The word "Utopia" literally means "no-place"—which is exactly where you find a society without class boundaries. But when 40,000 people journey to the desert and build a new civilization for a week, what cultural institutions do they bring with them and what do they leave behind?

Despite any illusions that Burning Man is a non-hierarchical playground where the very notion of "status" is left at the gate, there are most definitely different classes of people in Black Rock City. Delightfully, they seem to have little or no relationship to the classes that citizens occupy before they arrive.

For instance, the person in line in front of me to get a coffee at Center Camp Café (one of only two places where commerce is not expressly forbidden) may be a corporate exec worth millions or a truck driver living paycheck to paycheck. I can't tell because he's wearing fuzzy pink boots and matching bunny ears. Whatever class he was before today has vanished. Likewise, every thirty minutes or so the "employees" of the Café, all of whom are volunteers, are instructed (over a megaphone stenciled with the words "instant asshole") to take a "mandatory dance break". They immediately jump to the counters and shake their stuff in front of the waiting customers. Clearly, they are not part of any lowly service class of whom we are entitled to make demands but just another subset of the participant/spectator hybrid population that all Burners comprise.

It's really only when this hybrid breaks down that class becomes more pronounced. The "lower class" at Burning Man are the pure spectators, those who roam the Playa from party to party without ever giving back or those who slum it in RVs and snap pictures of topless girls. The "upper class" are those who are more serious about their participation, which includes everyone from hardcore theme campers through the Black Rock Rangers to the DPW and DMV, a phenomenon that seems exactly backward when compared to our typical relegation of the service industry to lower class.

It is in fact this very access (via the abstracted community of theme camps or the more formalized "we get to drive around on the playa and you don't" of DPW or DMV) that makes real the class distinctions. There is not much to own on the playa, so things like name badges can translate as conspicuous consumption. Burners being who they are, the upper classes in Black Rock City do not escape populist scrutiny, which ranges from passive envy to genuine ire. This extends to the "owning class", the year-round Burners whose day jobs involve securing the permits, raising money, selling tickets, and curating the world's largest art gallery.

This upside down leadership pyramid, where your station in society is directly proportional to the blood, sweat, and rebar splinters you put into it, would make Greek philosophers proud. While far from from perfect, it's equally far from the estranged democracy we seem to have in the (rest of the) United States.

I intend this post to double as an explanation for why I haven't blogged anything for over two weeks.