Kevin Smokler works for a nonprofit in San Francisco, but paid his own way to the conference. The juxtaposition of those two things is all the more crystallized this year because of the scary possibility of making money on the Internet. SXSW crew chief Doug McIntosh, who's been volunteering at the conference for five years, says nothing much has changed since last year. You have film on one hand and music on the other and interactive sandwiched in between. The nature of the Web One panelist at SXSW who understands the lack of permanence is Larry Harvey, the creator of Burning Man.
Thousands gather to create a small town, which they destroy at the end of the weeklong event.
Aside from the entrance tickets purchased beforehand, Burning Man is a completely commerce-free zone. Harvey adds that one need only look at the open-source operating system, Linux, to see this model at work. The code was built not by a company, but by a community of people who care about the product. You can't buy it. It's too expensive.