Burning Man’s UNOFFICIAL festival kicks off this weekend with 30,000 set to party in the desert

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The unofficial Burning Man festival kicked off this weekend in style with neon raves and huge fantastical floats and art cars at Nevada‘s Black Rock Desert – even after organizers cancelled the official event over COVID-19 fears.

Around 30,000 are expected to descend on the unticketed festival, known as ‘Renegade Man,’ over the next week, even as skies above them remain hazy from the nearby Caldor wildfire.

The last official ticketed Burning Man, which took place in 2019, drew nearly 80,000 Burners to the desert. 

Some renegades decided to take matters into their own hands after the event got canceled in April by setting up the ‘Plan B’ event. Alas, Renegade Man was born. 

On an Eventbrite ticket description, one wrote: ‘Welcome to the non-event, event that is happening in place of that. One event that is trademarked and we can’t mention its name. This is your official / unofficial place to procure your ticket which is absolutely required to be not required to attend!!’  

Thousands of festivalgoers have already begun to descend on Nevada‘s Black Rock Desert – dubbed ‘the Playa’ – including Michael Goetzman, 38, of Wisconsin, who flew first class to the event on a semi-private jet.

‘It’s amazing, it feels like the 90s,’ Goetzman, who works in cyber security, said of the renegade event, where he’s camped out at the Bureau Of Misinformation site with ‘lots of highly intelligent successful friends from the Bay Area,’ including ‘notable celebrities and executives,’ although he would not disclose who was on the star-studded campsite. 

 ‘Out here, this is the real America, the freedom. It’s public land. This is the real Silicon Valley of inspiration and emerging ideas. Bonds upon friends that spark innovations.’ 

He also said there were ‘lots of six-figure FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) workers’ in attendance, who could afford luxuries such as Porta Potties and private performances during a year where the official Burning Man organization wasn’t providing food, water, toilets and a weekend full of live music like they usually do.  

The event will be held the Black Rock Desert, located in northern Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management looks after the desert and has already put restrictions in place until late-October to stop ‘festivals.’

Restrictions include not allowing lasers, ignitions of fires, and building or burning any structures in the desert, according to We Rave You. 

Even though the unofficial festival is taking place, it will be nowhere close to the original. free-spirited event. Without the razzle-dazzle and even no bathrooms, 

The organizers warn of the reality of the desert, writing: ‘Bring everything you need for Radical Self Reliance. The desert is real.’ 

This includes no restrooms available or no ice coffee stations – a staple as festivals, like Coachella and Burning Man. It’s the ‘ultimate camping trip for Radical Self Reliance.’ 

Festivalgoers will not only be going au natural for the festival, but will also be battling the effects of the Caldor wildfires, a historic heatwave, and the COVID-19 delta variant. 

SFist warned the event could turn into ‘Woodstock ’99 on COVID.’ 

The Reno-Tahoe Airport, where a lot of partygoers are expected to go through as people from all over the country pile into the desert this weekend, is in a red, high transmission zone according to SFist. Those with connecting flights in Las Vegas can expect similar COVID-19 dangers as it, too, is in a red zone. 

A Hawaiian official, who recently traveled to Vegas himself, said anyone traveling to the city will ‘definitely catch COVID.’ 

The recent COVID-19 numbers for Reno, located a 100 miles outside of the Black Rock Desert, are rising in the last week, with 349 new cases being diagnosed yesterday. 

Vegas, who has recently seen a decline in COVID-19 numbers, still has over 700 new cases on September 3. 

With thousands of unmasked visitors without any sanitary options around, COVID-19 poses a threat for festivalgoers. 

The Playa is available to the public year-round with a 14-day limit on recreational and camping use. But the land management has already issued temporary restrictions effective August 18 to October 31, 2021, including bans on igniting fires other than campfires, the burning of structures, aircraft landings, possession of alcohol and use of lasers.

It also warned people that ‘there are no medical and emergency resources close to the playa and multiple emergencies may result in extended response times’. 

The statement means that this year’s event will look much different than past iterations of the festival, which are known for its incredible series of performances that showcase flaming structures and lasers alongside popular DJs. 

