Almost since the beginning, Burning Man has had a coffee shop at Center Camp where you could buy coffee, and, in later years, fancy espresso drinks and lemonades and stuff. The fact that coffee was for sale at the center of the biggest nothing-for-sale event in the world was hard to explain. Every description of Burning Man in the mainstream media ended up with some kind of awkward construction like “Burning Man, the 70,000-person city where nothing is for sale, except for coffee and ice, …” and before you’ve even explained Burning Man you’re already wondering about coffee.
The reasons for selling coffee were not entirely clear. Larry Harvey’s own explanation from 2013 of why coffee should be sold was not particularly convincing. Nevertheless, the status quo until 2019 was that Center Camp was a pretty dang lovely place, even if you did have to pay for the coffee. Not everyone went, but those who did found a delightful city square, got a chance to interact with people from all parts of the city, and you could sip giant iced coffees while watching hotties doing acro-yoga all day long. Even if you didn’t bring your own cup!
After the Renegade Burn in 2021, though, the myth about how coffee sales make sense started to run out of steam. As one particpant reported, “It turns out that the bizarre requirement, flying in the face of decommodification, to have coffee for sale at center camp was a myth.” Indeed a lot of theme camps that wanted to offer gifts like coffee or create interactive spaces felt like Center Camp just crowded out their gifts… those thousands of burners lining up to buy espresso were not walking the city streets visiting any of the 70 camps that advertised coffee as a gift in 2019.
So coffee sales were ended in 2022. But they build Center Camp anyway, in 2022 and 2023, to continue to host the events, artworks, and community interactions that had always been held there.
It was a ghost town in 2022. So they tried again in 2023 to create something exciting at center camp. “At any given time you may meet (or be!) a tap-dancing platypus, java-slinging cephalopod or rhinoceros puppeteer,” they advertised, but nobody went.
Theme camps, who had been invited to come do “pop up” things at Center Camp, actually preferred to do those things in their own spaces, which is the point of a theme camp, anyway, and what Placement incentivized.
What will happen in 2024? Reddit user hannican kicked off a long and interesting conversation by just suggesting that it’s time to close center camp. And the org is planning a town hall on January 27th to, once again, try and get some ideas for where to go.
Maybe the idea of a top-down organization creating something from the top down for us spectators to enjoy is not really going to work at Burning Man. There are thousands of things created by the participants, and having one big grand Main Stage coffee shop both flew in the face of decommodification but flew in the face of the even more important Burning Man ethos of No Spectators.
Golden Guy Alley is probably the best example of what a Burning Man town square should could be and should be: something that is entirely participant-created, decommodified, both small scale and able to handle crowds, and a real bottom-up city square that fits the ethos of Burning Man a lot better.