I lasted a month under the worst boss I ever had. I worked in marketing and social media for a web designer who had absolutely no need for a marketing and social media person, especially one whose chief interests included rap music, not being at work, thinking of excuses to leave work early so he could go smoke weed and pretty much anything other than web design. Not that he gave me much incentive to actually give a shit about my job—I was paid minimum wage and my tasks oscillated between the laughably easy ("Draft four tweets for the weekend" was a common directive) to the literally impossible ("Write a press release about this and use your contacts to make sure it gets written up on a few tech blogs," he once told me despite knowing that I'd been an actual adult for roughly four months and the only people I knew in New York were my friends from college and weed dealers, neither of whom wrote for any tech blogs)—with little to no middle ground. He was a former member of a forgotten industrial band and would make me and his other employees listen to said industrial band at loud volumes while he sang along. I hated both him and the job so much that I quit to take an unpaid internship. When I told him I was leaving, he seemed relieved because I think he hated me too. When it was all said and done, I was only half certain he even knew my name.
But all of this is minor and withstandable compared to his greatest sin: being a Burner. While it's one thing to get paid next to nothing by a stingy fuccboi who has little to no use for you, there is a particular strand of shame that goes hand in hand working for a stingy fuccboi who won't shut the fuck up about how amped he is to go to Burning Man. It was his first time going and I can't remember a single day when he didn’t talk about goddamn Burning Man. About how he had finally found a camp to stay with. About how he was going to take two weeks off for it. About how he was going to buy a bike especially from Walmart to ride around there and then abandon in the desert. About how he was ready to meet a bunch of other creative people who he could probably do some business deals with later. It is a testament to my infinite patience that I did not attack him on a daily basis.
If you don't already know, Burning Man has descended upon us and wrapped up with a thud, like a fat, drunken koala spilling out of a eucalyptus tree onto the hot, unloving Australian forest floor. Though the festival was started as essentially a Gathering of the Juggalos for hippies who were too pretentious to admit they were trashy, Burning Man has devolved into a meaningless bacchanalia that only reifies the systems of privilege it was founded in critique of. People used to run around Burning Man naked as a symbol of liberation. Now, they just run around naked because it's hot and they're assholes who are trying to cut loose.
It's socialist fantasy camp where every person who pays to enter misses the point as soon as they type in their credit card number to order their ticket.
Here's a life pro tip: Never, ever, ever talk to someone who's been to Burning Man about Burning Man. They will not shut the goddamn fuck up about it. They will you tell you how amazing it is. They will tell you how it changed their life. They will tell you that you have to go. They will tell you how it's amazing that there's no capitalism there and instead everyone trades everything and how amazing it was that they traded massages for water and cartwheels for gourmet food and then they traded that gourmet food for a super amazing parasol that they're going to keep in the corner of their room FOREVER because it'll serve as a reminder of OH MY FUCK HOW BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING AND PERFECT Burning Man was.
Dear reader, despite my apparently protest, I do not hate people like this. It's cute that they like Burning Man so much and I'm sure if I attended, I would find it dope as fuck. Instead, the problem with Burning Man is the logical fallacy of the very existence of contemporary Burning Man, which makes me want to claw my eyeballs out until they hang lifelessly from my agonized face.
Though Burning Man exists as a place that's ostensibly free from the trappings of capitalism (everything there is freely given), it costs a minimum of $300 to enter the place. When you factor in travel and supplies into the equation, you're probably going to end up spending at least a thousand bucks to go into the desert and take mushrooms and listen to some shitty techno. It's a place where only the privileged can move in ways that the festival's organizers think normal, everyday humans ought to. It's socialist fantasy camp where every person who pays to enter misses the point as soon as they type in their credit card number to order their ticket. My old boss was probably there over the weekend and he probably had a great time.
This year, the start of Burning Man was delayed due to rain. The idea that fifty thousand Burners got turned away from their turn up of choice is at once tragic and sublime (no Bradley Nowell) and the only thing that didn't make things completely and utterly perfect is that Burning Man eventually started. I am usually all for partying, and I realize I am not the first person to get angry at Burning Man for similar reasons, but still, Burning Man is a terrible, no good, horrible place, and anyone who goes there is the enemy of freethinking humans throughout the globe. See you next year.
Drew Millard wrote this, worried it was too mean, then re-read it and realized he might have been too nice. You can read more of his work on Noisey and follow him on Twitter here.
