Updated 2 years ago
Tech comes from Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley IS Burning Man
and Burning Man comes from Dune
“In Elon Musk’s infamous formulation, Burning Man is Silicon Valley. Regardless of your feelings about that, its hypocrisy or at least hilarious irony, consider this: It all goes back to Dune.
Frank Herbert’s [Dune] story is one any techish Burner will recognize on a cellular level: A boy-genius wanders into the desert, does a lot of drugs, and finds Buddhist clarity. Though Herbert didn’t care much for computers, and set his epic in a far future devoid of them, he nonetheless used the word computation to describe the superhuman abilities of his hero, Paul Atreides: Paul “saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet,” Herbert wrote in Dune. “He focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.” Sounds a lot like the so-called flow state so fetishized by Silicon Valley’s coding elite.”
