In other words, we can see that crowdfunding platforms are indeed apparatuses in the sense suggested by Giorgio Agamben (2009), who argued, following Michel Foucault, that the apparatus ‘has in some way the capacity to capture, guide, determine, control and implement the gestures, conducts, opinions and discourses of living beings’. In the following section we will consider what precise functions these apparatuses perform.
Apparatuses Adapted to Market Strategies
Following the diversification and segmentation of the traditional cultural industries, and integrating other economic sectors through their emphasis on creativity (Garnham 2005; Tremblay 2008), cultural crowdfunding platforms (gift and reward-based models) now operate in competitive two-sided markets (Eisenmann et al. 2006; Rochet and Tirole 2006) and must develop their appeal and their selling points in order to survive according to capitalist modalities that are not specific to the digital sector. Aiming to better understand the economics of platforms and the issues involved in them, a study by DARES (Direction de l’Animation de la Recherche, des Études et des Statistiques) emphasized that ‘the economics of platforms does not constitute a radical new break; the model pursues, combines and multiplies dynamics already largely at work during the 1990s’ (2017: 10).
They have indeed developed on the model of the intermediary, as an interface between diferent players (Miège 2017), and an instrument of industrial convergence (the ‘ecosystem’). According to a report by the Conseil National du Numérique en France, a platform is:
a service fulfilling an intermediary function for access to information, content, or services, either published or supplied by a third party. Apart from its technical interfaces, it organizes and hierarchizes content in view of its presentation and interconnection with end users. To this common characteristic is sometimes added an ecosystemic dimension characterized by interrelations between convergent services.2
This double movement of interface and convergence plays a part in the extension and financialization of ‘amateur’ practices, the outsourcing of problem solving, and content production, while reducing the risks of investment by shifting them to the user/consumer and/or community (Matthews 2015a; 2015b). Given these practices, the platforms develop a twofold discourse that reveals the ambiguity of their position. They present themselves to creators and backers as an ‘alternative’; simultaneously, they position themselves as partners rather than competitors to traditional industries. Sector professionals we spoke to believe that this globalized competitive ‘ecosystem’ is now ‘mature’. Cultural crowdfunding platforms can therefore be diferentiated according to distinct strategies aimed at diferentiated markets. We now set out these various modes of diferentiation.3
Far from an Alternative: Intermediation Apparatuses
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