How We Got Here

Iteration Cycle I (2014-2015)

My first burn was in 2014. Knowing next to nothing about it, I was invited by a friend to come to the desert. My initial intention was to fly in from Chicago and do open camping. When I arrived, his camp saved me from open camping and welcomed me in. The most transformative experience of my life ensued. I was going through a breakup and felt that egoistic validation to treat others poorly because I had been treated poorly in my life, both in that relationship and elsewhere. But there I felt the grace of the stranger. Random people were looking out for my best interests and I learned that I could break that cycle of people treating one another poorly. This realization was the birthplace of my integrity centered around being a cycle-breaker. It has been unwavering ever since.

Another form of this grace was in helping me unwind the spectator mentality that had pervaded my life. The average human isn’t taught to be an active participant. Instead we’re trained to show up and just watch the movie, pay to sit at the restaurant while food is brought to us, or follow your boss’s commands. It’s a deep unlearning to go from spectator to participant. On that first burn I felt how my interactions were inauthentically playing into the expectations of the people I was interacting with. This was my spectator self, one that has taken years to unwind. In a state of overwhelm one night that first burn, I asked a stranger how to navigate this strange and novel space. She walked me through the basics of self-expression and the participant mentality. With that schema in mind, I could see how my interactions on playa motivated by a need to fit in, feel safe from conflict, spectate, or other forms of inauthentic self-expression were met with skepticism. But when my actions were motivated by true participation and self-expression, it created amazing experiences. The burner community, in sometimes subtle and sometimes overt ways, was calling on me to be more authentic. This too was a fundamental mindset shift that blossomed in the decades following.

I camped with this camp for two years. They introduced me to the optimistic side of tech culture. I used its data-focused analytical prowess balanced with altruistic motives to improve the impact of the humanitarian projects in Sub-Saharan Africa that I was involved in, operationalizing idealism. But this camp had its limitations too. Struggling with the classic dilemma of shared ownership of camp responsibilities, they implemented a token system where you could exchange tokens for goods and services. Sound familiar? Yes, there’s no money at burning man but they basically reinvented capitalism. And with it came rational exchange (as opposed a gift economy) and the related entitlement. While well-intentioned, the experiment failed and it quickly shifted the camp dynamic to something that wasn’t plug-and-play but also, well, wasn’t not plug-and-play. I loved this camp but could feel the need to explore something new.

Iteration Cycle II (2016-2020)

Inspired by these ideas from my first two years and following my intuition, I moved all my worldly possessions from Chicago to burning man and then from burning man to San Francisco. In my stopover at burning man in 2016, I camped with a small camp of around 14 that was gifting coconut water to strangers as a harm reduction camp. We would take people overheating in the desert sun and fill them with cold drinks and vitamins before sending them on their merry way. I loved this camp and their simple but meaningful and impactful offering. This camp gifted serious volumes of coconut water, especially given its size. I committed to this vision of harm reduction at the point that we saved one person from heat stroke. Oh, and that year I met the man that became my best friend.

But with all camps, there were limitations. The camp lead was on the autism spectrum and had trouble reading others. He was deeply empathetic but in an analytical way that stopped short of what I understand to be deep empathy. Like most burners, he was well intentioned but flawed. When a new camp member who came straight from his required military service in Israel to the burn was disrespecting the mourning happening at the temple, I directly confronted him. We cleared our conflict afterwards but later, randomly in the offseason, I got a 4 AM email on a Sunday morning from our camp lead telling me I had been kicked out of camp. I was deeply hurt by this because there were miscommunications and a lack of empathy for both parties involved in the conflict. The camp lead heard about our tiff and misunderstood it as a threat to having the people necessary to bring the camp back, choosing to excommunicate me rather than understand and repair. And the other camp members refused to intervene. So like my first camp falling short of the burning man principles by commodifying, this camp in my mind fell short on the principle of inclusion. This experience added a new trick to my integrity where I drastically amplified my ability to mediate conflict in a way that respects the sovereignty of all parties without othering any party. I was grateful for my time with that camp but in 2020 it was time to move on.

Iteration Cycle III (2021-2025)

In 2021 I became connected with a camp called Elementum coming to playa for the first time during the renegade burn. I immediately respected the vision of bringing a full camp to the unofficial burn. I contributed by opening up my house in Reno to these 35 strangers, meeting camp members on playa for the first time after they had already stayed at my house. I immediately saw eye to eye with the level of care members of the leadership team, especially Kenny and Parker. So at the end of that year I asked to join leadership. I had learned a thing or two in my time in the dust and wanted to contribute.

This overall was a great experience. I helped improve the camp vision, manage infrastructure, brought out art, supported the community, used my wife and I’s home as a launch pad to facilitate burning man experiences, etc. And in 2024 I led the camp entirely. This was a deeply meaningful experience where in my opening speech I expressed my intention for the year as being grace for the stranger. That’s the grace I experienced in 2014 that changed my life and I was honored to pay it forward. Leading camp that year (my tenth year on playa) was one of the best experiences of my life.

Challenge I: Leadership Gaps

What excites me most about burning man is co-creating things where each person stands in their full sovereignty as a human and expresses their gifts, adding to one another’s expression. With that in mind, I stepped down from the camp lead role wanting to rotate camp leadership yearly so that it remains a group vision. Despite reservations from the camp, I supported our old camp lead rejoining as the lead because, despite some of her past shortcomings, my optimism saw a path for her to grow into a more capable leader. Sadly, I was disappointed by the results.

I’ll preface this next bit by saying that there’s always at least two sides to any story. What I share here is my side in full acknowledgement that there’s inevitable complexity and nuance missing.

Motivated by my love of burning man, I provided a lot of feedback to her on what went well with the year she took off, what leadership style the team responds to, my best ideas for building a co-creative container, and poured the rest of my love into what we might create. And when she started to slip into bad habits of a top down vision rather than being community minded, I called her out directly on it. Her initial response was that she’d process my feedback and then we’d speak about it, but then she stopped talking to me. After weeks of silence and avoidance, another member of the leadership team brought up our tension to the group and only then did she somewhat reengage. Looking to resolve our differences, I hired a world class mediator spending thousands of dollars out of my own pocket to try to ensure we could come to a resolution. It was too important not to.

But resolution didn’t come. Just indifference and judgments, virtue signaling and ships passing in the night. In a word, I hit upon the deepest, most vile enemy of intuition: ego. So once again I found myself in a situation where there was so much beauty and goodness as there was such a great community we were fostering. But so too was the vision, at least in my mind, fatally flawed. I’ve been in community building enough to know that without impossibly deep love, intention, and intellectual honesty, communities become cults of personality. It’s the corruption of power and that ever so subtle and conniving advance of the ego. Communities can easily become one person’s thing and they compromise vision with some excuse about the greater good. Sadly, this happened to Elementum.

Challenge II: Over-Focus on Self and Camp, Under-Focus on Gifting

When you lead a camp, you have a vision you’re working towards and a set of resources to get there. Money, time, and labor are the main resources you're managing. Now imagine that there are two main buckets where you can allocate the group’s resources: the experience of yourself and your campers or the experience of the people of Black Rock City you’ve never met. These aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, because supporting your campers supports the larger community of burners, but they represent two distinct ways of allocating resources.

I came to believe that Elementum over-allocated resources to the camp experience at the expense of gifting. One of our camp leads would say she wanted to build a comfortable camp that “I’d want to come back to.” This meant creating a massive tent shade structure because initially she wanted to expand her personal footprint, allocating a large amount of annual operating expenses for central power, spending large sums on sound equipment, increasing reliance on outside services year over year, and many other ways of making the camp experience more comfortable and, frankly, instagramable. There’s nothing wrong with taking care of your campers, of course, but I was questioning whether playa really needed another expensive sound system for a Thursday night party mostly thrown for us or a camp build process that took tons of labor but wasn’t fully pushing the needle on the diversity of experiences offered on playa. As camp scaled, the quality and scale of offerings didn’t scale to the extent that we scaled the experience of our campers. And if you looked at the collective self-expression of the group, it became overly focused on costumes, photos, and pristine aesthetics at the expense of all the other possible forms of self-expression. It felt more and more like we were training new members of the burning man community that the experience was about looking good, partying, chasing dj’s, and telling the tale on social media. Welcome home.

Plug-and-play camps are a spectrum where the closer you get to a self-focus, the closer you are to being a plug-and-play camp. Elementum isn’t a plug-and-play camp, but there’s certainly a trend in that direction. One of the reasons why I scaled down my personal contributions to camp in 2025 was because of these dynamics, choosing to focus on my art that was intended to be a more optimal balance between my self-expression and gifting an experience to strangers.

Challenge III: Lack of Vision

In addition to this, the vision of Elementum started to shift from the initial intention of grounding and an integrated expression of the various parts of our being. It started to move away from that intentionality and care, moving towards the average camp on playa with the average offerings. We’d discuss with placement each year how many different cacao ceremonies and similar workshops were in our vicinity, having to argue that our offerings were truly unique when in all honesty I didn’t think they were. I remained skeptical that our public offerings were truly the most pure and unique expression of Elementum’s identity. We had glimmers of this with our non-alcoholic elixirs, a super well-attended John Wineland workshop, and conception ceremony, but these weren’t yet converted into something of the scale and core camp identity necessary for a full expression. Camp struggled to find that Ikigai point at the intersection of what we were good at, what the playa needed, what we loved, and what there was true demand for.

One of our leads would visit other camps like she was shopping at a mall, wanting to bring this shade structure or that shipping container platform from the various camps she’d visit. That’s exactly the process for becoming a camp like every other camp and a camp too focused on the self. In that process it missed the depth of self-expression that creates something truly aligned with the essence of a thing. Yes, we all draw inspiration from our world but the process for iterating on camp was too much of a “where did you get that from?” approach. And maybe this is the gripe of any long-time burner, but the vision felt to me like it started to become increasingly murky and watered down, focused on what others were doing, what we wanted for ourselves, and what we thought we should be doing rather than full alignment with vision–with a deeper intuition. If I had to describe what the reality of Elementum became, it was a cushy landing spot for our friends. Which is to say that it wasn't strongly aligned to gifting and the rest of the ethos of burning man.

Moving On

I’m truly indebted to these past experiences and many others I didn’t recount here. I especially feel that for Kenny, one of Elementum’s initial founders, for the depth of his care and vision. So true to my pattern I think Elementum is a stellar camp with amazing humans. But sadly it’s no longer the place where I can best give my gifts because, when I self-expressed with valid criticism, my experience of the co-creative energy came careening to halt. It became too focused on the camper experience rather than the ethos of self-expression and gifting something unique. And the quality of vision has regressed to a more average camp with similar offerings to what are already on playa.

In 2025, I remained involved in Elementum but divested from some camp activities and channeled that energy into my art, a truly profound experience in itself. In response to a fentanyl scare at a regional burn, I pushed hard for a bolstered camp safety posture that in some small way contributed to a life being saved by our heroic camp members this year. These and many other experiences help create a map forward.

So now I must do that intimidating thing where I listen to my intuition when others don’t see the world I see and take a leap of faith into that place that for now only exists in my mind. The process is simple: take the good, leave the bad, experiment with the new. Over and over and over again.