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There are probably as many tech-heads at Burning Man as there are hippies, maybe more, plus the growing ranks of artists who are also somewhat techies, and vice versa. It's just a place for them to be all the things they can be and show all the things that they can do that mainstream America doesn't pay them to be or do. In other words, a rare opportunity to express themselves flat-out, and to get ideas from all the other people who are doing likewise.
Plus, of course, party and celebrate. The original idea of the Burning Man, as I remember it, was a festival of renewal: The Man burns. The Man is reborn. In that sense, it's also a sort of spiritual yet secular thing. And lately, they've also added the Temple of Remembrance (I think that's the name), a huge wooden temple that's built from scratch every year. People go inside and write their prayers or rants or laments or thanks on the wall for a couple of days. Then it, too, burns. The Burning Man, the burning temple: you can find correspondences within most major religion, and yet these ideas of construction and renewal apparently go back to the dawn of humanity, long before any religion that now exists. I think that the founders of Burning Man wanted to get back to those elemental ideas and symbols, without any of the gingerbread that has been layered around them through the millenia.
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