Burning Man's Ten Principles

The cultural document Larry Harvey wrote in 2004 to articulate Burning Man, eighteen years in. Now used as a touchstone by intentional communities, hackerspaces, and theme camps worldwide.

What this document is, and what it governs

The Ten Principles are a working description of Burning Man culture. Larry Harvey wrote them in 2004, eighteen years after the first Burning Man, in response to the question: what holds the regional Burner network together as it spreads beyond the playa? They are not laws. They are not rules of conduct. They are not enforceable in any administrative sense. The Burning Man Project's own framing is that the principles "were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community's ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event's inception."

The document is short. Ten one-paragraph principles, roughly six hundred words total. Written in plain English. Each principle names one value with a brief gloss, in the form of "[Principle Name]. [Sentence describing what it means]."

The Ten Principles govern, in practice, three overlapping domains. First, the operating culture of Black Rock City itself, the temporary city of roughly seventy thousand people that builds and unbuilds in the Black Rock Desert each August. Second, the Burning Man regional network, which now includes more than one hundred recognized regional events worldwide, from AfrikaBurn in South Africa to Midburn (the Israeli regional) to the Korean and Japanese Burns and dozens of smaller events across Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. Third, a much wider sphere of communities, hackerspaces, intentional villages, and theme camps that have adopted the principles as a touchstone document for their own cultural work.

The principles are not the Burning Man Project's constitution. The Project itself runs as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a board, an executive team, and standard operating bylaws. The principles sit alongside the legal entity as the cultural document that orients the Project's work. The distinction matters: a community can be Burner-aligned without any formal relationship to the Burning Man Project, simply by living the principles. This is closer to how religious traditions transmit than how legal frameworks bind.

The principles function as a governance document at the theme-camp and regional-event scale. A theme camp organizing two hundred people for a week of life on the playa uses the Ten Principles as its operating frame. A regional event applying for recognition by the Burning Man Project signs an affiliation agreement that names the principles as the shared culture. The principles are not directly enforceable, but their violation is what gets a camp called out, a regional un-recognized, or a culture-bearer asked to step back. They function more like the rule of a religious order than like the rule of a state.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. This entry is grounded in Sharon Avraham's lived experience as a co-founder of Midburn, the Israeli regional Burner event founded around 2011 and ongoing. Across more than a decade of organizing inside the regional network, Sharon has worked with the Ten Principles in their actual operating context. The lived knowledge of how the principles bend, hold, or break in the regional context underwrites much of what follows.

The founding context

Burning Man started as a beach burn in San Francisco in 1986. Larry Harvey and Jerry James built an eight-foot wooden figure on Baker Beach for the summer solstice and burned it. A small crowd gathered. They did it again the next year. By 1990, the burn had grown enough that the San Francisco police shut it down, and the Cacophony Society (a Bay Area counter-cultural collective Harvey was part of) suggested the Black Rock Desert in Nevada as an alternative. The burn moved to the desert. By 1996 it was an event of eight thousand people. By 2000 it was twenty-five thousand. By the mid-2000s, regional Burner communities were forming worldwide, organizing their own smaller events on the same cultural pattern.

Through this entire period, from 1986 to 2004, there were no Ten Principles. The culture transmitted through participation, through Larry Harvey's annual essays, and through the lived experience of attending Black Rock City. Many longtime Burners argue the culture was healthier when it was unwritten, that articulating it formalized what had been organically transmitted, and that any document is a partial reduction of the lived thing.

The trigger for writing the principles was the regional network. By 2003, the Burning Man Project was formalizing relationships with regional contacts in dozens of cities around the world. Each region was running its own version of the culture, with varying degrees of fidelity to what the Black Rock City community recognized as Burner. The Project needed a shared reference document that the regional network could point to. The Project also needed protection: as the brand grew, commercial actors began using "Burning Man" language for events that did not actually share the culture. A document was needed to mark the line.

Larry Harvey drafted the principles in late 2003 and early 2004. He published them in his "Letter to the Regionals" in 2004, framing them not as a law but as a description: "I drafted these principles, not so much as a series of commandments as a list of values that animate the experience itself." The Burning Man Project formally adopted them as the cultural reference document later that year. The text has not been amended since.

