HBO's new Burning Man doco asks if Silicon Valley killed the vibe

Burning Man used to be the place tech billionaires went to pretend they weren't tech billionaires for a week. HBO's new documentary wants to know what happened when the pretending stopped working.

The Man Will Burn, a four part series from Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi, premieres tonight on HBO, with new episodes dropping weekly through to 30 July. It traces Burning Man's journey from a scrappy countercultural gathering on a San Francisco beach to the sprawling, 80,000 person desert city it is today, one increasingly stocked with air conditioned yurts and Silicon Valley money.

The access is genuinely impressive. Noujaim and Gandhi got the Burning Man Project's CEO, board members and founders on camera, along with artists and longtime Burners who've watched the event's culture shift under them. There's also a proper reckoning with the two year COVID shutdown that nearly broke the whole operation, and the influencer and tech money influx that arrived once it came back.

Here's the part worth sitting with. Burning Man's entire founding ethos was radical self reliance and anti commercialism, a week off the grid, away from status and money. Somewhere along the way it became a place where founders network over sunset DJ sets in private camps with private chefs, while the radical inclusion principle gets stretched thinner every year. That tension isn't new, people have been complaining about Instagram Burners for the better part of a decade, but watching it laid out with actual receipts hits differently than another think piece.

Whether the documentary lands any real verdict is a separate question. Early reviews suggest it's more interested in showing the tension than resolving it, which is probably the honest choice given nobody involved seems to agree on when exactly the vibe shifted.

Either way, if you've ever watched a scrappy local event get discovered, monetised and slowly ruined by the people who found it, this one is worth your Thursday night. Burning Man's founders built something they couldn't fully control. Now there's a documentary about what happens when the people with the most money show up and decide they can.