If the 21^st century has an aristocracy on a par with that of Versailles, it is surely the Silicon Valley tech elite. And their equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s toy farm is Burning Man: a utopian week-long summer festival in the Nevada Desert, whose culture captures a distinctive West Coast liberal ideal — and which is, in the modern context, every bit as artificial and tone-deaf as le hameau de la Reine.

Last week, torrential rain transformed Burning Man from Mad-Max-meets-Magic-Roundabout party week to a dystopian-looking mud-pan filled with three-eyed “dinosaur shrimp”. The downpour, and resulting delay in campers being permitted to leave, spawned a host of increasingly baroque rumours, including an online effort (complete with fake CDC notices) to persuade the world of an ebola outbreak.

Photos from summer festivals are a staple of the silly-season news cycle. But I doubt many images from Reading Festival make the LA Times. Burning Man, meanwhile, is an object of fascination well beyond the Land of the Free, thanks to the paradoxical quality of the American empire.

This nation has done more than any other, from Woodrow Wilson on, to enshrine the notion of “national self-determination” in international law and parlance, while also evacuating other nations and cultures of their culturally distinct lifeways and replacing them with American ones. Having terraformed many nominally non-American nations with American practices and ideals, inevitably the elites from whom this terraforming emanates have also become influential well beyond America’s nominal boundaries.

In the 20th century, this phenomenon was largely confined to Hollywood and the music industry. More recently, though, the cultural centre of gravity has drifted toward Silicon Valley’s tech elite: a group heavily represented at Burning Man. And the schadenfreude that’s accompanied this year’s Burning Man rumour-mongering speaks to a growing ambivalence both about this elite, about the culture machine they command, and about the American promise it mythologises and enacts: the fantasy of perfect individual freedom, on a blank cultural slate, underwritten by universal material abundance.

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It’s two decades since my own Burning Man experience, but it was eye-opening both for what it made possible, and what it took to get there. The festival itself is very bonkers and very liberal: the two governing rules that I can recall are “no commerce” and “no spectators”. That is, if something exchanges hands it must be as a gift, or a barter trade; meanwhile, in social terms, pretty much the only rule is that it is not done to laugh and point at what people are doing, however weird that is. Join in, or move on.

There is a lot of installation art, a lot of sex, a lot of drugs and music and fancy dress. I don’t remember much of what I did in Black Rock City, but I do remember the cumulative atmosphere created by these constraints: a bewitching, enchanted sense of openness, serendipity, and infinite possibility. In this sense, it’s a perfect expression of the American progressive ideal: a world of abundance where everyone can do what they do in an atmosphere of welcome, affirmation and (if you desire it) mutual support, but in which everyone is always free to exit any scenario, at any time.

And like that progressive dream, sustaining Black Rock City requires considerable material effort under the bonnet: an effort that, by and large, doesn’t conform to the same high-minded morals. Sometimes described as an experiment in “radical self-sufficiency”, Burning Man is perhaps more accurately an experiment in creating a radical post-scarcity society by having done all your shopping ahead of time.

The “playa” where the event takes place has no shelter, no water, and no greenery. Nothing is left there between festivals, meaning all infrastructure a temporary, hauled in and assembled for the purpose. Depending on your actual bank balance, this means after the $575 ticket price you must buy or rent everything you need for an encampment, band together with friends, or at minimum raise the funds needed for membership in one of the annual larger pre-existing themed camps. You must pre-load with food, water and shelter. Plus you’ll have more fun if you also take trinkets and treats for barter, fun costumes to wear, drugs, and perhaps a bicycle to get around. All this is then hauled out onto the ring-fenced blank slate of a dry Nevada lake-bed, so festival-goers can enjoy a magical, week-long experience of life without buying or selling.

In other words: all this gift-economy joy is enabled by participation in the regular cut-throat capitalist one. And enjoying it at all is predicated on having enough surplus resource in your life that you can afford to blow at least a few grand on contributing to a colossal, ephemeral simulacrum of no longer needing money at all. And if you can afford to set aside the chunk of change required to resource yourself for a week-long extreme-climate self-catering fancy dress party, chances are you aren’t living hand-to-mouth. It is, in other words, very much a Marie Antoinette toy farm.