The document had no single official launch event. It appeared on the Burning Man website, was included in the regional contact handbook, and propagated through the network. By 2010 it was the standard reference cited in regional event applications. By 2015 it was being widely adopted by intentional communities, hackerspaces, festivals, and co-living projects far beyond the Burner network. The principles have outgrown their origin and now function as a working cultural document for a much larger community than the regional Burner network they were drafted for.

The lineage Harvey drew on is worth naming. The Cacophony Society in San Francisco shaped the early playful and absurdist sensibility. The Kerista Commune, also in San Francisco, contributed early thinking on decommodification through its experiments with Polyfidelity Economics in the 1970s and 1980s. The American Burning Man tradition is also closer to the Beat Generation and the Merry Pranksters than it is to European intentional community traditions like Tamera or ZEGG. The principles read as a Bay Area counter-cultural document, and their portability across the rest of the world has required adaptation that the document itself does not name.

The structure of the document at a glance

The Ten Principles are listed in the order Larry Harvey wrote them. The order is not random. The first three principles define the gift economy. The next two principles define the individual stance. The next three principles define collective and ecological duties. The final two principles are meta-principles describing the orientation of the entire experience.

The reading order matters. Radical Inclusion comes first because the entire culture rests on the premise that anyone who shows up belongs. Gifting comes second because it is what the included person does once they belong. Decommodification comes third because it is the negative space that makes the gift economy possible: no sponsorships, no advertising, no transactional exchange inside the cultural container. The next pair, Radical Self-reliance and Radical Self-expression, frame the individual's stance: you bring your own resources, and you bring your own gift. The next group, Communal Effort and Civic Responsibility, describe the collective duties: cooperation in the work, accountability to the broader civil society. Leaving No Trace stands alone as the ecological discipline. Participation and Immediacy close the document by describing the orientation of the whole experience: change happens through doing rather than watching, and the most important value is direct contact with reality, with each other, with the moment.

The structure is closer to a poem than to a constitution. The principles do not include enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, voting procedures, or revision protocols. They are read out loud at the start of regional gatherings, printed on banners, and quoted in conflict-resolution conversations. They function as a shared vocabulary, not a legal text.

Key principles, in their own words

Five of the ten principles, quoted from Larry Harvey's 2004 text, with a one-paragraph gloss explaining how each lands in practice.

"Radical Inclusion. Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community."

This is the first principle, and it is structural. Radical Inclusion is what makes the gift economy possible: if anyone may be part, then the gift cannot be transactional, because the person you are gifting to is whoever happens to walk past, not someone you chose. In practice, this principle is the most contested. Black Rock City's tickets are expensive and the lottery is hard to win. Critics argue Radical Inclusion is honored in the principle and broken in the practice. Defenders argue the principle is aspirational and the work is to keep closing the gap. The honest read is that both are true.

"Gifting. Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value."

The unconditional clause is the working clause. A Burner gift is not barter, not trade, not delayed reciprocity. It is given without expectation, often anonymously. In practice this means a theme camp serves coffee, mixes drinks, opens a sauna, runs a workshop, or hosts a sound system, and asks for nothing in return. The economy of Black Rock City runs on this. It is also where the principle bends: in groups of seventy thousand people, gift economies tend to develop reciprocity norms, status hierarchies among gift-givers, and patron dynamics. The principle holds them in tension, not at zero.

"Decommodification. In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience."

Decommodification is the principle that has caused the most ongoing controversy and the most legal action. Burning Man Project sues commercial actors that use the brand for advertising. The "no logos" rule is enforced at the gates of Black Rock City. The 2010s saw an open conflict over "plug-and-play" camps where Silicon Valley wealth pre-built luxury infrastructure for paying clients, which the broader community read as a Decommodification violation even when no money changed hands on the playa. The principle is the frontline of how Burning Man defends its culture from market capture. Many regional events are stricter on Decommodification than the main event itself, because they have less institutional buffer between the culture and the surrounding economy.

