What You Didn't Know About The Further Future Festival
"It's important what we do here. That's what we keep saying. We're shaping the future. These are the people who not only can do it, but these are the only people who can." So enthused Robert Scott, one of the co-founders of Further Future, a three day festival that takes place in the Nevadan desert during the spring, to The Guardian. If that simply sounds like Burning Man, that's because it does, at least according to The Guardian's title of "Burning Man for the 1%" and GQ's "The Bougie Burning Man (for Robots!) Is Almost Here." It's like Burning Man, except people have showers, high-quality cooking, and luxury camps. So, it's Burning Man without the fun parts of Burning Man but filled with the more insufferable type of people who get attracted to such festivals.
The goal of the Further Future festival is, as reported in the GQ piece, to "Reach the next stage in our collective evolution." Of course, its founders believe in forging our collective destiny without "[being] in the desert under hard conditions." But the actual finding of the future is more difficult, between the yoga, molly, and sound baths that fill the festival's schedule. Nothing in these articles actually give much of a clue as to what is actually happening, except for hobnobbing between high ranking members of Alphabet and Apple, which is probably the point.
It's just a party for rich people
Unfortunately, the website for Further Future has expired, meaning any deeper understanding via that route is impossible. So, turning to the other creator of Further Future, Jason Swamy, we find a branding studio. Not that a branding studio brands itself as such, instead Do What You Love describes its founder and CEO as "a creative and cultural catalyst whose vision has shaped the zeitgeist through art, music, food, wellness, thought leadership and community building." Indeed.
Billboard picks up in this brand talk jargon, describing the creator's work as "[setting out to fundamentally rethink what a festival could be through intentional and experiential community-building." It then proceeds to name check people who would turn up to speak. A person from Zappos. Check. A person from Google X. Check. Soundcloud co-founder? Check! Random scientist who might — with the help of some drugs — shed light on a new paradigm for life? Nope.
And that really defines Further Futures. It's a curated dance party in which people can pretend to have all of the transcendental bits and all of the artistic clout of Burning Man without dirtying oneself with the plebs. As Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt exclaimed in The Guardian piece, "This is a high percentage of San Francisco entrepreneurs, and they tend to be winners." They tend to be winners because they lead such bougie lives. Drop them in the good old fashioned Burning Man, and they would be utterly lost.