Brief: The Planet is Burning, Man (w/Tommy Diacono)
Burning Man 2023 will forever be burned in memory with two images: a group of climate activists blocking the single road into Black Rock City and the sea of mud that a climate change-induced hurricane turned the playa into. The jigsaw puzzle is pretty complete. Will Burners see it?
Tommy Diacono is a five-time Burner. He also helped organize the protest. He joins two-time Burner Derek for a discussion about why his crew blocked the roads, the importance of rituals, and the importance of knowing when rituals need to end.
Show Notes
FULL VIDEO: Climate Protesters Shut Down BURNING MAN, Rangers Ram Through Blockade
Tommy Diacono on Instagram
Burn it all down — Derek Beres
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Hey everyone, this is Derek Barris with a Conspiratuality Brief.
The planet is burning, man.
While nearly everything polarizes the left and right on social media, for years hating on Burning Man has been a topic of unity, albeit for differing reasons.
One reason that actually unites people is the disgust over private invite-only millionaire Silicon Valley camps, with guests being shuttled in via private airplanes.
One that actually separates people, however, is the event's impact on climate change, with its purported 100,000 tons of carbon every year.
And this critique usually does come from the left, though as you'll hear in a little bit in my interview, the difference between the left and the right on issues like this is kind of hard to discern.
Now last week I published a short article on my Reframe substack about the end of Burning Man, or why I think that ritual needs to end.
I wrote it as someone who has attended twice, and I've really appreciated the ritual elements of the festival, namely the shared experiences of like-minded people coming together.
That said, the differences between the crowds between the two years that I went, which was 2007 and 2013, were very noticeable.
And from my understanding, it's gotten much worse.
Even still, I can imagine many people drawing a lot of meaning from the gathering, even in its current form.
The Burning Man organization has recognized that its carbon impact is a real problem, and they even put forward a plan to draw down its carbon footprint by 2030.
It's well-intentioned, but I see no real way of enforcing or accomplishing this, given the massive travel imprint that brings 73,000 people into a remote desert every year.
Not even talking about The supplies and the gas and the airfare and everything that just effectively goes into the trash year after year.
Now if you saw videos from the end of this year when everyone was running away from the mud, you'll have noticed a city full of garbage that was left behind.
Plus, given the festival's libertarian leanings, I don't think monitoring people's travel into the festival is something they want to get into, or what they bring in or purchase for it.
Now, the idea of a temporary city meant for self-reliance was covered perfectly by the yelling guy on TikTok, Alexander Perlman.
No, Burning Man is actually about self-sufficiency and how you can survive any- Look at me!
Look at me surviving Burning Man!
In my fucking home!
I don't have to travel to the middle of a dry lake bed in fucking Nevada desert to build a temporary city when we're in the middle of a fucking homelessness crisis!
I also didn't have to sit in a long line of traffic a mile deep that was caused by climate protesters blocking the single fucking road in and out of the goddamn festival.
And why were they blocking it?
To fucking protest the amount of fucking carbon being dumped into the atmosphere by a bunch of fucking tech bros driving out to the middle of the fucking Nevada desert.
So as I said, I understand the human need for ritual.
I want it myself and I think it's important for everyone.
It simply doesn't need to be so inaccessible and environmentally damaging.
Now some commenters have pointed out that the carbon footprint of Burning Man is a drop in the bucket compared to what corporations do to this planet, and I fully agree with that, but it's not an excuse either.
So for a parallel example, I'm constantly receiving comments asking why I cover misinformation about supplements when pharma this or pharma that.
And it's a very similar mindset.
Other people are doing bad things at a high level so we can do them at a lower level.
And in reality there's no integrity in thinking or acting that way.
And pretending that a little bit of damage is okay because, oh hey look at that guy over there, is just a form of avoidance.
Regardless of your thoughts on Burning Man in general, whether you're a Burner and you plan on going next year and love it and draw a lot of meaning from it, if you understand the festival and appreciate it but also see the real problems with it, I'm kind of in that camp, or whether you're someone who's never really looked into it except from afar and you have no idea what it's about and you just hate on it, For all those groups of people, the 2023 edition is going to be burned into all of our collective memories due to being bookended by the image of climate change protesters blocking the single entry road into the festival and then the climate change induced rains that turned the festival into a sea of mud that forced massive delays for everyone leaving and all of that garbage that was left behind.
After publishing my article, which I'll link to in the show notes, I received a direct message from Tommy Deacono, who was one of the climate change protesters that blocked the road heading into Black Rock City.
Tommy joins me now.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
What I gather from your feed, on Instagram at least, it looks like you've attended Burning Man before, but this year you were involved with setting up the climate change protest and roadblock on the single road leading into Black Rock City.
Why did you and a group of friends decide to do that this year?
Correct.
But more than a climate change protest, it was more of a call to action for the Burning Man community to look in the mirror and be radically honest.
And more than the climate, because we all know the climate is, excuse my language, Aft is to talk about the root cause of why the climate is in the state it is, and that's our economic system.
Right.
You can curse on this podcast, so don't worry about holding back on that.
Fantastic.
Feels like a weight off my chest.
One thing I noticed is you were handing out flyers to the people in line.
What did those flyers say?
They were, it was a text that I wrote.
Which wanted to tie up how all our problems are connected.
It starts talking about inequality, which is how 500 of the richest Americans made 852 billion in the first six months of 2023 alone.
And how our privately owned media is refusing to make the correlation between this fact and why there is record carbon dioxide in the air.
Well, If we really sat down and there's a straight line.
So there's too much carbon dioxide in the air because of our economic system.
Our economic system is overproducing.
It's overproducing because we produce for profit and not for use.
And all these profits are now being accumulated at the very top while homelessness increased 11% in the last year.
If you connect the dots, you come to the conclusion that the current economic system is on the trajectory in the wrong direction.
And we're going to have to address it if we want to solve a livable planet.
One thing that I saw after Burning Man was a TikToker named Alexander Perlman had made a short three minute video that went pretty viral about his thoughts on what was going on.
And he specifically says that we have all these people building a temporary city in the desert, and yet we can't actually put that effort toward building real cities.
I mean, I'm a four, five year burner.
I mean, this is where you turn from a progressive to a right wing, a right wing conservative, no?
When you refuse to look at the actual physical reality and say, okay, we need to change.
And it's going to be uncomfortable because I'm going to have to move out of my comfort zone.
So it really, the perception changes.
So this summer with El Nino, the data's there.
It's horrific.
The data's horrific.
At a point you need to stop and say, okay, what made sense a year ago does not make sense this year.
And last year we took a protest art piece to Burning Man.
We named it Radical Honesty and it was a A big ugly metal frame with the text, we are the climate problem.
The people that are privileged enough to build a city in the desert for fun, to manufacture scarcity and manufacture suffering to feel alive.
In a moneyless classist society that is sort of admitting that the default world is inhumane.
And last year I had this epiphany while we were really burning a lot of fossil fuels here.
This is This is pure death cut galt behavior.
I was supposed to take an art piece this year also, but I felt like we're past art.
Now we need to disrupt to wake people up.
When you did that last year, what was the response of the Burners to that installation?
It was, I mean, we recruited a couple of people to join the collective.
They were like, you know what?
You're speaking truth here.
It's uncomfortable.
It's ugly.
We need to listen to it.
And change comes from Discomfort.
It never comes.
It's always a painful process.
To real change is painful.
It's like removing an exoskeleton.
It's going to hurt.
But mostly the responses were very techno-utopian.
Yes, we are the problem, but we're also the solution.
And I love these guys because they claim to be science and data-based.
But the science and data is showing that no amount of technology can make the Western lifestyle sustainable.
And if technology could solve it, it would have already.
And all the data shows that any technological improvement we've made over the last hundred years to improve efficiency has led to an increase in net use of resources.
So the cleaner the energy, the more resources we use.
Because we're going to mine more resources.
We're going to, we're just going to burn ourselves even faster.
It's part of the paradox.
I think it's called Jevons paradox.
And I don't think they were ready for someone who had answers.
So they would be like, I'm like your response saying technology will eventually solve it by when the evidence is to the contrary is like believing in fairy tales, which is not the scientific methods.
And then it usually fell into weird Spiritual spaces that are, maybe we're meant to go extinct.
Like what?
Your conclusion is that you are ready to go extinct for a 500 year old economic system that is no longer serving the greater good anyway.
Then it just becomes, it's like this, this, I call it latent white supremacy that comes out.
I'm not ready to question the system.
That is a white supremacist system.
I mean, let's be honest, it was born in Northern Europe and all the wealth is still in predominantly white hands.
So, okay, we should just go extinct.
Then you can't really engage with that level of unconsciousness, can you?
No, not at all.
You know, Freedom TV made an excellent sort of mini doc on the protest.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
Most of it involves the people you were blocking yelling at you.
We are anti-climate change.
I think you're in the wrong place.
Go to New York.
Go to a better place.
We're making an unsafe environment for other humans, which I know is the opposite of what you want.
I support this planet!
Like, fuck you!
And then there's the moment that the cops showed up.
But can you describe a bit of the energy of the burners when you did this?
It's such a rollercoaster as a burner myself.
I expected a higher level of engagement, but obviously you can't speak for all the burners.
We had full-on nationalism within the first 10 minutes.
There was a guy wearing a t-shirt, America, with the apostrophe, A off, and a Stars and Stripes Stetson, and he was screaming at us.
