Via State of the Nation
The Annual NWO Ritual Sacrifice
Thousands of attendees watched as the Burning Man structure burn as part of the annual celebration at Black Rock City, Nevada, on Sep. 5, 2026.
SOTN Editor’s Note: As far highly staged cultural marxist events go, it does not get any crazier and perilous than the annual BURNING MAN ‘festival’. Talk about twisted and warped, perverted and depraved to the extreme!
As if to graphically and poignantly expose this “Annual NWO Ritual Sacrifice & Symbolic Immolation of Humanity”, the 2017 Burning Man event saw one Aaron Joel Mitchell, 41, an American living in Switzerland, run into the flames during the burning of giant wooden effigy which was captured by the following photo.
Who knew that the global power elite are both the executive producers of this satanic orgy as well as the main actors in this demonic rite of passage for the up-and-coming WEF freaks. And they’re doing it in plain sight as if to stick it in our eye.
Also, who knew that this unparalleled and ultimate freak show was actually a worldwide phenomenon designed to capture wayward souls so that the Burning Man black hole conflagration would have ample sacrifices to offer to their infernal idols and icons.
What’s the crucial point?
This Alt Media platform is aware of numerous naive and unsuspecting folks, who are fundamentally good people but are tricked into attending this Satan fest. Truly, they have no idea what they are really walking into. And the many war stories and horror flicks that we have been told confirm that Burning Man is as dangerous as any public event ever concocted in USA. In point of fact, it makes the Bohemian Grove gathering look like a garden party.
KEY POINT: What follows is a list of just a few if the Big Tech founders, CEOs, and industry leaders have attended or are regular participants at Burning Man:
Oh, and by the way….
So, if your kids or friends, coworkers or other acquaintances, express an interest in going to this hellish holocaust, do your level best to discourage their attendance. Because once you see and hear and experience such a ritual satanic immolation, and everything else that precedes it, you cannot un-see, or un-hear or un-experience it.
Were the truth to be told as to how this diabolical assemblage of Satan-supervised soul snatchers really operates via their various devilish incantations and fiendish spells secretly cast upon the trusting attendees, the whole operation would be shut down as a profoundly evil menace to society and malevolent corruptor of our youth.
State of the Nation
November 7, 2026
Alex Newman
The Liberty Sentinel
• Burning Man is not just a music or arts festival in the desert, though it has those elements.
• It also is not just a haunt for paganism and perversion, though it is that, too.
• It is a model for the post-Christian new world order the elitists involved in it intend to create.
• It must be taken seriously because of the rich and powerful who embrace it and the overwhelming influence they have on the world.
BLACK ROCK CITY, NEV. — As the man with blinking glasses and a space suit who from “Andromeda” explained the nature of reality amid a deafening cacophony of techno music, an “art car” in the form of a giant octopus with shooting flames from its movable arms inched ever closer. Similarly outrageous “mutant vehicles” covered in LED lights and flame throwers lined up in every direction, blasting their own music to draw in the whirling masses. It was pandemonium, in the truest sense of the term. Before long, a fairy offering “Free Spankings” showed up to see who needed a slap on the rear from her horse whip.
Earlier in the day, attendees were enjoying everything from the “orgy dome” and the AI lectures to the giant “art” and endless “gifting.” But now, with the sun below the nearby mountains, everyone was waiting anxiously for the climax of it all: The burning of “the Man.” In less than an hour, a more-than-100-foot-tall structure with an effigy of a wicker man on top would go up in flames in a dazzle of fireworks and celebration. As soon as it collapsed, tens of thousands of “Burners,” as they are known, were ready to rush in. As usual, hundreds of them would soon strip off their clothes before circling and dancing around the smoldering remains of the “Burning Man.” Before long, with incense burning, anything-goes sex acts could be seen in every direction. More than a few children looked on in disbelief.
A few years ago, a 41-year-old man even offered himself as a sacrifice by jumping into the flames.
Even without the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, being at Burning Man felt like what a never-ending LSD or magic mushroom trip might feel like — at least as the experience was described by the high priest of the church of psychedelics, who spoke here at length alongside hundreds of other self-styled religious and spiritual gurus ranging from pagans and satanists to witches, warlocks, and everything in between. It was beyond surreal. In fact, it might as well have been another planet — or another dimension.
Burning Man cannot be easily explained in words, even by its creators or the tens of thousands of self-styled Burners who have been coming for decades. No two gave the same answer about what Burning Man is, or what it means. But regardless, it is one of the most important events happening anywhere in the world. More than a million people have attended so far, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful people alive. There are more than 100 satellite “burns” worldwide. And there are big plans for the future.
With Burning Man’s “10 Principles,” there is a near-total inversion of the concepts of freedom. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the infamous statement by satanist leader Aleister Crowley, was one of the most commonly seen taglines at Black Rock City. Orgies, sexual debauchery, unrestricted drug use, demon worship, sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, and more are all welcome. However, openly preaching the Gospel (free speech), journalism without submitting to Burning Man’s rules and supervision (freedom of the press), firearms possession (gun rights), and other basic God-given rights are all frowned upon, if not banned outright.
While it has flown largely under the radar of mainstream America so far, Burning Man is the tip of the spear in a planetary effort to bring about global transformation. The apparent goal of the brain trust behind it all: smashing what is left of Christian civilization and replacing it with a new world order based on pagan, New Age, occult, and totalitarian values. It is perhaps the clearest manifestation of what Lucifer Publishing Company founder Alice Bailey described as “externalization of the hierarchy” (more on that later).
More than a few leading voices call it demonic. And it’s easy to see why. In one video of leading Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey sitting at an “art” installation that he describes as “Satan’s throne,” he boasts that attendees can come and “have their souls sucked physically from their body.” That is par for the course here.
The movement is very deliberately bringing back pagan practices that the spread of Christianity suppressed — for good reason. In fact, being there and watching all this, one cannot help but contemplate the pagan ceremonies of the ancient Canaanites described in the Old Testament. All that was missing was open child sacrifice. It had the feeling of Sodom and Gomorrah with LEDs. No doubt that ethos is part of the reason for the hatred of Christians and disdain for Christianity shown by so many Burners, to the point where one Christian camp was literally expelled.
It might sound like a dystopian cross between a high-tech Mad Max and Woodstock, with a bit of Bohemian Grove thrown in — an event or community for hippies and drug users on the fringe of society. But between terrible dust storms and rain that turned the ground into an impassable, glue-like muck that made it almost impossible to move, private airplanes and helicopters carrying CEOs and senior executives from some of the most important technology companies in the world were rolling in at the makeshift Black Rock City airport by the dozens. It is said to be the busiest temporary airport in America for a whole week.
For many attendees, the festival, or movement, or city — nobody can quite seem to agree on what Burning Man really is — is merely about “art” or “partying,” or both. For some, it is about “community” and gift-giving — except for ice purchases, no buying or selling is allowed in this ephemeral place, and everyone is expected to bring gifts for fellow attendees.
But according to founder Harvey, who launched it 40 years ago on a beach in San Francisco, what is happening is actually an “ethical, cultural revolution.” Speaking in 1997, Harvey made clear that Burning Man was creating a new culture to supplant the remnants of the old Christian civilization rapidly disintegrating across the West and beyond. “I believe that what we’re doing is a model for the future,” he explained. Countless Burners agree. And they are shaping the emerging world order from behind the dust veil.
Harvey’s claims could easily be dismissed as the ramblings of a dope fiend or a lunatic. But over the decades since this began, Burning Man has attracted many of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. And despite the apparent inability to recruit enough young people with the money to attend, the influence of this movement continues to grow as its tentacles spread across the world in regional burns from China and Israel to South Africa, Canada, Australia, Miami, and beyond.
Trillionaire Elon Musk has publicly credited his trips to Burning Man for some of his most significant business ventures. “Burning Man is Silicon Valley,” Musk explained. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it. You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get *%^@#%# close to what’s in Silicon Valley.” Musk should know. He is a mega donor to the organization, and his brother served on the board until his ties with Jeffrey Epstein were exposed (Epstein repeatedly mentioned Burning Man in his emails with transhumanist and technocrat elitists).
Musk says Burning Man is one of the things he does for “fun.” In an interview with a podcaster, he said one year he went dressed as Darth Vader. He actually launched one of his most significant Tesla models there. But his comments about the fusion between the Big Tech companies and Burning Man are deadly serious. It is something of an open secret that Burning Man is essentially an extension of Big Tech and the companies that are now creating the new digital panopticon that humanity increasingly lives in.
Inc.com, a publication for business leaders, famously described Burning Man as “the place where Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech entrepreneurs escape for a week over Labor Day weekend.” Some major technology company leaders have even offered to pay for employees’ tickets in order to stimulate “creativity.” While people came from all over the world — foreign flags outnumbered American flags at least 100 to one — San Francisco was massively overrepresented.
Meta/Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg, who famously censored conservatives for years and even deleted the U.S. president’s account for exposing voting irregularities, showed up in a private helicopter one year. Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, one of the wealthiest men in human history, first attended in 1999, according to Forbes. The founders of Uber, Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, and countless other major companies have been spotted there regularly, too.
Another one of the most powerful companies in the world, Google, is also well represented there. In fact, the company that dominates humanity’s access to information today has been inextricably linked to Burning Man since it first emerged with powerful help from key figures and organizations in the U.S. intelligence-military-industrial complex. A drawing of the Burning Man served as the company’s first-ever “Google Doodle” in 1998.
Google’s founders and top executives have been a staple at the event for decades. Co-founder Larry Page explicitly invoked Burning Man as a model for spaces in which technologists can experiment outside normal societal and legal constraints. “I like going to Burning Man,” he said, describing it as “an environment where people can try new things.”
Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who became executive chairman of parent company Alphabet, famously got selected for the top post based on his ties to Burning Man. According to a report by Business Insider, his documented attendance at the event showed Google’s Burner co-founders that Schmidt could supposedly let go of his ego and fit into the company’s unique corporate culture. “I had been going before, and they had also gone, and so we found a kindred spirit there,” Schmidt said during a 2017 talk at Stanford University.
“It’s well documented that I go to Burning Man,” Schmidt told the leftwing U.K. Guardian. “The future’s driven by people with an alternative world view. You never know where you’ll find ideas.” In a speech at the Burning Man-influenced Further Future gathering, the Google boss described the crowd in Burning Man’s Black Rock City as “a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs.”
CEO Tony Hsieh of online shoe-retailing giant Zappos (now owned by Amazon) described Burning Man as an experience that activates what he described as “the hive switch.” “Basically, if you look at nature, you discover that certain animals, like chimpanzees and wolves, compete for food and mates, while others — bees are the best example — organize themselves for the greater good,” he told Playboy magazine. “They live together as a unified force because the DNA is the same. Bees are always working together for the benefit of the hive.”
The feeling of unity Hsieh associates with this hive mentality is what draws him to Burning Man, he said. “The art, especially at night, just puts you in a state of awe,” the tech bigwig added. “These things are hard to describe until you’ve experienced them, I guess.” That sentiment was repeated literally hundreds of times by Burners to The New American’s team on the ground.
Many leading AI CEOs have attended as well. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, for instance, admitted on the Life in Seven Songs podcast in 2024 that he had been to Burning Man five or six times — and that he has taken hallucinogenic drugs there, which transformed him. “This is one possible, like, part of what the post-[artificial general intelligence] world can look like,” Altman said. “Where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other.” Think: Universal Basic Income meets Magic Mushrooms and the New Age.
The AI-occult connection continues to surface in public. Musk, one of the most prominent Burners and currently the wealthiest individual in the world, famously referred to AI as “sort of summoning a demon.” U.S. Vice President JD Vance, backed by Big Tech overlord Peter Thiel, recently said in a podcast that there is a “really, really weird spiritual dark energy” around some AI. He noted a major tech firm was even holding a “burial ceremony” for a discontinued AI version as a new one got introduced.
Of course, Burning Man attendees are literally the people who produce the algorithms, AI models, and technologies that determine what you and billions of other people around the world see amid endless doom scrolling. And at this very moment, these same Big Tech companies and leaders are seizing power and building an entirely new world. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it this year, humanity is currently witnessing “the greatest transfer of power of our times — not from governments to people, but from governments to private technology companies.”
Guterres is right: Technology companies are increasingly dominating every facet of life and society, including government. That is concerning enough on its own. Now, consider that it is almost impossible to tell where those “private” technology firms begin and Burning Man ends.
For many Burners, Burning Man is “home.” In fact, at the gate, volunteer greeters welcome arrivals with the same two words they have used for years: “Welcome home.” Some call it an “event” or a “festival.” For others, it is a “city” with global reach. But many longtime Burners bristle at the terminology. It is a “transformative movement,” they say.
Ask a hundred Burners what Burning Man is and you will get a hundred answers. Indeed, the FreedomProject Media, Liberty Sentinel Media, and New American team did just that. Officially, the Burning Man Project insists it is not a festival. It is “a global cultural movement” and an “annual experiment in temporary community,” built for a week on a dry lake bed, or playa, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and then erased.
Volunteer “AJ,” the “playa name” of a veteran of nearly 20 burns who now works the city’s edges, described it as “an experimental community of people who are a little bit counterculture.” They come, she said, “to enjoy great art and make friends and camp.” It is “the most wonderful place on the planet” — but only for “the right people,” those willing to camp in extreme conditions and live by a shared ethic, AJ added.
Speaking to The New American on a couch in front of a fire on the desert floor next to blasting techno music, 16-year Burner “Alex” put it more bluntly: “You’d have to be crazy to be here. But yet every year we come again.” Nothing works reliably. Bikes break, generators fail, dust and rain swallow plans. That hardship, he said, is the point. “You put in a hard time and then go enjoy yourself.”
The physical form of the place is as distinctive as the rhetoric. The city is laid out like a clock: curved streets named for hours, radial avenues, the open playa at the center. At the hub stands the Man, a towering wooden effigy that is burned on Saturday night in fireworks and roar. Nearby is the Temple, a quieter structure that burns later, after people have written letters, pinned photographs, and left objects they want to release.
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The Annual NWO Ritual Sacrifice
& Symbolic Immolation of Humanity
Thousands of attendees watched as the Burning Man structure burn as part of the annual celebration at Black Rock City, Nevada, on Sep. 5, 2026.
SOTN Editor’s Note: As far highly staged cultural marxist events go, it does not get any crazier and perilous than the annual BURNING MAN ‘festival’. Talk about twisted and warped, perverted and depraved to the extreme!
As if to graphically and poignantly expose this “Annual NWO Ritual Sacrifice & Symbolic Immolation of Humanity”, the 2017 Burning Man event saw one Aaron Joel Mitchell, 41, an American living in Switzerland, run into the flames during the burning of giant wooden effigy which was captured by the following photo.
Who knew that the global power elite are both the executive producers of this satanic orgy as well as the main actors in this demonic rite of passage for the up-and-coming WEF freaks. And they’re doing it in plain sight as if to stick it in our eye.
Also, who knew that this unparalleled and ultimate freak show was actually a worldwide phenomenon designed to capture wayward souls so that the Burning Man black hole conflagration would have ample sacrifices to offer to their infernal idols and icons.
What’s the crucial point?
This Alt Media platform is aware of numerous naive and unsuspecting folks, who are fundamentally good people but are tricked into attending this Satan fest. Truly, they have no idea what they are really walking into. And the many war stories and horror flicks that we have been told confirm that Burning Man is as dangerous as any public event ever concocted in USA. In point of fact, it makes the Bohemian Grove gathering look like a garden party.
KEY POINT: What follows is a list of just a few if the Big Tech founders, CEOs, and industry leaders have attended or are regular participants at Burning Man:
- Elon Musk (Founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI): A frequent attendee who has brought equipment and art installations to the playa, and has credited the desert environment with inspiring elements of his work.
- Mark Zuckerberg (Co-founder and CEO of Meta): Attended the festival (including a notable one-day visit where he served grilled cheese sandwiches).
- Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Co-founders of Google): Longtime attendees who famously used Burning Man culture and candidate evaluation on the playa to help select Eric Schmidt as Google’s CEO.
- Eric Schmidt (Former Google CEO): A veteran attendee who bonded with Google’s founders at the festival.
- Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin): Has attended Burning Man since the late 1990s in the event’s earlier years.
- Brian Chesky (Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb): An attendee whose company culture and events (like Airbnb Open) have drawn direct inspiration from Burning Man.
- Dustin Moskovitz (Co-founder of Facebook and Asana): A regular attendee who has been spotted on the playa.
- Garrett Camp (Co-founder of Uber): A multi-time attendee who has made numerous trips to the festival.
- Alexis Ohanian (Co-founder of Reddit): Known to have attended the desert gathering.
- Drew Houston (Co-founder and CEO of Dropbox): Attended the festival.
- Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI): Reported to have attended multiple times
Oh, and by the way….
Even the ex-wife of one of the Google bros declares the Burning Man ‘demonic’
So, if your kids or friends, coworkers or other acquaintances, express an interest in going to this hellish holocaust, do your level best to discourage their attendance. Because once you see and hear and experience such a ritual satanic immolation, and everything else that precedes it, you cannot un-see, or un-hear or un-experience it.
Were the truth to be told as to how this diabolical assemblage of Satan-supervised soul snatchers really operates via their various devilish incantations and fiendish spells secretly cast upon the trusting attendees, the whole operation would be shut down as a profoundly evil menace to society and malevolent corruptor of our youth.
State of the Nation
November 7, 2026
Burning Man: Big Tech, Paganism & Your Future
Powerful forces behind this movement in the Nevada desert are shaping the future of the West, formerly known as Christendom–and they hope to take the world after a looming crisis. Beware!
Alex Newman
The Liberty Sentinel
AT A GLANCE
• Burning Man is not just a music or arts festival in the desert, though it has those elements.
• It also is not just a haunt for paganism and perversion, though it is that, too.
• It is a model for the post-Christian new world order the elitists involved in it intend to create.
• It must be taken seriously because of the rich and powerful who embrace it and the overwhelming influence they have on the world.
BLACK ROCK CITY, NEV. — As the man with blinking glasses and a space suit who from “Andromeda” explained the nature of reality amid a deafening cacophony of techno music, an “art car” in the form of a giant octopus with shooting flames from its movable arms inched ever closer. Similarly outrageous “mutant vehicles” covered in LED lights and flame throwers lined up in every direction, blasting their own music to draw in the whirling masses. It was pandemonium, in the truest sense of the term. Before long, a fairy offering “Free Spankings” showed up to see who needed a slap on the rear from her horse whip.
Earlier in the day, attendees were enjoying everything from the “orgy dome” and the AI lectures to the giant “art” and endless “gifting.” But now, with the sun below the nearby mountains, everyone was waiting anxiously for the climax of it all: The burning of “the Man.” In less than an hour, a more-than-100-foot-tall structure with an effigy of a wicker man on top would go up in flames in a dazzle of fireworks and celebration. As soon as it collapsed, tens of thousands of “Burners,” as they are known, were ready to rush in. As usual, hundreds of them would soon strip off their clothes before circling and dancing around the smoldering remains of the “Burning Man.” Before long, with incense burning, anything-goes sex acts could be seen in every direction. More than a few children looked on in disbelief.
A few years ago, a 41-year-old man even offered himself as a sacrifice by jumping into the flames.
Even without the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, being at Burning Man felt like what a never-ending LSD or magic mushroom trip might feel like — at least as the experience was described by the high priest of the church of psychedelics, who spoke here at length alongside hundreds of other self-styled religious and spiritual gurus ranging from pagans and satanists to witches, warlocks, and everything in between. It was beyond surreal. In fact, it might as well have been another planet — or another dimension.
El Pulpo Magnifico (also known as El Pulpo Mecanico), a famous giant mechanical octopus art car created by artist Duane Flatmo that shoots flames at Burning Man (The New American)
Burning Man cannot be easily explained in words, even by its creators or the tens of thousands of self-styled Burners who have been coming for decades. No two gave the same answer about what Burning Man is, or what it means. But regardless, it is one of the most important events happening anywhere in the world. More than a million people have attended so far, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful people alive. There are more than 100 satellite “burns” worldwide. And there are big plans for the future.
With Burning Man’s “10 Principles,” there is a near-total inversion of the concepts of freedom. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the infamous statement by satanist leader Aleister Crowley, was one of the most commonly seen taglines at Black Rock City. Orgies, sexual debauchery, unrestricted drug use, demon worship, sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, and more are all welcome. However, openly preaching the Gospel (free speech), journalism without submitting to Burning Man’s rules and supervision (freedom of the press), firearms possession (gun rights), and other basic God-given rights are all frowned upon, if not banned outright.
While it has flown largely under the radar of mainstream America so far, Burning Man is the tip of the spear in a planetary effort to bring about global transformation. The apparent goal of the brain trust behind it all: smashing what is left of Christian civilization and replacing it with a new world order based on pagan, New Age, occult, and totalitarian values. It is perhaps the clearest manifestation of what Lucifer Publishing Company founder Alice Bailey described as “externalization of the hierarchy” (more on that later).
More than a few leading voices call it demonic. And it’s easy to see why. In one video of leading Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey sitting at an “art” installation that he describes as “Satan’s throne,” he boasts that attendees can come and “have their souls sucked physically from their body.” That is par for the course here.
The movement is very deliberately bringing back pagan practices that the spread of Christianity suppressed — for good reason. In fact, being there and watching all this, one cannot help but contemplate the pagan ceremonies of the ancient Canaanites described in the Old Testament. All that was missing was open child sacrifice. It had the feeling of Sodom and Gomorrah with LEDs. No doubt that ethos is part of the reason for the hatred of Christians and disdain for Christianity shown by so many Burners, to the point where one Christian camp was literally expelled.
It might sound like a dystopian cross between a high-tech Mad Max and Woodstock, with a bit of Bohemian Grove thrown in — an event or community for hippies and drug users on the fringe of society. But between terrible dust storms and rain that turned the ground into an impassable, glue-like muck that made it almost impossible to move, private airplanes and helicopters carrying CEOs and senior executives from some of the most important technology companies in the world were rolling in at the makeshift Black Rock City airport by the dozens. It is said to be the busiest temporary airport in America for a whole week.
Black Rock City Municipal Airport (The New American)
For many attendees, the festival, or movement, or city — nobody can quite seem to agree on what Burning Man really is — is merely about “art” or “partying,” or both. For some, it is about “community” and gift-giving — except for ice purchases, no buying or selling is allowed in this ephemeral place, and everyone is expected to bring gifts for fellow attendees.
But according to founder Harvey, who launched it 40 years ago on a beach in San Francisco, what is happening is actually an “ethical, cultural revolution.” Speaking in 1997, Harvey made clear that Burning Man was creating a new culture to supplant the remnants of the old Christian civilization rapidly disintegrating across the West and beyond. “I believe that what we’re doing is a model for the future,” he explained. Countless Burners agree. And they are shaping the emerging world order from behind the dust veil.
The Tech Significance
Harvey’s claims could easily be dismissed as the ramblings of a dope fiend or a lunatic. But over the decades since this began, Burning Man has attracted many of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. And despite the apparent inability to recruit enough young people with the money to attend, the influence of this movement continues to grow as its tentacles spread across the world in regional burns from China and Israel to South Africa, Canada, Australia, Miami, and beyond.
Trillionaire Elon Musk has publicly credited his trips to Burning Man for some of his most significant business ventures. “Burning Man is Silicon Valley,” Musk explained. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it. You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get *%^@#%# close to what’s in Silicon Valley.” Musk should know. He is a mega donor to the organization, and his brother served on the board until his ties with Jeffrey Epstein were exposed (Epstein repeatedly mentioned Burning Man in his emails with transhumanist and technocrat elitists).
Musk says Burning Man is one of the things he does for “fun.” In an interview with a podcaster, he said one year he went dressed as Darth Vader. He actually launched one of his most significant Tesla models there. But his comments about the fusion between the Big Tech companies and Burning Man are deadly serious. It is something of an open secret that Burning Man is essentially an extension of Big Tech and the companies that are now creating the new digital panopticon that humanity increasingly lives in.
Campers getting stuck in the mud at Burning Man (The New American)
Inc.com, a publication for business leaders, famously described Burning Man as “the place where Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech entrepreneurs escape for a week over Labor Day weekend.” Some major technology company leaders have even offered to pay for employees’ tickets in order to stimulate “creativity.” While people came from all over the world — foreign flags outnumbered American flags at least 100 to one — San Francisco was massively overrepresented.
Meta/Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg, who famously censored conservatives for years and even deleted the U.S. president’s account for exposing voting irregularities, showed up in a private helicopter one year. Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, one of the wealthiest men in human history, first attended in 1999, according to Forbes. The founders of Uber, Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, and countless other major companies have been spotted there regularly, too.
Another one of the most powerful companies in the world, Google, is also well represented there. In fact, the company that dominates humanity’s access to information today has been inextricably linked to Burning Man since it first emerged with powerful help from key figures and organizations in the U.S. intelligence-military-industrial complex. A drawing of the Burning Man served as the company’s first-ever “Google Doodle” in 1998.
Google’s founders and top executives have been a staple at the event for decades. Co-founder Larry Page explicitly invoked Burning Man as a model for spaces in which technologists can experiment outside normal societal and legal constraints. “I like going to Burning Man,” he said, describing it as “an environment where people can try new things.”
Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who became executive chairman of parent company Alphabet, famously got selected for the top post based on his ties to Burning Man. According to a report by Business Insider, his documented attendance at the event showed Google’s Burner co-founders that Schmidt could supposedly let go of his ego and fit into the company’s unique corporate culture. “I had been going before, and they had also gone, and so we found a kindred spirit there,” Schmidt said during a 2017 talk at Stanford University.