"Participation. Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart."

Participation is the meta-principle that organizes the rest. It is the answer to the question "what is the difference between Burning Man and a music festival?" The festival has performers and an audience. The Burner event has only participants. There is no audience role. Theme camps build their own infrastructure. Art cars and large-scale art are built and operated by their creators, not by hired staff. The participation principle is what makes Doocracy the natural governance pattern for theme camps: whoever does the work shapes the work, because there is nobody else to do it.

"Immediacy. Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience."

Immediacy is the closing principle, and the most philosophical. It names the orientation of the whole experience: the goal is direct contact, not abstraction. The principle is what justifies the cost, the difficulty, the discomfort, the desert. You do not learn what Burning Man is by reading the Ten Principles. You learn what Burning Man is by going. The document closes by gesturing at its own limit: no idea can substitute for this experience. The principles are a description, not a manual. The thing they describe only exists in the doing.

The community that lives by it

Black Rock City is the home community. Each year, between sixty and eighty thousand people build a temporary city on a dry lakebed in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The city has streets, addresses, a Department of Public Works, an emergency medical service, a center camp, theme camps, large-scale art, and a Man burned at the end of the week. The city builds for two months, runs for one week, and is unbuilt over the following month. The Ten Principles are the operating culture for the entire effort.

The regional Burner network extends the culture worldwide. As of 2026, more than one hundred regional events are recognized by the Burning Man Project. Some are large: AfrikaBurn in South Africa draws over ten thousand attendees. Many are small: regional Decompression events with one or two hundred people are common. All operate under the Ten Principles, with regional adaptations.

Sharon's Midburn, the Israeli regional Burner event, is one of the communities this entry draws on directly. Founded around 2011 by Sharon and a small group of co-founders, Midburn continues to gather annually in the Negev desert. Across more than a decade, the community has carried the Ten Principles in a political and ecological context the document was not drafted for. The Israeli regional has been a steady contributor to the broader Burner network and one of the longer-running regional Burns outside North America.

Burner Without Borders is the humanitarian arm. Founded in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, BWB mobilizes Burner culture for disaster response and community development. Its work has included rebuilding in New Orleans, Haiti, the Gulf Coast, and other contexts. BWB is one of the clearest demonstrations that the Ten Principles can carry into work outside the playa.

The principles have also been adopted by communities outside the regional Burner network. Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal explicitly names Burning Man culture as one of its cultural sources: the founders describe TDF as "a Burning Man camp" in their archive interview. Feÿtopia in France traces a partial lineage to Burner-adjacent networks: Mathieu, a co-founder, came into community work through a Burner-influenced collective called Mangrove. The principles are also widely used in hackerspaces, maker faires, festivals (with mixed success on Decommodification), and intentional communities that want a cultural touchstone document without writing one of their own.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. A pattern across the regional network is worth naming. The principles work better in regions that translate them than in regions that import them verbatim. AfrikaBurn translated Decommodification into the South African context where the line between gift and transaction works differently than in Bay Area culture. Midburn has held the principles in the Israeli regional context for more than a decade. The Korean and Japanese regional Burns have adapted Self-expression and Self-reliance to cultures where individualism reads differently than in the United States. The principles travel best when they are read as a starting point for local cultural work, not as a fixed code to be applied.

How it has been tested, amended, or contested

The Ten Principles have not been amended since 2004. This is unusual for a working cultural document of a community this size. The stability is partly by design (Larry Harvey resisted revision throughout his life; he died in 2018) and partly because the principles are short enough and abstract enough to absorb new conditions without rewriting.

The major tests in the principles' life:

The plug-and-play camp controversy (mid-2010s). Wealthy Silicon Valley participants began contracting with concierge services to pre-build luxury camps with private chefs, climate-controlled tents, and paid staff. The broader community read this as a Decommodification violation: while no money changed hands on the playa, the underlying economic structure of the camps was transactional. The Burning Man Project responded by tightening regional event guidelines, publishing position pieces on the issue, and instructing the Department of Public Works on what plug-and-play infrastructure was acceptable. The controversy did not amend the principles but did clarify their application.

