Burning Man and the Rituals of Capitalism

So I found this old article about Burning Man entitled "Burning Man and the Rituals of Capitalism" written in 1995 by Matt Ray. At the time Ray is reflecting back on his first year, 1993, in which there were only 2,500 participants. (Sotto voce: can you imagine?)

In this piece, among other things, Ray discusses media presence at Burning Man and his concerns at the time echoed my concerns 10 years later when, in 2005, Discovery came to Burning Man. He says:

Last year it was HBO, this year it will be MTV. I worry that this media exposure will soon bring dramatic changes to the event. In fact, I know it will. Of course, change is often a good thing, but my fear is that the presence of corporate media will radically alter the scene, undermining the participatory nature of the event, turning it into yet another commodified, fetishized spectacle of late capitalist culture, to be consumed like a professional sporting event or some kind of desert Lollapalooza. My fear is that the communal rituals I've come to associate with Burning Man will be overwhelmed by another more powerful ritual of the capitalist belief system — the ritual commodification of our everyday lives under capitalist economic relations. Burning Man is, in so many ways, an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions we experience as participants in capitalist culture. We don't escape these contradictions simply by trekking out into the desert wilderness. But we do adventure into the unknown, an as yet unformed and inchoate social space.

In reading this article, I am reminded of a quote by Larry Harvey from Zpub in which he says:

"We lead lives that are deadeningly passive. Everyone is sorted out in a seperate [sic] stall, like cattle in a feed-lot. Every time anything like real culture is produced by a creative community it's expropriated and flogged in the media and turned into a cliche - it used to be six years, now it's six months it's getting down to six weeks."

I disagree, Larry. It's getting down to :30 second spots between episodes of the Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle.

It's rather disheartening, to say the least, to think that Harvey thinks BURNcast as a media entity is partly responsible in turning the event I love so much into a cliché. Mea culpa!

What about Main Stream Media? Or Larry's friends at Current TV? Is it really the media that is responsible for commodifying the Burning Man brand? Or could it possibly be the administration?

One thing I know for sure is: at least it's not the community...(drink!)