“It’s well documented that I go to Burning Man,” Schmidt told the leftwing U.K. Guardian. “The future’s driven by people with an alternative world view. You never know where you’ll find ideas.” In a speech at the Burning Man-influenced Further Future gathering, the Google boss described the crowd in Burning Man’s Black Rock City as “a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs.”
CEO Tony Hsieh of online shoe-retailing giant Zappos (now owned by Amazon) described Burning Man as an experience that activates what he described as “the hive switch.” “Basically, if you look at nature, you discover that certain animals, like chimpanzees and wolves, compete for food and mates, while others — bees are the best example — organize themselves for the greater good,” he told Playboy magazine. “They live together as a unified force because the DNA is the same. Bees are always working together for the benefit of the hive.”
The feeling of unity Hsieh associates with this hive mentality is what draws him to Burning Man, he said. “The art, especially at night, just puts you in a state of awe,” the tech bigwig added. “These things are hard to describe until you’ve experienced them, I guess.” That sentiment was repeated literally hundreds of times by Burners to The New American’s team on the ground.
Many leading AI CEOs have attended as well. OpenAI boss Sam Altman, for instance, admitted on the Life in Seven Songs podcast in 2024 that he had been to Burning Man five or six times — and that he has taken hallucinogenic drugs there, which transformed him. “This is one possible, like, part of what the post-[artificial general intelligence] world can look like,” Altman said. “Where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other.” Think: Universal Basic Income meets Magic Mushrooms and the New Age.
The AI-occult connection continues to surface in public. Musk, one of the most prominent Burners and currently the wealthiest individual in the world, famously referred to AI as “sort of summoning a demon.” U.S. Vice President JD Vance, backed by Big Tech overlord Peter Thiel, recently said in a podcast that there is a “really, really weird spiritual dark energy” around some AI. He noted a major tech firm was even holding a “burial ceremony” for a discontinued AI version as a new one got introduced.
Of course, Burning Man attendees are literally the people who produce the algorithms, AI models, and technologies that determine what you and billions of other people around the world see amid endless doom scrolling. And at this very moment, these same Big Tech companies and leaders are seizing power and building an entirely new world. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it this year, humanity is currently witnessing “the greatest transfer of power of our times — not from governments to people, but from governments to private technology companies.”
Guterres is right: Technology companies are increasingly dominating every facet of life and society, including government. That is concerning enough on its own. Now, consider that it is almost impossible to tell where those “private” technology firms begin and Burning Man ends.
What Is Burning Man?
For many Burners, Burning Man is “home.” In fact, at the gate, volunteer greeters welcome arrivals with the same two words they have used for years: “Welcome home.” Some call it an “event” or a “festival.” For others, it is a “city” with global reach. But many longtime Burners bristle at the terminology. It is a “transformative movement,” they say.
Ask a hundred Burners what Burning Man is and you will get a hundred answers. Indeed, the FreedomProject Media, Liberty Sentinel Media, and New American team did just that. Officially, the Burning Man Project insists it is not a festival. It is “a global cultural movement” and an “annual experiment in temporary community,” built for a week on a dry lake bed, or playa, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and then erased.
Volunteer “AJ,” the “playa name” of a veteran of nearly 20 burns who now works the city’s edges, described it as “an experimental community of people who are a little bit counterculture.” They come, she said, “to enjoy great art and make friends and camp.” It is “the most wonderful place on the planet” — but only for “the right people,” those willing to camp in extreme conditions and live by a shared ethic, AJ added.
Speaking to The New American on a couch in front of a fire on the desert floor next to blasting techno music, 16-year Burner “Alex” put it more bluntly: “You’d have to be crazy to be here. But yet every year we come again.” Nothing works reliably. Bikes break, generators fail, dust and rain swallow plans. That hardship, he said, is the point. “You put in a hard time and then go enjoy yourself.”
The physical form of the place is as distinctive as the rhetoric. The city is laid out like a clock: curved streets named for hours, radial avenues, the open playa at the center. At the hub stands the Man, a towering wooden effigy that is burned on Saturday night in fireworks and roar. Nearby is the Temple, a quieter structure that burns later, after people have written letters, pinned photographs, and left objects they want to release.
Discover our continuing exposé of Burning Man at insideburningman.com
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