The support which these apparatuses provide no doubt serves as a political and communicative argument for the importance ascribed to digital technologies and citizen participation. Politically, many cities (including Paris and Grenoble) have launched initiatives with participatory budgets, allowing citizens to finance selected projects. But most of these initiatives are highly fragmented and maintain the established decision-making hierarchies, creating the suspicion that participation is just a way of giving a misleading new shine to existing structures while impacting them very little, if at all. Furthermore, under the guise of emancipation and freedom, ‘participatory’ digital platforms act as tools of systematic control—for instance, through geolocation, the requirement to use online services, and nudging. It is no small matter that most platforms use proprietary code, far from the values of free and open source software (Smyrnaios 2018).
This leads us back to the requirement/suggestion to participate, and the need to develop efective forms of communication—for instance, educational workshops which invite as many people as possible to participate. While we are not critical of this approach in itself, we are more cautious when this participation involves the outsourcing of tasks and the shifting of financial risk onto the citizen/user/consumer alone. This marks a possible disengagement on the part of institutions and new forms of digital labour which are often ‘free’, breaking with hard-won legislation and social advances over the course of previous centuries. They are accompanied by educational logics which blur the lines between work and leisure, part of a process of ‘gamifying society’.
Finally, there is the question of cultural diversity. The ‘community’ gives participation its strength, but it also marks its limit. The editorial logics which the platforms establish and community members ‘put into practice’ do not necessarily lead to openness and cultural diversity. Following other researchers, we have shown that the motivation for participation is based on afective proximity to the project and, often, to the person or people in charge. In such conditions, it is dificult to promote projects with aesthetic or original themes which lie on the fringes of traditional or ‘mainstream’ logics. Under the guise of ‘participation’ and freedom, the platforms valorize these disinterested, outsourced production methods using classic capitalistic logics: data banks, big data, outsourcing tasks, and reducing investment risks. Most of them serve as new intermediaries in cultural and media strategies which have been known for decades.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization