Here Comes Karma Culture
Burning Man down, diarrhea plane, and the cackle of it all.
Hi friends!
What happened at Burning Man last weekend was my Super Bowl. While everyone in LA and their lucky little mother festooned themselves in silver to see Beyonce, I was watching another spectacle unfold from the comfort of my couch. It was the perfect cloudy weather to stay indoors, observe the mud-drenched masses, and google how long it takes for trench foot to set in. Diplo hitching an escape ride on the back of a pickup truck while Chris Rock yelled about cold brew was my halftime show — two of our most slappable celebrities brought together for one brief, but memorable moment — and the winner was all of us not at Burning Man, feeling smugger than usual about our life choices.
As with anything these days, the conspiracy enthusiasts were quick to jump aboard the content train and somehow by the afternoon a rumor had spread that FEMA was also attending Burning Man due to an ebola outbreak. This rumor was so pervasive that the local sheriff was forced to comment on it. I’m assuming that someone watching the madness unfold on TikTok was unfamiliar with the festival’s popular steampunk biohazard aesthetic, mistook it for an actual hazmat scenario, and then things just spiraled from there.
It’s 2023 and we aren’t missing an opportunity for collective social media schadenfreude. The pile on was fast and furious and the takes were served hotter than a sunny day on the playa.
First came the obvious comedy of watching someone trudge through mud in plastic bag covered furry rave boots. Then, unhinged reports from those in attendance insisting that the spirit of “radical self reliance” was alive and well. Impassioned counterpoints followed, mainly that the festival is just a playground for wealthy people to synthesize hardship in their otherwise cushy lives.
My favorite of those takes came from this one redheaded man who occasionally shows up yelling on my feed — his video calling out white women with dreadlocks and inferring that people go to Burning Man to try homelessness on for size got taken down but the stitches live on. Love his tenacity and his juxtaposition of the homelessness crisis with a festival where thousands of people willingly forego running water and sleep in tents. Not my take, but value its place in the discourse.
Truth is, I am more Burning Man adjacent than I’d like to be. And while attending the festival is my idea of hell and I simply would never, I had an extended party phase and easily know a dozen people who have made this event part of their personality.1 Do I think everyone in Black Rock City deserved to get stuck in the mud for cosplaying apocalypse whilst doing copious amounts of ketamine? Absolutely not. Did I revel in the tragic irony of a “community” built on “radical self reliance” waiting for someone to come empty their porta potties? Yes, yes, I did. And I can only imagine how much junk got left behind in the mud, a natural consequence of holding a massive festival in a dry lake bed that due to climate change is maybe now… not so dry.
The climate protest that kicked off the festival seems even more potent in hindsight, a foretelling of the disaster that came. And it seems like we’re seeing more and more of this swift circle back, a karmic revolution of sorts where the path to comeuppance is shorter and sweeter than ever. In the grand tradition of nothing bringing people together like a common enemy, we are finding community in the fated misfortune of others.
Karma culture is a natural evolution of cancel culture, a cosmic twist for the masses already primed to get their digital pitchforks out and huddle together for retribution. After our pandemic years, and all the collective grief, fear, and magnified inequality, there is perhaps no more comforting thought than everything coming back around to bend in the favor of karmic justice.
Burning Man now joins the vengeful orcas, our dearly departed submersible, and Donald Trump’s mugshot in the annals of this cackling zeitgeist. I am curious to see who or what is next — my money is on Elon Musk — but in the meantime, we must heed a warning from my absolute fave news story of the week, the Barcelona-bound diarrhea plane forced to return to Atlanta when one passenger’s bowels exploded up and down the aisle.
This story was just a tremendous treat, first the pilot’s conversation with air traffic control went public, then we got some truly wild footage of the plane’s interior, followed by the news that the carpet had to be ripped up and replaced. The identity of the pooper has not been revealed so we can all just assume it was the most annoying person we know, how embarrassing for them.
Air travel has become an absolutely heinous experience and this incident highlights the most extreme outcome of an alarming trend I have observed this summer on multiple flights — unbridled, remorseless farting into the stale cabin air.
I was recently on a 45 minute Southwest flight (like, hold it in!) and was sitting in the back during some of the worst turbulence I have experienced in years, wearing a very thick mask because planes are the petri dish of the sky and I aim to have the common sense of an elderly Asian woman, and still I could smell the farts from passengers around me who seemed not to care for gut health or decency.
Let this be a warning to you, free and easy farters of the sky, sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire, and when you’re caught sharting in the aisle we will all be laughing at you.
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend full of fresh, fart-free air and little to no personal karmic retribution. I am going to go to the movies and will let you know if I see anything good!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz
If any of you reading this were there this year, I implore you to hit reply and tell me your tale. TYSM!