how current platforms have been constructed on multiple ideological grounds, all of them fertile, and how they are marked by ‘object-discourses’ that serve ‘reconfigured’ capitalist logics. For it is clear that the only new thing about crowdfunding is its name. Its participative and financial logics existed long before digital technologies and the Internet.
The first part of this chapter seeks to define the neologisms ‘crowdsourcing and ‘crowdfunding’. This is a subject of debate between those who argue that crowdfunding should be seen as a particular type of crowdsourcing, and others who believe it to be something separate. In the second part, we examine the ‘revolutionary’ label often applied to these platforms, showing that, if anything, this refers in fact to the ‘permanent revolution’ proper to capitalism. We then situate the question of crowdfunding in continuity with a certain ideology of the Internet, and show that the origins of the logic of gift and counter-gift are pre-digital. We then question the logic of gift–counter-gift at work in the majority of cultural crowdfunding platforms, and conclude by examining the managerial and competition-led nature of these platforms. Far from generating truly revolutionary practices, they transform participation into an operational tool in the service of more traditional economic aspirations, ones that do nothing to reduce inequality.
Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding: One and the Same Thing?
To understand crowdfunding’s ideological basis, we must trace the word’s semantic genealogy. Today, crowdfunding often occupies a significant place in the discourse of political, economic, cultural, social, and even citizen players. But it rests on a broader concept, from which it emerged: crowdsourcing.
This neologism designates a set of activities on the part of Internet users (design, production, expertise, valuation, promotion, broadcast, distribution) on specialized web platforms. Basing his own work on that of James Surowiecki (2004)—who defends the idea of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the need to develop ‘collective intelligence’, endorsed by the researcher Pierre Levy in the late 1990s—the American journalist Jef Howe (2006) has, strangely, become an academic reference for understanding the phenomenon. Howe gives a useful definition of crowdsourcing:
Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the wide network of potential labourers (Howe 2006).
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization