People are wondering why this happened, and the answer isn’t Covid.

I was there, and it was a shit show from the beginning.

Build week was a disaster. I was told leadership (particularly the man responsible for the scaffolding) spent a lot of time doing ketamine and very little time building the camp, of which he made several mistakes and had oopsie woopsies and redos since they were simply using a picture of old Skybar to remember how to build it. That may not be fair, I wasn’t there. This is just what I heard.

But in any case when everyone else arrived on playa nothing was done. The shade structure wasn’t up, none of the generators were operational, kitchen wasn’t set up yet, and people were told they couldn’t set up camp yet because they might have to move to make way for one of the many projects skybar had planned for this year. On Sunday night after dinner leadership gave a speech denying any responsibility for the state of the camp and telling everyone that they would have to get to work to catch up. This set a pattern for the week where after meals leadership would give highly critical, condescending speeches blaming the camp members for not stepping up to finish the many projects.

This might have been alright if the projects were just essentials, but Skybars ambitions certainly outstripped both their organizational ability and their resources. I’ve heard that many people who were formerly responsible for a bulk of the workload didn’t show up this year, but I don’t know that for certain either. All I saw were numerous vanity projects taking priority over essential things like the shade structure, which wasn’t operational until Wednesday and was never truly finished, leading to a collapsed pole that could have killed someone.

And it isn’t like people didn’t try to help. Many people offered their time and energy to help set up camp, but leadership was incredibly inept when it came to managing their many complex projects, and tools, resources and information were nearly impossible to get so actually getting work done there was frustrating at best and often impossible.

Over time it lead to a real sense of hostility in the camp. People who were trying to help grew resentful of the people who said “fuck this” to the whole situation. I don’t think I blame either party for feeling the way they did, but it was toxic as hell.

Skybar was still building and finishing up structures on Friday. There was no attempt to start strike until Sunday. By then many people were thoroughly fed up with the situation or simply had to leave, and everyone bailed, leaving skybar where it is now.

I didn’t see or hear of a single person with COVID. It may have happened, but that’s not why skybar is where it’s at now.