The 2018 sexual misconduct reckoning. The MeToo period produced a community reckoning at Black Rock City. Multiple high-profile theme-camp leaders were named for predatory behavior. The community had to confront the gap between Radical Inclusion (which welcomes everyone) and Civic Responsibility (which requires accountability for harm). The principles did not give a clean answer, and the community has been working through the tension since. New protocols around theme-camp accountability, consent culture education, and harm response were developed at the Project level and across the regional network. None of this changed the principles. All of it changed how the principles are practiced.

The 2020-2021 pandemic cancellations. The annual Black Rock City event was cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19. The community organized "Virtual Burning Man" online and held smaller distributed gatherings worldwide. The pandemic surfaced the question of what Burning Man is when there is no event. The principles held, but the cancellation revealed how much of the culture was actually located in the annual gathering itself. The 2022 return to the playa was a relief, and a question.

The wealth-inequality critique (ongoing). Tickets to Black Rock City cost between $575 and $2,750 per person as of recent years, plus travel, supplies, vehicle, gear, and time off work. The total cost for a first-time Burner is rarely under $2,000. This is incompatible with Radical Inclusion in any straightforward reading. The Project has run subsidized ticket programs (Low Income Tickets, Steward Sale). Critics argue these are insufficient. The principles do not resolve this; the work of resolving it is the lived practice of the regional network.

The ecological critique (ongoing). Black Rock City's carbon footprint is large. Tens of thousands of people drive to the desert, build infrastructure, run generators, and depart. Leaving No Trace addresses the litter and physical impact, but it does not address the carbon cost of getting to the playa. Some regional events have started measuring and offsetting their footprint. The 2030 net-zero goal the Burning Man Project has stated remains aspirational. The principle of Leaving No Trace was drafted for the playa surface, not for the atmosphere. Translating it for a climate context is ongoing work.

The regional disagreements (ongoing). Different regional events interpret the principles differently. AfrikaBurn is unusually strict on Decommodification. Midburn has run continuously in the Israeli regional context for over a decade. The Korean Burn has adapted Radical Self-expression in ways that read American Burners as "less expressive" and Korean Burners as "appropriately bounded." These differences are not failures of the principles. They are the principles working: a short document is portable, and portable documents become local.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

Where the Ten Principles are alive in 2026, and how to engage with them as a community builder.

Living examples

Black Rock City (Black Rock Desert, Nevada, late August annually). Approximately seventy thousand participants. Tickets are sold via lottery. The principles operate at full intensity for one week each year. For most community builders, attending Black Rock City once is the deepest available immersion in Burner culture, but it is expensive and difficult to access.

Regional Burner events (worldwide). More than one hundred regional events run annually, ranging from AfrikaBurn (~13,000 attendees) to small Decompression events of one or two hundred. Regional events are dramatically cheaper, easier to access, and often closer to local culture than the Black Rock City event. The regional list is maintained at burningman.org/regional-network.

Midburn (Israel, ongoing). The Israeli regional Burner event. Founded around 2011 by Sharon and a small group of co-founders, Midburn continues to gather annually in the Negev desert. For a Burner visit in the region, contact through the Midburn organizing community is the entry point.

Burner Without Borders (worldwide). The humanitarian arm. BWB volunteers deploy for disaster response and community development. Joining a BWB project is a way to see the principles applied outside the cultural container of a Burn event.

Adjacent and inspired applications

Theme camp culture beyond Black Rock City. Festivals like Boom (Portugal), Fusion (Germany), Symbiosis (US), and Lightning in a Bottle (US) all have theme-camp cultures influenced by Burning Man. The Decommodification principle is not always honored at these events, but the participatory ethic and the gift culture often are.

Hackerspaces and maker culture. The hacker ethic and the Burner ethic share lineage and have influenced each other since the 1990s. Most hackerspaces explicitly or implicitly run on principles close to the Burner ten.

Co-living projects and intentional communities. Traditional Dream Factory names the principles directly. Many intentional communities use the principles as a starting point for their own values document.

