Festival leaders are hoping for some help from D.C. Burning Man looks for love from D.C.

Burning Man is storming the Hill this week to talk to The Man.

Leaders of the anarchic festival in the Nevada desert — a tech-free gathering that Silicon Valley has increasingly embraced — were to meet with regulators and lawmakers Monday and Tuesday as they press their case that Burning Man needs some government love.


The organization hopes to dispel the tawdry image some have of the nation’s biggest outdoor arts event as a haven for drug-taking, clothing-optional participants who have group sex and dance to pulsating electronic music all night.

Burning Man instead is a cradle of American innovation and creativity, the event’s organizers plan to tell Washington. There’s a serious side to the event: Internet companies have increasingly flocked there to make deals and launch businesses — with some companies now viewing it as an annual retreat.

“We’re a nexus of creativity,” said Marian Goodell, director of business and communications at Burning Man. “Now we want to talk about innovation.”

They also want to talk about its arrangement with the Bureau of Land Management, which has since 1990 permitted the event on BLM land 110 miles north of Reno.

The festival gets its name for the burning of a stories-high effigy of a man.

The event — with its principles of “radical inclusion,” “decommodification,” and “radical self-expression” — has swollen to more than 50,000 people who bring their own food and water and manage to leave little trace. Burning Man sold out last year and demand remains high this year.

The bulk of this year’s tickets were sold in a random drawing, leaving long-time “burners,” as they are called, without tickets. Organizers want a five-year permit from the bureau and they want to take the event up to 70,000 participants.

“We’re an antidote to everything else happening in the world,” Goodell said. “There is no Internet connection. Cellphones don’t work. It is an economy of creativity and self-expression that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Meanwhile, the bureau for the first time put the event on probation for going over the attendee limit of 53,000 during two days of last year’s event.

While Burning Man has appealed the decision and Black Rock City will still rise in the desert from Aug. 27 through Sept. 3 this year, the probation status has put a damper on the mood of self-expression clique.

It’s also thrown a wrench in the organization’s efforts to win a five-year permit from Uncle Sam.

If Burning Man is put on probation again this year, the event’s permit could be jeopardized, said Gene Seidlitz, the BLM district manager for the region. The population caps are important as they make it possible for law enforcement and other services to plan, he said.

Burning Man’s Goodell said that being put on probation “is not jeopardizing our survival.”

As part of its federal outreach, Goodell and Larry Harvey, the founding director of the event, will visit offices of lawmakers from California and Nevada as well as the BLM and the Department of the Interior. They will also hold a cocktail party for congressional staffers and others. The organization declined to say exactly which lawmakers and agencies it plans to visit.

The event has evolved since its first bonfire on a San Francisco beach in 1986. The man then was just 8 feet. Now, it attracts multi-generations and people from all over the world, some of whom dress in costume or engage in performance art on a dry lake bed known as La Playa.

The average burner has gone for 10 years. The average annual salary of a burner is $50,000 to $70,000.

So entwined is the event with the tech community that the Google doodle on Google’s home page got its start during Burning Man. In 1998, Google’s founders put a stick figure on the home page when they attended the event to let users know where they were should the site crash.

Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, went to Burning Man first in 1999 and has gone back five times. “It was like a blank visual canvass,” he said.

“It’s a place to revel in the kind of life I very much enjoy leading and to be inspired by people’s collective ability to make a lot of stuff without supervision or direction,” said Rosedale, now a co-founder of Coffee and Power, a marketplace and tech firm for people to work together. “Technology is putting us in the same kind of desert as Burning Man. It has leveled the playing field. Building something in a totally new space, that’s what Burning Man is about.”

Academics study the culture of “gifting” at Burning Man (no money exchanges hands); books have been written about it. Local lawmakers, medical staff and law enforcement are given tours of the events. While business may be conducted as people bike around the desert, the organization doesn’t allow corporate sponsors or marketing. When RockStar offered drinks to Burning Man staff one year, it had to cover up logos on its vehicle in order to enter the event grounds.

In the past year, Black Rock LLC, the firm that runs the celebration, has launched a nonprofit firm, the Burning Man Project, with the aim of spreading the Burning Man culture beyond the event. In March, Burning Man helped with an event in Las Vegas with Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Internet retailer Zappos. They burned a 20-foot-high effigy of a showgirl, Lucky Lady Lucy, as part of a revival of a dormant arts festival.

This year’s art theme is Fertility 2.0., “wherein we contemplate the tendency of any being or living system to create abundant life.”

“People are realizing it’s not just a party in the desert,” Goodell said. “It’s become a culture.”