In many cases, the desire for Utopia is connected to an escape from a reality that is experienced as unbearable. Not engaging with reality, and ignoring its rules, are strategies of defiance and resistance which can be seen both as defeatist, and as affirmative. Contemporary forms of exodus include not only the individual retreat onto an ‘island utopia’ or the disappearance into the virtual worlds of computer games. There’s also the annual collective performance of carnival, or the temporary gathering in the desert ’non-space’ of the Burning Man Festival.
Franco Berardi is a philospher, radio and Internet activist, who develops ways of applying old and new media to turn the tables on mass media narratives.
Erik Davis is a cultural researcher, WIRED-author and has written the study ‘The Cults of Burning Man', a yearly gathering of artists, hedonists, and digital freaks who, over the course of a week, build and destroy a nomad city in the barren salt-flat deserts of northern Nevada.