And he's the guy that screamed, I'm going to call the cops and tell them you have a gun.
That's not burner behavior, is it?
We had the usual liberal word salad.
I'm an activist.
Yes, what do you do?
I drive a Tesla and I don't eat meat.
Okay, but that's not activism and it's mathematically not enough anymore.
I was handcuffed in the back of a truck after, I mean, 40 minutes since starting the peaceful protest.
And it was interesting watching thousands of cars drive by with some people I know.
And none of them stopped.
Do you want a cold drink?
But it was interesting.
I stood there in the truck with my chest open.
I was, I'm not, I'm not ashamed to be arrested for this.
I'm proud of this.
And they were mixed.
There were people giving me the finger and there were people just filming, which I thought was the most dystopian.
There were some people saying, thank you, thank you, thank you for what you're doing, which was hopeful.
And I mean, the post response where lots of people reach out and be like, you know what?
Thank you for expressing what I've been feeling for a long time.
I noticed the shirtless burner with the lollipop.
Yeah, you're telling us how you feel.
You know nothing!
You know nothing!
Like, cool, you're not going to fucking stand.
We're all trying to go fucking burn.
This has been hours and hours of bullshit to get to this fucking point.
Oh, Google, you should fucking know better than this.
What are you fucking doing here?
You should fucking know better than this.
Ass clown!
Do you think people like that just don't understand the bullshit that millions of people are already going through due to climate change and how privileged he sounds at a moment like that?
I'm going to go deep and ugly.
I'm going to go deep and ugly fast.
The West is built on lies.
Let's be honest.
All the wealth of the West, London, Madrid, Paris, the United States, is a fossil-fuelled pillage fest.
And then we built borders to keep out people from the Global South.
So when a society is fundamentally built on these lies and this illusion, There's a book by Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion, which was one of my first, like, real epiphany moments in reading.
It's hard for people to admit the truth because the truth is like a woolen sweater.
Once you start pulling the thread, it just keeps going.
So it's, we're in this mass, mass psychosis.
But it's been planted there by previous generations.
We don't want to admit how much of our existence is built on injustice.
And to solve it, we have to do a full root cause analysis.
So the lying just comes second nature.
Once you see it, it's hard to unsee.
I mean, there are lots of people saying people wanted to go home.
And the answer is easy, like to the right wingers, is like the big five insurance companies are slowly retracting natural disasters from home insurance.
If that is not a real world, OK, you don't believe in climate change, but the insurance companies do.
And when the natural disaster that we're seeing this year were off the charts are going to hit your home and you're uninsured, who's like Come on, the bells are ringing within the real world.
We can't continue fueling this illusion for much longer.
It's getting absurd.
And Burning Man was a perfect place to shake up the middle that claims to be conscious.
Like, you can't be seeing the climate data and then still Fill an RV with a ton of gasoline to go be in an air-conditioned space for a week in the desert that hit triple digits last year.
The bells are ringing too loud to be ignored now, no?
Yeah.
One response I got to my Substack article was that Burning Man is a drop in the bucket compared to what oil companies do.
Absolutely.
And if you're looking at it as pure output, that is true.
I've always felt that doing something that bigger, more egregious players are doing, but are also causing damage, isn't an excuse for that behavior.
And that's the typical Western right-wing Answer, because when you scratch a liberal, you usually find right wing when it turns onto themselves to discomfort.
It's like, look at India, look at China.
That's not really an answer.
I mean, China's industrial revolution was the 60s, 70s.
If you had to put carbon emissions into historical context and per capita, China isn't even in the top 10.
Neither is India.
It's us.
It's the West.
It's Northern Europe and the US and Canada and Australia.
We've been burning resources.
In fact, we have all the wealth to show it.
Also, Burning Man has a responsibility as a real cultural zeitgeist.
It's one of the only spaces where There's no money.
It's a gift economy.
It's a non-profit.
It's a space where people come and create non-profit entertainment and compete with each other to give more fun, not for money.
So it's a space where it's saying, you know what?
The real world doesn't make sense.
So we're going to create this utopia.
By doing that, you have a responsibility.
So if the guys that are the wealthiest and most self-proclaimed conscious are not performing radical change, then what chance do the oil companies have that are fully emerged in the illusion that shaped it?
You were arrested, I'm guessing.
Yeah.
Are you going to see legal repercussions from this action?
I mean, we have been charged with a couple of fines.
The Rangers came in hot because they were told we had weapons.
Which was a lie.
Which was a lie, obviously.
I mean, we're fully, we're even dressed like full peaceful hippies.
There was nowhere to even hide a weapon.
And the metaphor of the Ranger driving into The planet Earth that says burners of the world unite, which was such a uniting, oh wow, we do have this beautiful community.
But when you have a conscious community, you have a responsibility.
I think the charges will be dropped because of that excess response.
