San Franciscans are digging deep to fund a 300-mile wall that would keep Burning Man attendees from getting back into the Bay Area.

Sick of hearing about the desert festival, a plucky group of campaigners are crowdfunding $7.3bn to build a fence from Point Reyes to Santa Cruz to stop festival-goers returning to the region when the festival ends on 7 September.

‘The week of Burning Man is the only week the rest of us don’t have to hear about Burning Man, but what if that week could last forever?’ campaign co-creator Brian Janosch asks in the campaign’s video.

It seems to have struck a chord with the public, 821,036 of whom have pledged a combined total of $2bn so far.

The satirical project is the brainchild of Cultivated Wit, the group behind Comedy Hack Day, which brings comedians and developers together to create – you’ve guessed it – comedy apps.

According to the campaign’s MegaGogo page, construction would start the day the festival begins in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, near the California border, and take seven days.

‘We’ve called around to local suppliers and hardware stores and it seems like we shouldn’t have trouble finding enough materials to get this job done,’ they say confidently on their campaign page.

But building a structure of this scale is not without risk, as they acknowledge.

‘[It] will be difficult, but if we can get just 50% of the Bay Area population (minus Burning Man attendees) we’ll have about 3.5 million volunteer wall builders. That’s less than half a foot of wall per person!’

Could Burning Man hatred actually mobilise a DIY army? It remains to be seen.