Inside the 2025 Burning Man theme: Tomorrow Today

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The Burning Man Project has announced its novel 2025 theme: Tomorrow Today. Although Burning Man is scheduled for August 24th to September 1st of 2025, almost a year later, the creative team has wasted no time collaborating, fantasizing, and engendering next year’s event with bountiful possibilities and radical creativity. 

Stuart Magnum, director of Burning Man Project’s Philosophical Center, shared insight into the thought process behind the selection of the theme. In a blog post on The Burning Man Journal, he asseverated that the future was once unanimously seen as positive, how technology in the 1800s was at its cusp and the capacity for growth excited the masses. According to Magnum’s argument, the later 1900s experienced a shift in ideology: the populist perspective transformed from utopian to dystopian, allegedly due to the then-global, Orwellian phenomena titled1984. The novel captivated the world with its dark portrayal of metastasized corruption and control. 

“It’s important to appreciate the cultural weight of these two mythic structures – the modernist story of eternal progress and the postmodern story of irreversible destruction,” muses Magnum. “Protopia,” originally coined by longtime burner Kevin Kelly, was created to capture the juxtaposition of utopianism and dystopianism. The term describes “a future based on steady progress, better than today but not perfect… predicated not on avarice or despair but on… working to make the world better for everyone…” Protopia: a burner’s version of egalitarianism, an imperfect but surmountable future. 

Magnum stipulates that Burning Man can act as an oasis of thought, kindling the much-needed sparks of ingenuity to tackle real-world problems. Some of the world’s most pervasive conundrums – internal harmony for all humanity, environmentalism, sustainability – could theoretically be tackled via protopian ideas conceived during Burning Man. What begins on the playa inevitably bleeds into the real world, as burners return to their communities with their flames burning brighter than ever.

featured image courtesy of The Burning Man Project