Conclusion
The revolution under discussion involves not so much the various modes of gift-giving as the modes of reaching a larger audience, to which the homogenizing and extremely contestable label of the ‘crowd’ is applied; and with altering social organization by making (productive and financial) participation into an original economic tool. As we have seen, the quest for collective financing is nothing new, but with the Internet it opens up a larger space, ‘the crowd’, and becomes integrated into capitalist logics aimed at innovation and open competition. In this context, the term ‘crowd’—widely criticized in the social sciences and in research on media reception—has been reborn. We are far from Gustave Le Bon’s ‘crowd psychology’ (1926 [1895]), which depicted crowds as indistinct, irrational entities which were dangerous to his own bourgeois vision of society. The modern use of the term implies that the Internet allows one to reach a ‘crowd’ of people. The shortcomings of this globalizing, homogenizing conception of social groups brings to mind the analyses put forward by Raymond Williams in the conclusion of his work Culture and Society, regarding the shift of focus from ‘crowds’ to ‘masses’; Willians rightly points out that this semantic shift is ideologically motivated: ‘the term has been capitalised for the purposes of political or cultural exploitation’ (Williams 1960: 319). Not only do these terms attempt to provoke fears and conceal social struggles and inequalities; Williams also asserts: ‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses’ (Ibid.). This comment is just as valid in the case of ‘crowds’.
28
Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization