Have you heard? Burning Man, the annual week-long art festival in the Nevada desert, has jumped the shark. It's been taken over by tech world CEOs eating trucked-in plates of sushi. Except no, wait, it's actually all a bunch of dusty, acid-tripping naked hippies. Or is it candy-tripping techno ravers?

Either way, infamous Washington anti-tax libertarian Grover Norquist is going this year, so it's definitely not worth attending anymore. Right?

Every time I read one of those articles — they are legion at this time of year and invariably seem to miss the point — I feel a bile rising, a furious urge to defend the festival I've attended, on and off, since 1999. This week's New York Times style section story is a case in point. The author, Nick Bilton, is a smart guy, and he's been to the event. He should know. But here he is telling one of many old and cliched untruths about the place:

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air. A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct.

Poppycock. That assumption has never been even close to correct. The author Brian Doherty, whom Bilton quotes (he wrote the definitive and highly recommended history "This is Burning Man"), could have told Bilton that. You have to understand, as Doherty's readers are led to, that this is a Mad Max kind of environment.

It is, and always has been, ruled by all kinds of techno-smart futuristic punks rather than nostalgic hippies or dippy ravers.

Consider: this is a week-long art party in a handmade city in an environment that is doing its level best to kill you. Either the sun is baking dry ground that is blinding white, leeching water from your body, or the wind is blasting mile-high storms of dust across this enormous barren plain at fifty miles an hour, enough to take your tent away if it isn't attached to rebar, or a starry desert night is damn-near freezing you to death.

Occasionally the climate likes to remind you you're actually partying on an ancient lake bed — the playa — and rains for days until the solid dusty ground turns to thick soupy mud that adds inches to your shoes in seconds.

Who thrives in that environment? People who are a little bit crazy, quite a bit determined, and a whole lot of wiry and smart. People with an Iggy Pop-style lust for life. Here are punks of all stripes: cyberpunks, steampunks, biker punks, punk punks. People who do what it says on the ticket — voluntarily assume the risk of death. People who are brought roaringly to life in this killer of a desert, and fight fiercely to build an all-inclusive volunteer-driven civilization that lasts for as long as a mayfly.

See also: 36 Surreal Instagram Images From Burning Man

Sure, you're getting away from some of the trappings of civilization — though certainly not all, because the county police are as numerous and visible a presence in Black Rock City as in any American city. It is also Federal land filled with BLM rangers, who work hand in hand with the Burning Man organization to make sure this party on protected land gets its usual world-class cleanup.

Burning Man is crawling with law enforcement and officialdom; they've just gotten very good at blending in. The notion that you have complete freedom to openly flout federal or Nevada state law is a dangerous myth. The idea that, as Bilton suggests, "drugs are easier to find than candy on Halloween" is what leads the guy carrying the "I Need Drugs" sign to his inevitable arrest on the city's main drag, the Esplanade.

Notice, newbies, that when I keep calling it a city, I'm not speaking metaphorically. This is a city with roads, street signs, with a volunteer force of street gas lamp lighters, with public services like coffee and porta potties and sewer trucks and water trucks to douse the roads, all included in the price of your taxes — er, ticket.

Grover Norquist is, I hope, going to have something of an epiphany on the playa. The anti-government crusader will see what people do in what he thinks is a post-government kind of environment — they band together and rush headlong towards a system of collective survival infrastructure, also known as government.

Leading the charge is the Department of Public Works, or DPW — the roughest, toughest, hardest-working punks of all. These are the men and women who come out to this hostile environment literally months in advance to drive the golden spike in the ground that marks the dead center of vast concentric horseshoe-shaped boulevards, to construct the vast public spaces of Center Camp and the (completely nondenominational) Temple, to build the Man just so you can watch him burn.

It's no wonder the DPW is famous for roaming the streets during the event demanding beer from unsuspecting strangers because "we built this city" (to which the only appropriate response, if you're daring enough, is "on rock and roll.")