Mutual aid networks. Burner Without Borders is one example. Many smaller mutual aid networks have adopted the principles or principles-adjacent frames.

Entry points

Read Larry Harvey's original text (burningman.org/about/10-principles). Twenty minutes. The document is short. Read the introduction, then read each principle slowly. Notice the order.

Attend a regional Burn before considering Black Rock City. Regional Burns are cheaper, smaller, and easier to fit into a life. They also test whether the culture is what you thought it was. Many people discover after a regional that they prefer the smaller scale.

Help build a theme camp. Theme camp leadership is the practical application of the principles in microcosm. Most regional Burns accept new theme camp applications. Camp building requires every principle: Inclusion (who joins), Gifting (what you offer), Decommodification (no sponsors), Self-reliance (your own infrastructure), Self-expression (the camp's identity), Communal Effort (the build crew), Civic Responsibility (your relationship to the wider event), Leaving No Trace (cleanup), Participation (the work itself), and Immediacy (the moment).

Translate the principles for your own context. The principles travel best when adapted. If you are starting an intentional community, a maker space, a co-living project, or any cultural container that wants a values document, read the Ten Principles, write your own version, and notice which principles you keep, which you translate, and which you drop. The act of translation teaches you what your community actually values.

Sit with the contradictions honestly. The principles do not resolve their own internal tensions. Radical Inclusion and the cost of attending. Decommodification and the commercial economy that surrounds the event. Leaving No Trace and the carbon cost of getting there. The principles describe a horizon. The community is the work of walking toward it. Communities that adopt the principles as scripture miss the point. The principles are a starting argument, not a settled answer.

One caution

The Ten Principles came out of a specific cultural moment and place: Bay Area counter-culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, transposed onto a desert in Nevada. They carry assumptions about individualism, expression, and inclusion that do not transfer cleanly to every cultural context. Communities adopting the principles wholesale, without translating them, can reproduce a Burner-shaped culture inside a context where a different shape would have served better. The deepest engagement with the principles is to read them, attend a Burn, and then decide what your own community's principles will be.

Where it gets hard

Five tensions inside the document and inside the community that lives by it.

The wealth-and-access tension

Tickets to Black Rock City are expensive. Travel is expensive. Gear is expensive. The total cost of a Burner week is several thousand dollars per person at minimum. Radical Inclusion in the principle does not match the economic gate at the entrance. The Burning Man Project runs subsidized ticket programs, but these reach a few hundred people out of seventy thousand. Regional Burns are cheaper but still have access barriers. The honest read is that the principle of Radical Inclusion is true in the cultural sense (no one is excluded by identity once they are present) and false in the economic sense (the cost of arrival excludes most of the world). This gap is one of the longest-running internal critiques of Burner culture, and the community works on it without resolving it.

The cultural appropriation tension

Burner culture has freely borrowed from Indigenous, ritual, and spiritual traditions worldwide. Sweat lodges, vision quests, peyote ceremonies (early playa years), feathered headdresses (worn into the early 2010s), and a generally syncretic spiritual aesthetic have drawn sustained criticism. The Burning Man Project has responded over time: feathered headdresses are now formally discouraged, ceremonial appropriation is named in education materials, and the regional network has worked on awareness. The Ten Principles do not address appropriation directly. Civic Responsibility could be read to include cultural responsibility, but the document does not name it. Communities adopting the principles need to do the cultural-responsibility work that the document does not specify.

The race-and-inclusion tension

Black Rock City has historically been overwhelmingly white. The Project's own demographic surveys have confirmed this for years. Black, Brown, and Indigenous attendance has slowly grown but remains underrepresented relative to the broader population. Multiple Black Burners have written publicly about the experience of being one of very few people of color at a Burn, and about the gap between Radical Inclusion in the principle and the lived demographic reality. The Project has supported Black Rock City's Black Burner alliance and similar initiatives at the regional level. The work continues. The tension is real and not resolved.

