This is a perfect epilogue to the last book I finished, End Times by Peter Turchin, whose thesis is that overproduction of elites leads to civil war and/or economic collapse that leads to reduction of the 0.1% of wealth hierarchy elites so they can’t use the “wealth pump” to suck wealth from the 99.9%.
Burning Man is a 1 to 3 week crash course I’m how to survive an economic collapse, so this sort of stratification based on 0.1% wealth and/or sexual attractiveness (including cleaning up the dust for photos) shows the persistence of the ethos of overabundant elites as well as any examples given by Peter Turchin across the last 500 years.