One dude interviewed for this academic paper about Burning Man had a pretty interesting answer to the question - is Burning Man counter-cultural:
No… I consider my day-to-day world counter-cultural. I think that society, the global-whatever you want to call this thing we live in, most of the time, going to work, it’s just… just so fragmented, so incongruent, that I think true culture is found in what we’re doing with Burning Man. I don’t get that same sense of community and cultural richness presented to me, or presented [at all]… It’s almost like you have to search for it outside of select few things, and Burning Man being one of those things. And the intentional communities that are forming through people having met one another at Burning Man, who started collaborating on projects, started to share their passion… that’s real culture. I think counter-culture is people getting numbed and going to work forty hours a week and losing their passion and sight of their dream and purpose, that’s counter-cultural.
It's interesting to think about Burning man not as an arbitrary departure from modern culture but as a powerful restoration of premodern culture.
I think I have to agree with this guy.
The modern industrial project is counter-cultural.
Burning Man, to some degree, is the restoration of human culture.
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"Cultural Performances at Burning Man: Dramatizing the Postmodern Crisis of Affect"
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