It's a really interesting idea, and I think it does speak some truth.
It's a cynical take on BM for sure, and I don't think the writer accurately describes BM when he/she says "the lower caste of Burners who want to partake in the festival are dependent on the whims and fantasies of the wealthy to create Black Rock City." While some of the impressive projects at BM are funded by the tech uber wealthies, at least as many are crowdfunded, or funded by grants from BMorg, or just funded by regular folk who have decided to do the crazy thing of sinking their lives and money into some art. For all of the most exciting, spectacular, BM projects that I've been involved in or around, funding came from a variety of sources, but never from a rich psychopathic (or otherwise) demagogue.
But you can't really ever encapsulate BM in a short piece of writing anyways, so I'm not going to spend any more time nit-picking it apart. The piece does point to some truth about burning man, and like the OP picked up on, a certain current in our society's trajectory.
Actually, I think BM is a good arena for dealing with this issue. I feel a lot of words coming on, so I'm going to leave it at that for now and complete the thought later.
there have been some interesting responses, i didn't think the thread would take such an anti-BM direction. like you say, BM is a concept with intrinsic value, i think the focus of the article was not that BM is bad but rather that there are people who may be subverting the BM philosophy for commercial ends. It seems like events or organizations that are originally spawned to make the world better eventually end up commercialized and spiritually hollowed out.