But we have lawyers working on it.
The same guy that drove into us gave me a lift after.
And we had very, very interesting conversation about the state of the planet.
I mean, these guys had just seen a hurricane a few days before and record floods.
I mean, I don't know if you saw videos from Vegas.
The floods were insane.
So you have these images.
You have the beginning of the burn with your protest and roadblock.
And then you have what happened with the floods there.
Do you think that's enough to help at least wake up some of the burners to the damage that's being done?
Absolutely.
I've had lots of friends come back and say, you know what, like, like the way the rain responded.
And I mean, a lot of the burners now are like, it was amazing.
It was amazing.
If you ask the people that were there for the first time that aren't fully immersed, that aren't lost in the salsa, that are honest, there were lots of people having panic attacks.
There were people trying to drive out to escape.
The people on the peripheries that were just intense had flooded tents.
They were freezing.
Yes of course there was a lot of camaraderie.
I hope it moved a lot of people but then I also see a lot of responses that are like completely surreal like next year we'll take boots and elevate our tents.
Man.
And also, I've seen some posts of people there being like, we don't need outside help.
We're self-reliant.
Yeah.
I wonder if they ever recognize, again, using that word privilege to understand that the fact that they could even attend kind of negates any sign of self-reliance compared to what actual self-reliant people have to go through.
You're not self-reliant if you've got a fridge full of stuff from Whole Foods.
Self-reliance is growing your own crops.
And this is part of the Western dilemma.
We've been so detached, which product of capitalism, no?
They detached us from nature because our connection to nature was a way for us to be free.
When you see how humanity lived, humanity was groups of two, 300 people living and farming together, working with our hands, impossible to control.
Impossible to control.
And now we've been completely detached.
Our food comes from the same 10 companies, the same people that make the fertilizers, that own the infrastructure, that own the food factories.
It's total control.
And we don't even realize it.
Radical self-reliance is growing your own food, stopping in Walmart and filling your cooler with single-use plastics and packed bacon and all the wealth of the world.
I mean, what happens when that runs out?
You're going to grow food in the desert?
We're deluded.
Now, you did mention the word hope a few moments ago, and I'm wondering where, if anywhere, that hope lies and what you have planned for the future to continue this sort of activism.
Whenever you read about revolution, revolution only always comes when it's the bleakest.
Which makes perfect sense, because that's when people say enough is enough.
People are suffering.
I mean, it's 75 or 76 percent of millennials live paycheck to paycheck.
Minimum wage, can't afford a one-bedroom apartment in any of U.S.
cities.
So the system itself is self-cannibalizing.
We're seeing record amount of unions striking, workers are striking because they can't keep up with the cost of living.
The worst things are looking And the more hopeless the default world becomes, the more hope there is for people to say enough.
I mean, this next election is just such a snapshot of where we are.
It's fundamentally nothing changed.
We were told we have to all vote for Biden for the next election because Donald Trump doesn't believe in climate collapse.
Yet doesn't believe in climate change, yet the dams are pumping more fossil fuels than ever.
Well, there's a moment where you had the burners on one side, but I don't know if you expected, you had the people who live on tribal lands coming from the other side.
And there was a moment where one of them says, we're working class.
And you turned to him and you said, we're working class too.
Yes.
Yes.
We did.
We've been told this to the government.
They don't care about working class people.
They don't care about that.
I am a working class person trying to go to work.
Me too, brother.
They don't care about that.
And that, of the whole video, that was the most stark moment for me because there you
see actual unity of people, but how, how do you find some way to work together with, with
people who are experiencing the same problems?
Yes.
I love that you brought this up.
This is part of class consciousness and the lack of it in the US, where in the United States, the media has completely morphed what we believe working class is.
You could be earning quarter of a million over a year and still be working class because if your mortgage, your two cars and to maintain a certain life, you must work, you are working class.
It's a petty bourgeois, it's still within the working class.
Not working class is owner class, which means you have enough private property or capital To be able to not work and make money off of the act of owning.
In fact, there are some really good articles about the new poor-rich, where if you have a really good job, say in New York or San Francisco, where you earn even up to 20 grand a month, if you're renting an apartment that now the rent went up 20%, your cost of living is X, to keep up with the Joneses within the white-collar professional class you're in, Your cost of living is, you're still living paycheck to paycheck.
It's just a different form of white collar slave, so to speak.
So we're all working class.
If we're living paycheck to paycheck, which I think now is 68% of the American population, we're all working class.
There are people screaming at us, telling us, I want to go home.
Like, guys, unless we push for radical change now, soon we're not going to have homes to go to.
I mean, look at the fires in Maui, the floods in Vermont.
Like, if the big insurance companies are going to pull out of natural disasters, we're going to have another homelessness epidemic.
And the global South, there are already places that are uninhabitable.
