This chapter is divided into three complementary parts. In the first we analyze the structural modifications of labour carried out by and on these platforms, and the representations they produce. In the second, we focus specifically on the forms of labour organization deployed within platforms, and examine how the work of project creators and members of their ‘community’ is framed and optimized, before considering how this process echoes platform managers’ eforts to optimize their own projects and communities. Finally, the third part develops the hypothesis that platforms (and their various uses) can be understood as instruments of ideological production; to do this we analyze the ‘pedagogical mission’ emphasized in the guidelines issued by many platforms.
Towards Gamification, or Invisible Labour
Human activities that take place on and around these platforms are obviously embedded in commercial relationships, and cannot escape the transformation of labour power into commodities, one of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism. And yet, in the case of cultural production financed through crowdfunding platforms, this transformation does not take place by way of a salaried workforce (which indeed has long been the case in the media and culture industries, where salaried jobs are the exception rather than the rule). Consequently, these apparatuses apparently consolidate pre-existing forms of labour organization, in particular by extending them to encompass cultural workers who had previously been spared to some extent, either because they were somewhat protected by public institutions or because their ‘amateur’ practices still put up some resistance to commodification and industrialization. It should also be recognized that intermediation apparatuses existed within the cultural field long before the emergence of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platforms.
Nevertheless, what is most characteristic of cultural crowdfunding is its capacity to extend commercial prospecting into specific areas of cultural production, including alternative, or even oppositional, creative labour, and places where production merges into ‘social’ or ‘community economies’, drawing these diferent forms into an eminently ‘entrepreneurial’ project-based model through the consecration of the figure of the artist as ‘project creator’. Secondly, if platforms do indeed bring about a structural modification of labour, they now do so, as Marine Jouan’s (2017) research suggests, in an entirely ideological way, acting as ‘pathfinders’: that is, although they no longer fundamentally transform labour per se, they show the way.
Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour
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