Burning Man’s tech bros, earth poets and mime artists: Go on, admit you laughed about the mud

“It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

Nobody seems sure who came up with that, but someone, somewhere spoke the words and believed them. The quote imagines human life playing out on a metaphorical ladder that reaches from failure to triumph. What matters is not how high you get but how much higher you get than anyone else. In this imagining, we need not wonder why humans laugh at that fellow stepping in a puddle, that woman losing her luggage or that pierced astrologer ankle-deep in Nevadan mud. Anybody else’s disaster places a few more rungs between them and us.

The world’s media has, over the past week, been much concerned with the application of a venerable German term to a 40-year-old faux-Bohemian freak-out. “Why all the Burning Man schadenfreude?” the Guardian asked. “Oh Burning Man, this is delicious schadenfreude,” the London Evening Standard echoed. “A familiar schadenfreude,” Variety noted of the disaster. “Yes, it’s OK to laugh at wealthy Burning Man attendees mired in muck,” a second Guardian piece eventually decided.

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It’s not hard to discern why the collapse of the Burning Man festival caused such glee. Even in its early days the event could annoy the recreationally intolerant. It began with the burning of a modestly sized wicker man – no connection to the horror film, apparently – outside San Francisco at the summer solstice of 1986. Five years later the countercultural jamboree began its long residence in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Not so much a festival as an improvised community, Burning Man now lives by 10 “principles” that take in such concepts as “radical inclusion”, “radical self-reliance” and “immediacy”. Are you smelling joss sticks yet? “We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves,” the text wearingly explains. I have never been, but my understanding is it takes in all the usual hippie stuff. Chanting. Juggling. Stupid hats. Most tickets this year cost $575, or about €540. Insider magazine reckons all that radical inclusion could “easily set you back at least $1,000 to $2,000″. That’s for one weekend. That’s without hiring an RV.

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This all sounds pretty annoying. But, to be fair, Burning Man has stayed away from brand sponsorship, commercial vendors and paid performers. If Beyoncé wants to play she’ll need to drive out in her own caravan and compete fairly with all the amateur nose flautists and thumb pianists. What really set the event up for Schadenfreude was the increasing association with Silicon Valley’s tech bros. Capitalists “unironically love Burning Man”, Keith Spencer explained in a 2015 article for Jacobin. “Last year, a venture capitalist billionaire threw a $16,500-per-head party at the festival, his camp a hyper-exclusive affair replete with wristbands and models.” Elon Musk has attended. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it,” the Canadian X-Man told the New York Times.

Hence the glee when torrential rain fell on the site, causing biblical waves of mud and flooding. Tens of thousands were stranded for days. This Schadenfreude was of a different order from the deeply unpleasant celebrations on social media when, in mid-June, the Titan submersible imploded, killing five people. One person did die at Burning Man, but organisers confirmed the incident was not related to the weather. This was an opportunity to laugh at mere inconvenience – albeit considerable – to strangers “we” had decided were variously insufferable. Tech gits. Libertarians. Reiki practitioners. Ted Talkers. Crypto-heads. Mobile-home enthusiasts. Mime artists. Earth poets. Avant-garde clowns. Genital exhibitionists. People in silly hats. The scope of (imagined?) irritants had something for everyone.

This is a way of alleviating our own underperformance by revelling in the misfortunes of people whom we don’t know

Obviously this is hugely unfair. Brendon Deacy, a Laois man interviewed this week from Burning Man for this newspaper, was none of those things. “The camaraderie that was around was remarkable,” he said of the crisis. But such collective acts of Schadenfreude have nothing to do with fairness and little to do with reality. This is a way of alleviating our own underperformance by revelling in the misfortunes of people we don’t know and can, therefore, reinvent as all-purpose privileged wrong ’uns.

Satisfying that urge is becoming an industry. Festivals are a particular target. There have been two successful documentaries on meltdown at the Fyre Festival of 2017. The famous film on the 1969 Woodstock festival brought empathy to its treatment of the logistic failures, but most processed the accumulating disasters in Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, a three-part 2022 series on the millennial revival, with thirsty relish. There is an important lesson to be learned there. Something about the increasing cruelty of the age. Ah, heck. Who can be bothered with that when we can again watch the famous RTÉ video of that poor man slipping dramatically on the ice? Ha ha! He fell over.