Burning Man 2025

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?

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!