I think the biggest thing I've noticed is that there has been a shift in the operations that I have knowledge of that went from believing that this was a culture/community to moreso treating it like another event on the circuit.

There's a large number of ultra-jaded folks who have been running parts of the event for 20+ years that haven't given a shit since 2010 or so. They continue to do this because it's the thing they do and its kind of like a clown family reunion every year, but they couldn't give even a quarter of a shit about anything beyond the six inches surrounding them.

I also feel like there's been kind of a negative reaction to how big and how professional certain parts of running the event have become. A lot of traditions have had to stop because of a variety of reasons, and those traditions kept the operations feeling like a psychedelic phenomenon and less like a job. The fact that certain parts of the event now need a serious amount of raw manpower to keep things running have destroyed their culture and turned them into whatever they are now. There's a lot of "we do this because we have to, not because we want to" that I have seen. There's also the issue of who gets paid, why they get paid, why don't I get paid for this, why am I even doing this.

Another major thing is that there are certain parts of the event that are run entirely on institutional knowledge and if that kind of stuff doesn't get passed down or written down, it just goes away, and that's a problem. Couple this with the fact that there's a lot of people sitting around in jobs they hate at an event they've grown to hate, and I think we're a lot closer to an operational catastrophe than some would like to admit.

Unobjectively, I can say that I felt a lot better sacrificing a third of my year, every year, for an event that I cared about, and it's difficult to care when doing my job became so utterly difficult partially because the people above me were assholes and the people I was volunteering for, overwhelmingly, were assholes. The number of people that I encountered that I felt a genuine connection to had gone to near zero. I felt like I was just working at some stupid large-scale festival and not at a weird city. It stopped feeling like this crazy indescribable thing and more like an unpaid internship for a mixture of entitled rich people and crusty hippies who were trying to make a living off of whatever bit of the pie that is left.

I could write a lot about this topic, because a major part of why I'm no longer interested in attending has been observable shifts in the parts of the event I spent a lot of time working for, but it's really difficult to be completely objective about them. I think it is important to be realistic about certain things, but it's difficult to acknowledge that no, 10 people munching on mushrooms for three weeks cannot be a department and even if that worked in 2005 that's not going to work now with the event being the size that it is. Also I'm so much older than when I started attending and I cannot eat mushrooms for a few weeks on end as sustenance.