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Burning Man theme: "Tomorrow Today" [1]

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Date: 2025-05-22

Later this summer, BURNING MAN 2025 will be coming together in Black Rock City. The theme of this year is “Tomorrow Today.”

from the Burning Man site: (bold and underlining mine): I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” —Angela Davis The 2025 Burning Man theme is an invitation to imagine the future in new ways, and to make it real through our collective actions. In the exuberant spirit of the prior century’s world fairs, which celebrated not only scientific progress but also cultural exchange and artistic excellence, the 2025 edition of Black Rock City will showcase Burning Man’s global culture of art and innovation. It will provide a venue for us to dream, invent, prototype and share our best and brightest ideas for the years ahead. If we think of the future as a story we tell ourselves, two plotlines have seemingly come to dominate the popular imagination. On the one hand, a happy modernist fable of tech-fueled utopia, and on the other a postmodern myth of dystopian collapse. It’s increasingly difficult to believe in the first because we now know it’s built on an unsustainable foundation. And we don’t even want to think about the second because it’s a tragedy where no one gets out alive. Yet for all its uncertainty the future still feels real to us. It’s a time and a place where we’re going to live, sooner or later. What’s it going to be like for you? For us? For all of us? If you could talk to your future self, what would you say? And what would you want to hear? What kind of an ancestor are you going to be?

This is so interesting to me….and doubly so because this will be a group of ARTISTS and MUSICIANS and other kinds of CHANGE MAKERS who indeed can influence our path into the future! I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Burning Man is a lot more than one event these days, and the global culture is strong and healthy. And yet, as we expand our presence out into the world and daily life, we no longer have the luxury of thinking we are somehow apart from that world. The world’s problems are ours, and vice versa. We may not be able to fix everything that’s broken but we just might be able to build something better. Let’s take back the future! “The future doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we’re the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.” ―David Suzuki

I agree that our place in the GLOBAL culture is important, and at this time in history, it is very important that we WORK TOGETHER AS A PLANET to bring a future that is safe for our children and for the survival of humans here on Earth.

Somewhere between the extremes of a perfect but impossible utopia and a terrifying dystopia that nobody wants is a third possible path for the future: protopia . Writer and futurist (and longtime Burning Man participant) Kevin Kelly coined the term to describe a future based on steady progress, better than today but not perfect, and not without setbacks. Predicated not on avarice or despair but on slowly, gradually working to make the world better for everyone, one step at a time. In other words, a lot like the iterative approach that we encourage and embrace in the Burning Man world. “You can’t see a difference of 1 percent unless you turn around and look behind you. One percent a year, for 100 years — that’s a big difference.” —Kevin Kelly

I propose we contemplate our ideas for the FUTURE and post them here. Then, later, we can see what the Burning Man participants do with that theme at the end of the Summer

Burning Man is emphatically not a utopian society, nor was it ever meant to be – but it is an influential cultural movement and social experiment with some unique opportunities to prototype new solutions. As we cross the halfway mark in our 10-year sustainability roadmap, this is a natural point to consider how we can achieve a more harmonious relationship between ourselves, the environment, and the resources required to Burn . In the spirit of protopianism, we are prototyping ways for humanity to survive and thrive in the face of a mounting climate crisis over the decades to come. Our strength lies in our ethos: in the power of communal effort, in our commitment to leaving a positive trace, and most of all in the Principle of Participation, to “make the world real through actions that open the heart.” This year’s Black Rock City event will seek to rekindle the hopeful spirit of the World’s Fair , fueled in this case not by consumerism but by a shared interest in learning from each other and advancing our collective progress toward a better future . Artists, camp organizers, and cultural contributors of all varieties are encouraged to bring their visions for a protopian future. And since so many of the challenges we face are global, we invite the international Burning Man community to join us in this effort, whether in Black Rock City or in their local actions around the world. It’s easy to be disheartened these days. Our event, our society, and the planet itself are all facing unprecedented challenges. But we are a can-do crowd, a resourceful bunch with a strong bias to action. So when you imagine the future, what is your place in it? How are you going to show up? As a hero or a victim? Whatever future we imagine, it’s not something that’s going to happen to us. It’s something we’re going to go out and make happen.

I’ve always been interested in Futurists. Sometimes I like to envision a FUTURE (or several versions of a Future) myself! I will leave my thoughts here in the comments.

Do you have any ideas of what a POSITIVE FUTURE would be like? Any ideas on how to get there? Just think of it like a brainstorming session….no bad ideas!!!

Let’s goooooooooooooo!

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