The climate tension

Leaving No Trace was drafted for litter on the playa surface. It does not address the carbon cost of getting tens of thousands of people to a remote desert. The full life-cycle carbon footprint of Black Rock City and the regional network is large. The Burning Man Project has stated a 2030 net-zero goal. As of 2026, the path to that goal is unclear. The deeper question is whether the Burner cultural form, which depends on annual gatherings of large numbers of people in remote locations, can be reconciled with the climate constraints of the next decades. The principles do not answer this. The community works on it.

The transmission tension

Larry Harvey died in 2018. The Burning Man Project transitioned to leadership without him for the first time. The Ten Principles were always partly held by his interpretive authority: he was the document's author, its primary interpreter, and the cultural figure whose presence at the playa held the principles in the room. His absence has been a slow test. The Project has held. The principles have held. But the question of whether a culture that depends on a founder's interpretive presence can sustain that culture across the founder's absence is being answered in real time. Sharon's Midburn has navigated its own version of this question across more than a decade of organizing. The transmission tension is one every founder-led community eventually meets. The principles do not solve it. They give the next generation a document to argue with.

More resources

Canonical primary sources

• The Ten Principles of Burning Man. Larry Harvey's 2004 text, in full. The foundational document. Start here.
• Larry Harvey's Letter to the Regionals (2004). The original framing letter that introduced the principles to the network.
• Burning Man Project Annual Reports (AfterBurn). The organization's own published annual reflections. Useful for understanding how the principles are being lived from year to year.
• The Cult of the Burning Man by Lee Gilmore (2010). Academic study of Burner ritual and culture. Useful as a third-party reference.

Trainings and residencies

• Regional Burner camp organizing. The most direct entry point. Most regionals (AfrikaBurn, Midburn, European Burners network) run camp organizer onboarding. A two-week effort building a camp at a regional Burn teaches more than reading.
• Burner Without Borders deployments (bwb.org). Volunteer with the humanitarian arm.
• Black Rock City participation as a first-time Burner. Larger, harder, more expensive than a regional, but the deepest available immersion.

Theoretical lineage

• Bay Area Counter-cultural lineage. The Cacophony Society's "Pranks and Counter-Pranks" archive (Re/Search Publications, 1980s and 1990s). The Diggers' free-store ethic from Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s. Both feed into Burner Decommodification thinking.
• Kerista Commune materials (1971-1991). The San Francisco intentional community where Polyfidelity Economics was practiced. Early articulation of community-scale decommodification.
• The Beat Generation and the Merry Pranksters. Cultural ancestors of the Burner playful-disruptive sensibility.
• The Sacred Matrix by Dieter Duhm (separate Library entry, forthcoming). A theoretical companion from a different tradition (Tamera) that nonetheless overlaps with Burner thinking on the relationship between culture and cosmology.

Companion frameworks

• Doocracy. The off-chain governance pattern most-used by theme camps. Burner culture is one of the historical streams that produced doocracy as a working pattern.
• DAO Governance. The Traditional Dream Factory entry names Burning Man culture explicitly as one of its cultural sources. The Burner-DAO connection runs through the regenerative-village movement.
• Embassy Network: Design Patterns and Do-ocracy. Burner-influenced co-living network.
• Tamera Forum. A different tradition with surface differences and underlying overlap on the question of how a culture transmits across generations.

From the ToGather archive

• The Feÿtopia archive includes a key reference to Burning Man: in Jess's fundraising interview, the founder names Burning Man's Ten Principles as the precedent she is studying as Feÿtopia approaches its year-ten cultural-articulation moment. The Ten Principles are functioning as a touchstone document for at least one community building its own version a generation later.
• The Traditional Dream Factory archive includes Sam's account of TDF's founding: "this looks like a Burning Man camp, and it still does to some extent. There was a lot of this culture of co-creation that went deep into the place. And everyone who has been a steward, especially in the early days, was coming from Burning Man culture." See DAO Governance for the broader context.
• Sharon's Midburn co-founder lineage is the first-person archive grounding for this entry. It is not a published interview yet. When the Midburn material is added to Base44 as a Community entity, this section will be revised to link directly.