Beyond these Western practices, we should also note that collective financing for social and cultural projects exists in many other countries in diferent forms and under various names. Community fundraising campaigns in Africa, called umgulelo in Xhosa, have traditionally been held in the form of fixed and regular contributions, under the authority of groups of community leaders who are responsible for sharing out the money to those in need, for funerals and marriages, building houses, and starting businesses. These modalities of gift in Africa and among diasporas also occur in tontines—a word derived from the name of the Italian banker Lorenzo Tonti, who in the seventeenth century advised Cardinal Mazarin to use this type of financing. They come in real estate, financial and associative forms, all of which consist in giving a sum on a regular or one-time basis to help fund individual or collective projects in the community.
The forerunners of what we now call cultural crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are many and various, from subscriptions to more or less limited oppositional modes of production, via talent shows and reality TV music shows as fictional representations of ideal collaborative production. However, this does not imply the abandonment of alternatives (in the primary sense) for certain types of content, or in particular economic, cultural, geographical or ideological contexts.
The Logic of Gift–Counter-Gift in Question
It is true that the first crowdfunding platforms were based on the gift. But above all they were based on the gift–counter-gift model. Once again, we must ask whether these ancestral models of exchange just translate existing models into digital form, or whether they have been updated for the digital age and the Internet.
The question of the gift is at the core of the work of French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (2001), who studied Amerindian societies. As Florence Weber suggests in her introduction (2007) to the republication of Mauss’s book, many researchers remember only potlatch, an agonistic struggle for prestige, which might lead them to see the logic of gift and counter-gift as a permanent struggle. But this ignores the fact that the same logic is at work in another form: Kula. First studied by Bronisław Malinowski (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922 [2002]), Kula involves a peaceful ceremonial exchange, rather than one marked by conflict and the possibility of establishing a social hierarchy in the community.
We may hypothesize that this logic of the gift is objectively at work in many cases of crowdsourcing, where users produce and share content without financial considerations entering into the matter directly. Obvious instances of this can be found in literature, including the wiki-novel project A Million Penguins, initiated by the British publishing house Penguin, which received 11,000 contributions. Such examples come in diferent forms, involving both authors and readers in interactive games which often end up blurring the boundaries between them. These forms of creation and their subsequent promotion involve not only literature, but also education and information. Following the logic of gift and counter-gift, each participant is alternately creator and user, producer and consumer, regardless of their real social status and legitimacy. As in the primitive societies Mauss studied, only these activities contribute to the construction of the community and the status which each person has within it. Wikipedia is equally emblematic of this. And, while the names of the initial creator and the contributors remain, they are no longer of primary importance. Contributors’ names disappear in favour of the content produced, at the same time as the distinction between author and reader, or musician and listener, disappears—with all the associated dangers for the veracity and diversity of the content on ofer (Kittu and Kraut 2008).
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization