The Theme

Burning Man 2025: Tomorrow Today

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“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” —Angela Davis

The 2025 Burning Man theme is an invitation to imagine the future in new ways, and to make it real through our collective actions. In the exuberant spirit of the prior century’s world fairs, which celebrated not only scientific progress but also cultural exchange and artistic excellence, the 2025 edition of Black Rock City will showcase Burning Man’s global culture of art and innovation. It will provide a venue for us to dream, invent, prototype and share our best and brightest ideas for the years ahead. 

 If we think of the future as a story we tell ourselves, two plotlines have seemingly come to dominate the popular imagination. On the one hand, a happy modernist fable of tech-fueled utopia, and on the other a postmodern myth of dystopian collapse. It’s increasingly difficult to believe in the first because we now know it’s built on an unsustainable foundation. And we don’t even want to think about the second because it’s a tragedy where no one gets out alive.

 Yet for all its uncertainty the future still feels real to us. It’s a time and a place where we’re going to live, sooner or later. What’s it going to be like for you? For us? For all of us? If you could talk to your future self, what would you say? And what would you want to hear? What kind of an ancestor are you going to be? 

 Burning Man is a lot more than one event these days, and the global culture is strong and healthy. And yet, as we expand our presence out into the world and daily life, we no longer have the luxury of thinking we are somehow apart from that world. The world’s problems are ours, and vice versa. We may not be able to fix everything that’s broken but we just might be able to build something better. Let’s take back the future!

“The future doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we’re the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.” ―David Suzuki

Most lives are lived in a sort of endless present, or more accurately a fractional second in the past thanks to processing lag. But somewhere back in the Pleistocene, some of the cleverer apes developed the ability to conceptualize time and create mental models of things that did not really exist. The future was one of those things. It was useful but not terribly so, because for a very long time things didn’t really change much for most people. Then, a few hundred years ago, the pace of change suddenly sped up from zero to dizzying. Electric lights! Indoor plumbing! Espresso machines! Before long the slow march of progress had turned into the all-out sprint we know today, and the idea of the future was back in business. 

 The first of what would come to be called World’s Fairs was England’s Great Exposition of 1851, which showcased bleeding-edge tech like an early fax machine. By the 20th century, this tech-forward depiction of the future had become part of the mythos of western culture, complemented by the starry-eyed prose of “golden age” science fiction and made manifest in popular culture through movies, TV shows, and theme parks. And, of course, advertising; the World’s Fairs and Expos were coming-out parties for debutante products, which sooner or later everyone was going to want to buy. Looking back, the modernist myth of the future seems to have been first and foremost a marketing story. An alluring story, with sexy robots and flying cars, but nonetheless built on an untenable foundation of endless growth and boundless resources.

“Along the road to a utopia, the future seems to have run out of gas.” —Larry Harvey

The term “dystopia” has been around for centuries, coined originally as a snarky counterpoint to the dreamy Utopia of Thomas More. But from a cultural point of view it wasn’t really much of a thing until George Orwell published his 1984, a dark tale of perpetual war and pervasive surveillance. And so was born the prevailing postmodern myth of the future, now typified by planetary ruin, societal collapse, and AI murderbots. 

It’s important to appreciate the cultural weight of these two mythic structures – the modernist story of eternal progress and the postmodern story of irreversible destruction. For all its evolutionary advantages, foresight has its shortcomings. Like all mental models it is by definition incomplete. And lazy human computers that we are, we populate it with memes we’ve absorbed from popular culture. Like the AI that famously concluded the meaning of life is cat videos, we have been exposed to enough dystopian thinking that at some level we may start to believe the zombies are real. 

Somewhere between the extremes of a perfect but impossible utopia and a terrifying dystopia that nobody wants is a third possible path for the future: protopia. Writer and futurist (and longtime Burning Man participant) Kevin Kelly coined the term to describe a future based on steady progress, better than today but not perfect, and not without setbacks. Predicated not on avarice or despair but on slowly, gradually working to make the world better for everyone, one step at a time. In other words, a lot like the iterative approach that we encourage and embrace in the Burning Man world.

“You can’t see a difference of 1 percent unless you turn around and look behind you. One percent a year, for 100 years — that’s a big difference.” —Kevin Kelly

Burning Man is emphatically not a utopian society, nor was it ever meant to be – but it is an influential cultural movement and social experiment with some unique opportunities to prototype new solutions. As we cross the halfway mark in our 10-year sustainability roadmap, this is a natural point to consider how we can achieve a more harmonious relationship between ourselves, the environment, and the resources required to Burn. In the spirit of protopianism, we are prototyping ways for humanity to survive and thrive in the face of a mounting climate crisis over the decades to come. Our strength lies in our ethos: in the power of communal effort, in our commitment to leaving a positive trace, and most of all in the Principle of Participation, to “make the world real through actions that open the heart.”

This year’s Black Rock City event will seek to rekindle the hopeful spirit of the World’s Fair, fueled in this case not by consumerism but by a shared interest in learning from each other and advancing our collective progress toward a better future. Artists, camp organizers, and cultural contributors of all varieties are encouraged to bring their visions for a protopian future. And since so many of the challenges we face are global, we invite the international Burning Man community to join us in this effort, whether in Black Rock City or in their local actions around the world.

It’s easy to be disheartened these days. Our event, our society, and the planet itself are all facing unprecedented challenges. But we are a can-do crowd, a resourceful bunch with a strong bias to action. So when you imagine the future, what is your place in it? How are you going to show up? As a hero or a victim? Whatever future we imagine, it’s not something that’s going to happen to us. It’s something we’re going to go out and make happen.

Cover image graphic by Mike Hampton, inspired by art from Disco Space Shuttle, Five Ton Crane, and David Best. #thankslarry

About the author: Stuart Mangrum

Stuart Mangrum

Stuart is the director of Burning Man Project's Philosophical Center and the host of the Burning Man LIVE podcast. His first Burn was in 1993. He lives in Baja California with his wife Paizley and a clowder of cunning cats.

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