There’s been a rift growing in the community that attends the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert for years, and it now threatens to separate the once unified crowd into the painfully familiar divide of ‘Haves’ and ‘Have Nots.’ The White Ocean luxury camp, founded by Russian oil magnate Timur Sardarov and tech investor Oliver Ripley, was raided by unknown ‘hooligans’ who glued trailer doors shut and cut through electrical cords powering the many amenities found in the high-end turnkey camp.
Here’s White Ocean’s Facebook post on what happened:
A very unfortunate and saddening event happened last night at White Ocean, something we thought would never be possible in OUR Burning Man utopia. A band of hooligans raided our camp, stole from us, pulled and sliced all of our electrical lines leaving us with no refrigeration and wasting our food and, glued our trailer doors shut, vandalized most of our camping infrastructure, dumped 200 gallons of potable water flooding our camp.
We immediately contacted authorities. Sheriffs came to our camp along with rangers to take our report.
This year has been quite the challenge for our camp. We have felt like we’ve been sabotaged from every angle, but last night’s chain of events, while we were all out enjoying our beautiful home, was an absolute and definitive confirmation that some feel we are not deserving of Burning Man. We actually had someone from the organization tell us that in paraphrase “it makes sense that you have been sabotaged as you are a closed camp and not welcoming.”
We provide one of the most state of the art stages on the playa and feed hundreds of non white ocean burners a day. Does this qualify as a non welcoming camp with no contribution to Burning Man?
White Ocean does indeed organize one of the biggest and best dance stages on the Playa featuring many of the most famous DJs to make it out to Burning Man. But they also run a ‘closed camp’, meaning all the transport trucks used to set up that stage and camp are then parked around the camp to keep the average Burning Man attendee out.
Anger from the more anarcho-capitalist segment of Burning Man against the ultra-rich who often pay thousands to drop into these closed camps and isolate themselves from the riff-raff seems to have turned into direct action. Reaction from the community seems split between those worried this sets a dangerous precedent and those who feel it’s a worthy prank pulled on ‘parasites.’
“And so the revolution has begun,” the top commenter on White Ocean’s post said. “Taking burning man back from the parasite class, back from the EDM tourists. Taking burning man back for the people. This wasn’t much, but it’s a great start.”
“I hate the idea of turn keys as much as anyone,” another replied. “But if this is how ‘taking burning man back’ plays out, I want nothing to do with it. F**king people’s sh*t up, is just a bad a perversion of the principals as being exclusive and closed. In fact worse by a large margin.”
If so-called raids like this become common, it could end up driving away many of the deep-pocketed tech industry individuals pouring huge scads of money into stages, camps, and art cars. There’s already an up and coming alternative to Burning Man for those looking for ‘unabashed luxury’ called Further Future, held in May on Native American land just outside of Las Vegas.
It would be a shame if incidents like this harm the inclusiveness Burning Man is supposed to represent. But according to some of those supporting what happened at White Ocean, it’s the closed camps that have already violated that tenet, amongst others.