Burning Man also usually has an airstrip for luxe on-site arrivals. 

However, the restrictions – including the threat of historic heat strokes and smoke from the California wildfires – are not stopping die-hard Burner fans and groups such as Black Rock Plan B, Playa Poop Protocol, Unity 2021 Free Burn, RenegadeBurn, Renegade Man, and Rogue Burn from trekking into the desert anyways.

At the Bureau Of Misinformation campsite where Goetzman is staying, all guests are fully vaccinated. Unvaccinated Burners were kicked out, according to Goetzman. 

He said that overall, people are being ‘very respectful’ of Covid guidelines by setting up campsites farther apart than usual, wearing masks and asking others if it’s okay to approach. ‘There is a risk of Covid anywhere but we wear masks,’ he added.

Art cars are expected to make a showing this year in place of the Burning Man’s infamous larger-than-life art structures, not to mention about 500 unofficial Burning Man camps on the Playa, according to Forbes, which has festivalgoers excited to experience what the festival may have been like in the early 90s.

For Burners who can’t make it to the renegade version of the event, Burning Man organizers have kicked off Virtual Burn Week. The virtual experience is free with a requested donation – a price that’s a little less steep than the $500 per person asked to attend the in-person festival.

Goetzman, a Burning Man veteran, is also attending the virtual iteration of the week-long festival while he’s in the desert thanks to his $1,000 Internet uplink and SpaceX’s Starlink backup service. 

He said the virtual festival was a good alternative and described it as ‘innovative’ for ‘breaking into new ideas of art’. 

‘I had a grand time without the dust covering me,’ he added. 

‘And virtual reality (VR) there is actually the art and temple,’ Goetzman said after noting that he missed the staples of the usual event. 

An extended VR experience pass is allowing the half a million expected guests to visit the broadcast over and over again for up to 30 days after the virtual festival ends. 

It’s designed to replicate as much of the annual festival known for its music, art, nudity and sex as possible, complete with the hours-long traffic jam to get in.

VR developers from six different companies have spent a year trying to reproduce that scene as they also took advantage of the new technology to give festival-goers, known as Burners, an experience they only would have had in past years if they were high on hallucinogens – with flying and teleporting avatars and Porta Potties that lead into a world of art.

They aimed to build a city out of thin air where participants can live in a utopian society that follows the principles of ‘decommodification’ (not needing money to obtain goods and services) and ‘radical inclusion’.

Virtual camps would allow longtime Burners to revisit their old haunts as DJs play virtual sets.

The virtual experience cannot, however, replicate the free-flowing drinks the festival is known for or the constant hugs participants get at the live experience that draws tens of thousands of people each year. 

The festival began on Sunday, as thousands of people encountered a glitch trying to get into the system – not knowing that the developers programmed a rain storm to replicate one a few years prior.

The idea, according to Andrew Barrett, a creator of some of the virtual worlds, was to get the Burners to ‘hang around and rely on each other to figure it out,’ calling the approach ‘radical self-reliance’.

Half a million people are expected to show up virtually for the event over the next few days, as they did for the first Virtual Burn last year – which was pulled together in a month, with several participants experiencing glitches as they could not figure out how to enter its multiple digital worlds.

This year, though, developers said the experience will be better.

‘We’ve improved on the technology because we’ve had a year and a half,’ Colette Crespin, director of Virtual Experiences for Burning Man Project, a nonprofit that organizes the event, told the Wall Street Journal.

The first Virtual Burn was built on Microsoft’s social platform, Altspace, and included over 200 worlds to explore, with more than 1,500 hours of live events.

It drew an estimated half million attendees, the Journal reports, more than five times the 80,000 who were there physically in 2019.

After winning the PGA Innovation Award last year, and further publicizing Altspace, Microsoft threw more resources behind the Virtual Burn this year and fast-tracked a 2D version compatible with Macs and PCs so anyone with a computer can create an Altspace account and teleport to the festival, according to IndieWire.

‘We brought his whole community with us, and now Microsoft is pouring money into Altspace to turn it into a premiere events platform,’ said BRCvr co-founder Athena Demos, adding for her ‘it’s a labor of love.’