“The hypocrisy of the Burning Man Organization pisses me off. …But the thing that yanks my chain is that they do all this — they give you a straight-up totally one sided work-for-hire contract that essentially says, ‘if you are a photographer, and you are at the Burning Man event, then you are our employee and we own all your work’ — and they try to soften the blow by accompanying it with a smarmy press kit that re-states the terms of the contract in this totally weaselly way: they go on at length about how they are viciously protecting their brand for your own good. And every other paragraph says stuff like ‘Larry Harvey — dare we say it — a Genius…’

It is to gag.

They’re taking a totally standard, normal, corporate line toward their theme park — but that idea embarrasses them (they don’t like to think of it as a theme park.) So they cloak it in bullshit and hope that everyone will buy the lie that it’s actually some spontaneous group-hug, and not a theme park.” Jamie Zawinski [via walker]

Now don’t get defensive if you’re an enthusiast for hip, scene-making events like Burning Man. I’m in one of my equal-opportunity misanthropic moods. We expect there to be less potential for exploitation, hypocrisy, inequity, at an alternative event than a mainstream one, so it hurts more when the inevitable letdown comes, but come it does. Pockets of resistance and counterculturalism (if there is such a word) exist; I happen upon them in my peregrinations, but they are certainly not the events with the media buzzword visibility like Burning Man. Oh, I don’t know, I’ve never been, probably because I got fed up wtih hipper-than-thou long ago, not long after I felt so self-important for making the scene at Woodstock. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…