Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.
That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.
Billionaires already own the police, which number over 700,000 in the US alone and the national police budget would be equivalent to the third most expensive army in the world. If this is already the state of things, how could we blame that on the anarchists? This argument effectively boils down to “we shouldn’t have a revolution because the rich would have a monopoly on violence”, which we already know to be the case in our current society. So in this way, nothing at all is holding us back. The worst case scenario would be a preservation of the status quo. Even if the Proud Boys, III%ers, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, etc. all combined into a giant mercenary group, it wouldn’t be even close to how the cops already are. They’re one of the most militarized police forces in the world with access to heavy equipment such as assault rifles, chemical weapons, acoustic weaponry, MRAPs, and much more.
If the revolution ever comes, we’ll just have to take all the billionaires to the Ipatiev House. A revolution would already have no recourse but to defeat any police opposition anyway, so there really is no difference whether the billionaires are around or not. Those billionaires, if they have any sense of self-preservation, would be smarter to take their money and simply flee abroad.