I unironically loved my Burn. The festival’s paradoxical blend of brutal desert conditions and stranger generosity, hedonism and survivalism, communitarian friendliness and radical individualism, felt (and still feels) like distilled essence of a liberal cultural ideal present in some form wherever the American cultural empire extends its influence. But I also remember finding the experience dizzying, not least because I went straight to Black Rock City from a whistle-stop tour of a great many parts of the United States for whom similar conditions obtain — just without the option to go home afterwards.

I had decided, that summer, that interrailing round Europe was too tame, and so I was going to do the American equivalent instead: a Greyhound bus tour. Greyhound is probably the closest America gets to genuinely affordable trans-continental public transport: a network of buses between major cities, not just on the coast but also spanning the “flyover states”, as coastal Americans disdainfully describe their country’s interior, including innumerable stops in the middle of nowhere. If you buy a time-limited ticket, you can get on and off as much as you like during that time. I stopped in a lot of one-horse towns and on the lengthy, cramped bus journeys themselves sat next to a lot of the type of Americans you’re never likely to find at Burning Man: drifters, recovering addicts and a hefty sprinkling of the genuinely crazy.

Whenever I recount this experience to coastal Americans, they look shocked that I survived at all. But my main recollection of the company I kept on those interminable and often noisome bus rides was friendliness, eccentricity, bizarre clothing, and generosity alike with their life stories and sometimes limited resources. Not a million miles, in other words, from the temporary citizens of Black Rock City. Meanwhile, outside the buses, the dustiness and jerry-rigged quality of architecture in many of the one-horse towns where Greyhound buses lay over bore more than a passing resemblance to that festival’s temporary infrastructure.

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The main difference between the two was that for denizens of Black Rock City, there’s an outside to the experience of hardship and scarcity. The Google multimillionaires who helicopter into Nevada for a week of self-expression and gift economy against the (usually) arid backdrop of a dusty lakebed enact a crystallised essence the American civilisation’s founding myth of abundance manifested ex nihilo and brought into being through resourcefulness and creativity. But in truth they’re play-acting at the ideal, having pre-resourced that resourcefulness and creativity via a much more cut-throat reality of material competition in which there are, unlike in Black Rock City, winners and losers.

And unlike their fellow-countrymen in the “flyover states” — the losers, in fact, in the real economy that enables the Burning Man fantasy one — most of Black Rock City’s citizens have the option at any time to pull the ripcord, and exit desert survivalism and gift economies for an air-conditioned condo in some of the world’s most expensive postcodes. Unlike those who inhabit that scarcity all the time, they can enjoy the generosity and camaraderie that comes with scarce resources, safe in the knowledge that they have largely foreclosed the risk of genuine material suffering or interpersonal violence that so often accompanies real scarcity.

My own Burn, and the flyover-state tour that preceded it, happened before widespread fentanyl abuse blighted the American interior. The period since my visit has also seen the Great Crash, and widening income inequality. It’s a safe bet that in the intervening period the contrast has only grown starker, between those in the Land of the Free who can afford to play at trying to flourish in a world of scarcity, and those for whom that’s just everyday life.

No wonder, then, that public reaction to the prospect of Black Rock City experiencing even a temporary blip of real as opposed to opt-in material hardship held a vindictive edge. Had photos percolated out of Versailles of Marie Antoinette stuck in manure, forced to milk actual cows even for a few days, perhaps her subjects might have enjoyed a similar frisson.

Weather-wise, Burning Man is rarely a holiday. I went for the first time with my girlfriend in 1999. We’d been warned about the extreme heat in the day, had been told that it was best to take it easy in the afternoons, to relax in the shade in preparation for nocturnal adventures later. The day-time temperatures that year were lovely, in the mid-70s; the nights were freezing. After dark I wore everything I had (which didn’t include a pair of gloves, unfortunately).

The following year it was windy and even slightly rainy. Our bikes got briefly clogged with mud. Another year there were horrendous sandstorms. These sandstorms are part of Burning Man in that they are not only to be expected but are, to an extent, caused by the event: the winds are an unalterable fact of nature but the amount of dust blowing around is increased by all the traffic and activity. One way or another the weather is rarely perfect. You have to be prepared for it being too hot, too cold and everything else. The one thing you didn’t need to worry about is drenching rain. Except now you do.