What's more incredible than this highly effective volunteer government (such as the DMV, or Department of Mutant Vehicles, which registers and regulates every art car on the playa)? It's the universally agreed-upon rules and mores, the culture that so quickly rushes in on top of the infrastructure year after year like fast-pouring concrete.

Some of them are just common sense — drink water whenever you're not talking, for example, which is a good rule to obey if you don't want to end up in the med tent. "Drink enough water that you piss clear" is another (you can see what the equivalent of Eskimo words for snow is here). "Leave no trace" — hard as it is to believe, the vast majority of Burners actually follow this rule religiously, to the point of chasing windborne trash for miles, even though the DPW constructs a nine-mile long trash fence around the city.

These are, generally speaking, people for whom the Golden Rule is a rather milquetoast suggestion. People who drop everything to help a stranger with a cut on his knee or a camp of strangers with a wind-torn shade tarp, or sign up to help some mad sculptor with insane ambitions of building a giant steel rocket ship, are a little beyond needing to be reminded to "do unto others."

Everything else that happens on the surface of Burning Man — the partying, the techno music, the whimsical city-wide improv act complete with Mad Max-style Thunderdome — is icing that sits on the cake of this deep and genuine community spirit.

As for the tech titan attendees that Bilton concerns the rest of his column with, billionaires like Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos? Guess what — I saw all three of those guys at Burning Man in 2000, and they'd been going for years even at that point. It's a truth widely acknowledged, but rarely properly understood by non-attendees, that Page and Brin chose Eric Schmidt to helm Google for a decade because he was the only candidate who'd been to Burning Man.

Silicon Valley has been intimately connected to this event since its inception. That's because the tech industry tends to hire the same kind of smart, active, collaborative freethinkers drawn to the challenges of creating something unique on the blank, bleak desert canvas. This is what Elon Musk was trying to say when he complained that the makers of HBO's Silicon Valley didn't quite get Silicon Valley — because they hadn't been to Burning Man. He got baffled looks and laughter from the non-attendees of polite society.

But what about the plates of sushi, the ridiculously decadent desert food the billionaires are bringing with them? Hundreds of camps do exactly the same thing — ridiculously overspend, beyond their means, on ridiculously decadent food that they keep in a series of coolers just so they can be ridiculously generous to friends at unexpected moments.

I have attended fabulous and random four-course dinner parties during sunset on the playa. I've seen camps bring tanks of liquid nitrogen just so they can make ice cream for anyone who stops by. One year I had the ridiculous notion to take Chinese food delivery orders from my camp long before the event. For those who took me seriously, I ordered, vacuum-packed and froze their meals the day I drove out, then heated and delivered the results to their tent doors in their original containers the next day. That sort of thing happens all the time. Bilton's notion that nearly all Burners are eating ramen noodles is the column's other tired cliche.

It was better last year

The ultimate misconception about Burning Man, though, is that it'll be around forever. The whole idea is that it won't. The event is a celebration of impermanence and change — the clue is in the title, and in the vanishing city that gets packed in and packed out.

Larry Harvey, Burning Man co-founder, has long said he's preparing for the day when it will be no more. Eventually the crush of extra people at an event that's adding up to 10,000 new attendees each year will get too much, the culture will collapse, it really will jump the shark. It doesn't matter, Harvey insists — the spirit of Burning Man burns brightly in dozens of what are known as regional Burns, held around the year.

For many grizzled veterans who no longer go, that day has already come. It doesn't matter. People are always on the edge of phasing out of Burning Man; that's why "it was better last year" is one of the most common memes on the playa, right up there with "leave no trace."

So far, however, Black Rock City has absorbed far more immigrants than it has spat out emigrants. There's healthy stream of new attendees (and yes, new tech billionaires) to replace the old. For all its sham, drudgery and imperfect visions, Burning Man the event, not just the spirit, is still gaining strength.

It's high time we started seeing it for the phenomenal jerry-rigged punk-built human achievement it is — rather than the oft-ruined hippy fest of media legend — before it leaves no trace one last time.