Crowdfunding platforms, in their overwhelming majority, appear to be characterised by these dominant logics. The term ‘alternative’, as used by the French Junior Minister in the speech quoted at the beginning of this chapter, has to be considered according to its second finality, i.e. without any explicit reference to forms of emancipation, to critical models, or to the transformation of the existing system. This usage of the term goes hand in hand with the praise of ‘innovations’ and ‘creativity’ which are specifically designed to extend capitalism’s lease, so as to speak. It belongs to a somewhat hazy ideology of participation which can indeed alternately be declined to the ‘gift economy’, the ‘collaborative economy’, the ‘gig economy’, the ‘peer economy’, etc. In practice what these various notions share is the commodification of daily activities which formerly were beyond the realm of market economy, either because of their inherently private nature, or because they remained until recently publicly supported (Scholz 2016).
As with the majority of platforms and with the ideologies that accompany their usages (Gillespie 2010), cultural crowdfunding platforms can be seen as positioned on the fringes of traditional cultural-industrial logics. To ensure their financial viability, platforms apparently adopt the so-called ‘long tail’ model (Anderson 2006): instead of developing and securing niche markets, they secure niche projects, in a ‘grey zone’ of the cultural industries, led by project creators and their communities. Unlike the logic of rarity-based artistic and cultural markets (Farchy, Sagot-Duvaroux et al. 1994), these platforms ofer a huge number of projects, most of which are not aimed at an audience much beyond the ‘crowd’ of participants/backers. This is confirmed by the presence of heterogeneous projects, and by the fact that these are largely one-ofs which appear on rapid rotation (financing over periods of 2 months, less than 180 days on average), asking for an average of €4,365 (source BPI France).1 Their alternative features rely, moreover, in the forms of financial transaction that they ofer, supposedly on the margins of mainstream finance. Several titles of NESTA annual reports are, from this point of view, quite eloquent: The Rise of Future Finance: The UK Alternative Finance Benchmarking Report (2013); Understanding Alternative Finance: The UK Alternative Finance Industry Report (2014).
Crowdfunding platforms undeniably reflect some of the values and ideas that one also can find in alternative discourses and projects: participation, horizontality, the strength of local, community-based projects, the autonomy of project creators—but consistently in forms which are compatible with capitalist economic logics. These forms of participation are therefore very much removed from, or even in contradiction with, concepts such as Participatory Economics (or Parecon) developed by the American economist Robin Hahnel and writer activist Michael Albert (1991). These last proposed to wholly rethink the economy on the basis of socially shared needs and desires, both within the structures and values of labour, in a respectful relation to the environment, and in view of a social justice inspired by democratic decision-making procedures, and initiatives carried out during the twentieth century in various revolutionary contexts, from Soviet Russia to Latin America.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization