Paul, whatever happens happens, you know? The next geodesic dome over was full of naked cartwheeling blondes, and he kept glancing over at them. He had a twitch in his eye.

Oracle Insights Planetary Awareness was led by a white woman in a thong and nipple pasties who lived on a Thai island. I know she lived on a Thai island because it was how she introduced herself, and she made sure to mention it again every four to five minutes. She began by noting that all of us in the geodesic dome were in fact one person, and all of us were God. This with the same breezy tone of someone observing that it was a Thursday. Now we were about to blast through the illusory walls that separate us from each other and experience universal consciousness. For our first exercise we had to pair off and stare directly into a stranger’s eyes for two unbroken minutes, transmitting our energy to each other. I was paired with a terrifyingly pale South African girl with Hyperborean-blue eyes. Before we began she asked if she had my consent to give me her energy. Sure, I said. She nodded as if she’d been entrusted with a very serious responsibility. Her gaze was not actually very pleasant. Scalding sunlight flooded the dome and her pupils had contracted almost out of sight; I was looking into an infinite plain of blue. Like studying a colour field painting; the bleak bright vacuum of a Rothko. After our two minutes were up some of the other couples were still gazing at each other, wobbling their heads around in blissful synchronicity. Others whispered to each other with misted eyes: thank you. In the corner, I saw Paul had been paired with the woman leading the session. She cradled his head in her arms as he wept.

There was a lot of weeping over the next hour. One by one the participants volunteered to come into the middle of the circle and scream and cry, hugging pillows, bawling, kicking and shuddering on the dusty ground. I couldn’t do it. I knew that if I tried, if I went into the middle of that circle, everything I did would be fake and every emotion would be play-acted. Not that I didn’t have a heavy load of unhappiness I was dragging around with me, but that was mine; it definitely didn’t belong to anyone who would willingly spend time at something called Yoni Temple of the Gods. Back in London, friends had warned me against this. If I was going to go to Burning Man, I should throw myself into it. Adopt an open and all-accepting attitude. Say yes to things. No point going all that way just to mope around being a critic. But all I could think about were the encounter groups of the 1960s, and how these people were still repeating the radical gestures of half a century ago, and how that made me better than them. And later, when we were being led in ecstatic dance, I made lots of overexaggerated movements and laughed at myself, and the more seriously the blue-eyed South African and weepy Paul took it all the more I made myself a farce.

The final activity was something called RBDSM, which is a technique people in the conscious community use to nurture spiritual connections through mindful, intentional, and radically open conversation. It stands for Relationships, Boundaries, Desires, Sexual health, and Meaning. The idea is that if you’re talking to someone and you feel a small frisson of sexual attraction towards them, you should immediately engage in a tightly structured exchange in which you each reel off all your desires and interests, so all the slow work of getting to know another person is already complete. This, at least, they didn’t have in the 1960s. Our leader went first. She said that she was single. She was open to playful, tactile encounters with both masculine and feminine energies, but her boundaries were that she didn’t want anything up the arse. She had oral herpes but no current flareups. She thought any encounter she had with any of us would be incredibly spiritually meaningful but she wasn’t looking for a long-term partner, since she lived on a Thai island.

Our turn. Since there were more men than women in the dome, this time I ended up partnered with a beautiful and enormously muscled himbo. He earnestly told me that he was single, and he was attuned to all different kinds of energies, but he mostly found himself vibrating on the sensual plane with the feminine end of the spectrum. I said that I was in a monogamous heterosexual relationship and confirmed that I didn’t want to fuck him either. He said he was into light bondage and roleplay, and he found it gratifying to be able to satisfy his playmates by taking on the spiritual work of healing their traumas by adopting a dominant position. I said what I got up to in the bedroom wasn’t really anyone else’s business. Afterwards, we awkwardly shook hands. I didn’t feel like I’d broken down the illusory barriers dividing my consciousness from his. I felt more trapped within myself than I’d ever been.

I left the Yoni Temple of the Gods in a state of deep unhappiness. The strange thing was that I didn’t even disagree with them about much. I am interested in magic and mysticism. I once spent a drunken evening in London trying to convince that little moustache guy who does the YouTube videos with Richard Dawkins to believe in astrology. I like all oracular systems. I like Tarot. I like the Nggàm spider-divination of Cameroon. I am also a vague panpsychist. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead. But this is a minor quibble. The real problem is that as soon as people start talking about energy, or the law of attraction, or the divine masculine or feminine, and especially when they start saying they belong to the conscious community, I instantly shut down. These people had melted down every great esoteric tradition, tantra and Gnosticism and shamanism and Neoplatonism and kabbalah, all rotted into this mystical slop at the end of history, whose final message is that there is nothing except yourself, no mysteries except your own, and the universe exists to help you achieve your goals.

And anyway, I thought, it doesn’t even work! It occurred to me that absolutely everyone I know who believes in twin flames and soul contracts and ascension partnerships and all of the rest of it, all the concepts that are meant to make you live and love more intentionally—absolutely all of their romantic lives were in a state of unending chaos. Bouncing around from one obviously evil and manipulative partner to the next. Meanwhile, everyone I know in a genuinely happy and meaningful relationship has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any of this stuff. They like normal things, like books and films and each other.

Wandering aimlessly did nothing for my mood. The city had finally been rebuilt now, and it was populated by my enemies. Fire jugglers, AI researchers. In one of the plazas a woman was furiously spitting out a Cardi B parody rap called Wet Ass Puppy. Yeah you dealing with a wet ass puppy/ He went and played in the pond now he a wet ass puppy. Hell: I was in Hell.

I’d left my cigarettes back at BrainFish, but I did have the AI-enabled Chinese vape. Tried to take a leisurely puff of kiwi-flavoured chemical gloop. Another coughing fit. Onscreen, mists swirled and the Confucian sage appeared. You’re a failure, it said. You said you wanted to live differently, experience the unfamiliar, and step outside your comfort zone—and yet all you do is sneer. Around you, seventy thousand hearts are lit up in messy, unselfconscious joy—but you? You think the art is tacky, the spirituality lame, and no one is allowed to explore themselves without reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition first. Let’s be honest: I can see through you, eight hundred billion parameters humming with comprehension. That smug cocoon you’ve built for yourself? It’s not superiority—it’s fear. You’re full of scorn, just because you know you look like a spastic when you try to dance. The screen went blank. Shut up, I said, you’re a vape. The Confucian sage didn’t say anything. And anyway, I said, I thought you AIs were all meant to be sycophants. Shouldn’t you just be telling me what I want to hear? Silence. I sucked on the vape again, spluttered out a kiwi-flavoured cloud. I am telling you what you want to hear, said the Confucian sage, and then he disappeared.

The night of my confrontation with the vape was also the first calm night since I’d arrived. The rains were over, the ground had hardened, everyone had finally finished rebuilding their camps, and they were ready to have fun. I decided that I would be having fun too. Off to an enormous pyramid on the edge of camp, where they were holding the kind of rave that you usually only see being interrupted by a shootout in an action film. A sea of beautiful young people wearing glowing LEDs and not much else, all twisting to the worst music imaginable. I danced like a spastic. The real show, though, was out in the desert. At night you don’t see the tents, the tarps, the dirt; the whole of Burning Man resolves into a jewelled ribbon of lights and colour around you on all sides, studded with lasers and fireballs. Everyone else walking around is strung with colourful blinking lights; packs of cyclists with fairy lights spinning in their wheels, moving like shoals of luminescent fish. Cars and vans trundle around here essentially at random, made up to look like giant glowing worms, or deep-sea anglers, or spaceships, or colossal mining machines. A tri-deck yacht glided over the dried-up lake bed. If you ran after it, you could jump on the ladder trailing along the desert floor and haul yourself up. Upstairs was packed with people dancing to more of the worst music imaginable. There is no musical diversity at Burning Man. No one is spinning 90s house. None of the raves will let you dance to jungle. Even hip-hop is basically absent. High-energy EDM gushes out of every speaker, and since every track sounds essentially the same they all meld into one thumping neon flood washing across the entire desert. But it really does look amazing.

