“Light weights.” That was the reply when Diplo posted a video of himself, Chris Rock, and several other others escaping this 12 months’s Burning Man after heavy rains left hundreds of different Burners stranded and unable to go away. It was a small factor, but in addition encapsulated a rising divide between long-term attendees and those that present up anticipating a weeklong Coachella within the Nevada desert.

“Old-timers like myself tend to relish in the chaos,” says Eddie Codel, the San Francisco–primarily based videographer who called Diplo and Rock lightweights on X, the social community previously referred to as Twitter. “It allows us to lean into the principle of radical self-reliance a bit more.” Codel is on his fifteenth burn, he’s been coming since 1997, and Diplo wasn’t the one escaping Burner he referred to as out. When another person posted a video of RVs caught in waterlogged sand, he posted, “They were warned.”

’Twas ever thus. Burning Man might have began as a gathering of San Francisco counterculture sorts, however lately it has morphed right into a confab of tech bros, celebs, and influencers—a lot of whom fly in and spend the occasion’s crushingly scorching days in RVs or air-conditioned tents, powered by mills. The Playa, because it’s identified, remains to be orchestrated by the Burning Man Organization, in any other case referred to as “the Org,” and its core principles—gifting, self-reliance, decommodification (no industrial sponsorships)—stay in place.

But more and more the Burning Man tenet of “leave no trace” has discovered itself butting heads with rising piles of particles scattered within the desert following the bacchanal, which may draw greater than 70,000 folks yearly. It’s an ideological minefield, one laid atop a 4-square-mile half-circle of tents and Dune-inspired art installations the place everybody has a carbon footprint that’s two-thirds of a ton.

Plenty of this got here to a head earlier than rain turned Black Rock Desert right into a freshly-spun clay bowl. Last week, as competition goers had been driving into Black Rock City, activists from teams like Rave Revolution, Extinction Rebellion, and Scientist Rebellion, tried to halt their entry, demanding that the occasion stop permitting non-public jets, single-use plastics, and limitless generator and propane use. They had been met by attendees who stated they might “go fuck themselves,” and in the end the protest was shut down by the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribal police. (The path to the occasion passes through Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation.)

Last Sunday, as information started to unfold in regards to the Burners trapped by the rain, reactions grew extra pointed. In one standard TikTok, since deleted, Alex Pearlman, who posts utilizing the deal with @pearlmania500, lambasted Burners for contributing to local weather change whereas “building a temporary city in the middle of nowhere while we’re in the middle of an unhoused fucking homeless problem.” Reached by e-mail, Pearlman stated that TikTok took down the video, claiming it was mass reported for content material violations. The creator challenged that, and it obtained reinstated—then it was eliminated once more. “My reaction was, ‘I guess the community guideline enforcement manager hitched a ride with Diplo and Chris Rock out of Burning Man,’” Pearlman says.