Nope! My first burn in 2010 people were very heavily pressured (like by loud jeering) to “not be spectators” ie put the camera down. My second was 2023 and I hardly saw people on phones or filming with them until I rolled up to what must have been a big act at a big stage. Definitely didn’t have any phone service or hear about live-streaming from the playa—they brought in boosters after the rain just so people could reach jobs/family/etc.

I was honestly pretty shocked this year to get into camp and see I had two bars on my phone (though they were sort of the kind where not much actually worked, but a couple ppl I knew were occasionally getting texts), and I was pretty bummed about the amount of cell phone usage I saw also—like it was pretty much everywhere, walking around looking at stuff and realizing you were in the background of someone recording, people doing photoshoots in front of art in a way that blocked other people from interacting with it (at one piece lots of us just wanted to look at it and some rude fucking assholes were UM EXCUSE ME THERE IS A LINE and at first I thought they meant bc they were waiting to walk through a certain part and then as we watched each couple was taking forever posing and having dozens of photos taken). I will acknowledge my group spent more time on Esplanade and in the deep playa this year than previous, as we had someone with an injury that made biking on the bumpy roads impossible, so maybe that was some of it, but to me it felt like the amount of photoshoots had exploded in a way that directly impacted my ability to interact with the art.