I went to Burning Man for what I thought was the last time in 2005. I’d finished that phase of my life and was, in addition, glad to be free of the multiple hardships of Black Rock City. There was always something to contend with, often a minor thing that became a major source of discomfort like painfully cracked heels from the acidic dust of the playa. Or there was the time I took a stupid gulp of what I thought was water but was actually the paraffin my friend used for her fire-spinning. Another year my wife ended up on an IV drip because of extreme dehydration.

So I was long done with it when a friend who was directing a documentary about the festival invited me to go with him in 2018. I had visions of this being a rather luxurious return. He was in talks with the organisers who were offering some logistical support. I’d heard rumours of luxury camps that went against the spirit of Burning Man and I was, of course, strongly opposed to such things. Nevertheless I said to my friend that while he should avoid using the word “resort” in any discussions, if it were possible for us to have something as close as possible to a “resort experience”, that would be ideal.

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It turned out to be far from ideal. But it did get better after the first night when my friend, the snoring film director, agreed to move out so I could have the decrepit trailer to myself. And on a couple of occasions other friends allowed us to sneak into their endowed camp and take a shower. So my experience was more luxurious than it had ever been and, overall, every bit as great as I remembered. It was still what it had been when I went that first time in 1999: a high-water mark of civilisation.

The toilets are a good symbol of this. The portapotties at festivals are always a site of potential trauma. But the principle of leaving it as you find it holds good at Burning Man. In my experience, one could be 90% confident there wouldn’t be piss or shit on the seat at any time. And there was always toilet paper. This year I heard that the torrential rain meant the toilets couldn’t be serviced. That is the stuff of nightmares, on top of the quagmire of sucking mud that dries into something like concrete. Jeez, it’s sounded, at times, like Passchendaele in the desert, albeit without the violence. “I too saw God through mud,” wrote Wilfred Owen but while many people regard Burning Man as an ecstatic religious experience, this was a vision few would have wanted to share.

England is a rainy little country, so it’s no surprise Glastonbury regularly turns into a mud-fest. People are prepared for and wallow in it. More than 10 years ago my wife and I set off for Glade Festival. It had been raining heavily. Reports of mud proved accurate but we found our friends and pitched our tent. There were two schools of thought among our group and, I’m guessing, the festival at large about what should happen next. One was: take more drugs and carry on. The other was to squelch around for a bit, pack up the tent and get the next train back to London. That’s what we did and it was a mistake; we shouldn’t have pitched the tent at all, should have just arrived, taken a look and retreated. Or, even better, not gone to Paddington. Or even left the house. The first rule of military strategy is never reinforce failure so, overall, I regard that aborted trip to the Glade in the same way that Nasa rated the Apollo 13 mission: a successful failure.

If I’d seen the weather forecast before heading off to Burning Man this year, I would have cut my losses and decided against it. But I want to make it clear: there’s not even a hint of schadenfreude about my relief at not being stranded there. Over the years, the organisers have consistently made the right decisions about policy and development, have been able to correct previous mistakes, and remained faithful to the festival’s core values in the face of its massive expansion — both actual and hegemonic — into the most influential cultural event on the planet. (Its tentacles have spread so far into the mainstream that people often aren’t aware that Black Rock City is where they’ve extended from.)

And they have always stressed that it takes place in an extreme environment unsuited to human well-being, even when conditions are optimal. Burning Man is a long-running experiment not just in radical self-expression (fun!) but radical self-reliance. At the moment this means waiting. Not waiting for someone to come to the rescue but waiting to turn a passive and challenging idea of self-reliance into a similarly challenging active and mobile one.

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Few words these days are more over-used than community. Raymond Williams, reflecting on its inclusions in his book Keywords, recalled that it was only when he noticed that “community” was never used in a negative way that he became suspicious of it. Had he lived, though, he might have seen fit to include these words from the late Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man. “Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere good will. They grow out of a shared struggle.” Well, that is certainly being put to the test now — and I remain confident (from the comfort of my living room) that it’s a test that will be passed.

The larger question is what happens to the festival after this exceptional year of unprecedented struggle. The impact on the playa is presumably going to be extreme so the clean-up — meticulous, always, to the granular level — will be more difficult than ever. But it will happen and Burning Man will be back, hopefully with sunny skies, next year. I still believe in it, absolutely. And I hope the Man, however soggy and down in the mouth he may feel right now, does what he is there for and is burned, surrounded by whoever might still be around to see it happen. As Harvey argued with irrefutable logic: we have to burn the Man, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to burn him next year.