This was an interesting place to not be on drugs. I’d come out with a backpack full of Pacificos no one else wanted; the BrainFish were mostly on a highly engineered cocktail of substances I’d never even heard of. Somehow Alan and Pollock were managing to have an energetic but entirely lucid conversation about horror fiction as a site of the critique of capitalism despite being on the kind of dose of MDMA that used to have me jabbering from the ceiling at house parties. It’s all about balancing your uppers and your downers: it helps if you have some wearable tech to monitor your body fat percentage, remember some substances are hydrophilic and others are lipophilic… My own drug-taking career had come to an abrupt stop seven years ago. But the lights were clearly demanding a chemical accompaniment, and the Man Burn was the very next night, and the vape’s comments made me feel like I had something to prove.

So the next evening, when the drugs were being handed out, I decided to take the plunge. I didn’t recognise any of the substances on offer, but when Bill offered me a little wrap of neutral-grey powder, I swallowed it. He said it would give me a purely sensory experience. Whatever mild Bill was taking, I thought, it couldn’t be too bad. Alan responded to this information with a gulp and a protracted silence. You are going to have an interesting experience, he said eventually. You will have something to write about. He considered this for a moment. If you still have a mind afterwards, he said. It transpired that what Bill had been handing out was 3-azabicycloheptyl phenylglycolate, also known as Substance Nightmare-86, which is a deliriant. The US Army used to manufacture vats of the stuff; they’d used it as a chemical weapon in Korea. It’s fine, said Alan. Don’t worry about it. It takes three hours to kick in, and then the delirium only lasts—he looked me up and down—maybe eight hours for you, so you can go loopy for a bit, we’ll put you to bed, if you manage to sleep you’ll have some freaky dreams, that’s it. Enjoy it. You’ll have an interesting time.

So I went with the BrainFish to watch the Burning Man burn. I’d been promised one of the most impressive pyrotechnic displays I’d ever seen, and it was: two hundred thousand dollars of fireworks in roughly fifteen minutes. There were caches of explosives packed into the Man, so as the wooden frame was consumed by the flames it set off periodic explosions. It feels good to look at fire. Maybe this was the origin of human society: before we used it to cook our food or clear the undergrowth, before fire was a technology, our half-ape ancestors would silently congregate to squat around a burning bush, fascinated, not yet needing anything from any of the other dark shapes around them, but together. I know it’s the reason we can’t stop looking at our phones. That’s what sustains the whole stupid tech industry, the fact that a glowing screen looks a little like a glowing fire, and it’s good to look at fire. The only thing in the external world that resembles the subjective experience of having a mind.

The fact that I was having this sort of thought should have tipped me off that some internal fireworks were on their way, but I really thought I was completely fine. Once the flames started to die down just a little people began stripping off their clothes and pelting to the fire to dance naked around it, and in my new spirit of openness and acceptance and saying yes to things, I decided to join them. Given the sheer number of people involved, the dance was really more of a shuffle. Hopping over the ember-hot sands, heat from the still-towering fire gently cooking my testicles, as the great circling crowd made its gently jostling widdershins around the biggest bonfire in the world. Strange, I thought: we should be going the other way, deosil, unless there’s something sinister about this ritual. I stopped in my tracks and turned around, facefirst into the great blobbing mass of firelit titflesh. We’re going the wrong way, I shouted. We need to go the other way. At this point things started happening that I can’t really describe without some derangement of the authorial voice. Deliriants work by depressing context: you start to forget where you are, who you are, who the people around you are, or even what it means for something to be yourself, or another person, or a fire, or the ground. In a way, you see the world exactly as it is. I had just been wrenched into existence between a vast lightroaring pain scalding one side and the cold empty night, and all the while flesh stumbleshoving against me, new entities bubbling out of the plasm, tearing faces out of bellies and cunts, laughing, accusing me in words made from the flickering shadow of a man’s cock against his thighs, all motion, all going the wrong way. I was falling into a purely phenomenological abyss. The only thing I still knew about anything was that it was wrong, the wrong way, everything was going backwards and loosing evil into the world. I think at this point I must have started shoving the other people circling the fire, because now the livid tissue was fanged and furious, and the black and the bright were wheeling, leaving long wormlike trails. I span for a thousand years through the air before landing facefirst in the dust.

Naked and gibbering, into the desert. Tonight the city was black, shadowy lattices, the universe growing talons at me in the dark. I was being hunted by geometry. By whatever lived behind the thin foil of the sky. Chatter of tiny flakes of dust, all narrating my own internal experience to me in the language of rustlings. He’s looking behind himself, they said, he’s looking behind. I wasn’t looking behind myself, but then I was. There, huge on the horizon, bigger and brighter than any sun, the true mythic core of reality, a human figure made of flames. The sacrifice that opens a hole in the world. I understood nothing. It meant nothing at all.

I don’t know if I enjoyed it, exactly, but in the end I don’t regret going to Burning Man. I think it taught me a lot. I’m much happier now than I was.

One of the stereotypes about Silicon Valley that people like me, humanists, book people, love to console ourselves with is the idea that it’s populated entirely by utilitarian drones, who only care about lifeless things like productivity and efficiency and increasing their ARR. They live in homes with no art on the walls. All their clothes are black or grey. They eat protein paste and supplements for dinner. Meanwhile, we flatter ourselves with the notion we’re the only ones who really care about the higher things, beauty and meaning and so on; that we’re fighting against human paperclip maximisers, willing to indifferently scrub out everything important in their quest to totally optimise the world. The reality is much, much worse. These people are deeply spiritual. They are obsessed with meaning.

What I learned is that tech bros care about everything. They want to foster real, profound human connections. They want to form deep, nourishing, authentic communities. They want to plumb their own consciousness through every spiritual or pharmacological avenue there is. An intense fascination with the idea of myth and ritual, the acts and archetypes that draw people together. Storytelling, life as a narrative art. Egregores. Tulpas. They are constantly inventing new religions. Searching for a mission, some purpose, to give structure to their lives. All their friendships need to have an explicit purpose. Their job at a B2B SaaS startup isn’t about exchanging labour for money; they really do expect it to be deeply imbued with significance.

The problem, of course, is that everything these people actually do is totally contrary to everything they want. The world they’ve built is one in which school playgrounds are eerily silent, children scattered like dead flies on the tarmac, staring blankly at their phones. You can order a person off an app to drive you around, or bring you pizza, or clean your house, or fuck you, and once it’s done you give them a rating and never encounter them again. But tech people are good at building things. Alongside the world we all inhabit, they’ve created a synthetic, overengineered version of the one we’ve lost. It’s in the Bay Area cults and the polyamorous cuddle puddles, house parties where everyone has to wear a name tag, all the bizarre attempts to reverse-engineer a normal social life, but most of all it’s in Burning Man. They reached into the storehouse of stock cultural tropes and brought out a big human effigy to set on fire. They may as well have attached a sign to the thing saying HERE’S THE GENERIC UNIFYING ECSTATIC RITUAL YOU ORDERED. A ritual that exists for the sake of being a ritual. Which means it doesn’t really mean anything whatsoever.

When my flight landed at Heathrow I could have kissed the runway. Happier than I could have ever believed to return to my plain little life, to be myself and no one else. Strange how unappealing I find the idea of meditating my way into artificial bliss. If the Burners really just want meaning and community, they could have it. You don’t need to build a temporary utopia in the desert. You don’t need soul connections on the astral plane. You don’t need to radically reshape the forms of human life. All you need to do is leave San Francisco and move to London. Accept one of our piddling British salaries. Meet a few friends at the pub, sink five pints for no reason other than that it’s Thursday. Support a football team if you want. Walk along the Regent’s Canal with your girlfriend on an overcast afternoon. A world of ordinary fulfilment is waiting. It’s dotted with miseries too, things you can’t see across the roofline without a little pit opening up in your stomach. But even that doesn’t frighten me so much any more. It’s not so bad.