which largely focuses on the supposedly unprecedented ways these platforms operate (Divard 2013; Boyer et al. 2016), on their capacity to act as tools for ‘liberation’ and ‘value sharing’ (Lemoine 2014) in the name of technological and socio-economic innovation (Kuppuswamy and Bayus 2013) and cultural diversity (Fohr 2016), and on participants’ motivations and the benefits they receive (Brabham 2009; Céré, Roth and Petavy 2015). We take a critical stance, examining platforms, players and their accompanying discourses in terms that go beyond gauging their functional efectiveness. To do so, we adopt a ‘dynamic holistic’ stance which pays attention to the way in which individual and collective behaviours are determined by structures and institutions, but also to social actors’ proactive capacities (Vercellone 2008: 7). From a structural point of view, it’s important to recognise that the platform economy relies not principally on commercial revenue deriving from the production of goods and services, but on a model stemming from the fields of advertising and finance; ‘commissions’ are justified by their ability to link up individuals and/or groups with commercial entities, brands or investment opportunities. And from an etymological point of view, the platform is indeed a space dedicated to the stationing of carriages that are to be unloaded or loaded with goods or persons: the platform constitutes a locus of transaction and translation – an instrument of ideological convergence.
In enthusiastic accounts, the platform economy is based on a worldwide market, open to a multitude of player of all sizes, linked together by digital networks. The regular emergence of new markets and conversion of users into economic players gives this project an allure of realisation – as long as one ignores the fact that a powerful oligopoly has emerged (Smyrnaios, 2017), and that even fringe players objectively dominate individual users. Moreover, we have shown that web platforms innovate mainly by reducing costs and allowing for an ‘alteration of perceptions’ that the various players have of the capitalisation process and the internal organisation of economic sectors (Matthews and Vachet, 2014).
Kenney and Zysman (2016) identify as privately generated platform-based ‘ecosystems’, companies which fundamentally ‘are not delivering technology to their customers and clients—they use technology to deliver labour to them’ (Smith and Leberstein 2015, 3). Moreover, it is apparent that the ‘bargaining power of workers is undermined by the size and scope of the global market for labour; the anonymity that the digital medium afords is a double-edged sword, facilitating some types of economic inclusion, but also allowing employers to discriminate at will’ (Graham, Hjorth and Lehdonvirta 2017: 16). And as De Stefano points out ‘the possibility of being easily terminated via a simple deactivation or exclusion from a platform or app may magnify the fear of retaliation that can be associated to non-standard forms of work, in particular temporary ones’ (De Stefano 2016: 10).
These perspectives in turn us to consider the phenomenon of crowdfunding in the light of the constraints and opportunities it presents for the productive activities of the artist as ‘project creator’—a version of the ‘artist as labourer’ figure proposed by Menger (2002)—as well as the characteristic of the other players involved, and in particular the work of those who manage platforms. Our hypothesis is that both emerge as ‘polymorphous entrepreneurs’. At the intersection of multiple, often contradictory players and logics, their work consists fundamentally in trying to synthesize them so as to optimize the economic value extraction upon which their livelihood depends. This hypothesis converges with that of Marine Jouan who, following the works of Bergeron, Castel and Nouguez (2013), introduces the notion of a ‘border-entrepreneur’, defined by their position ‘on the border of many worlds in tension’, and their strategic reshaping of these into a ‘new world of which they will be the centre’ (Jouan 2017: 335).
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization