Reinforcing the ideology of the ‘creative project worker’, entrepreneur of her/ his own project, these platforms are directly and indirectly complicit in driving a reconfiguration of labour. Economic liberalization and globalization tend to absorb what were once ‘alternative’ experiments. This observation dovetails with the analysis of Boltanski and Chiapello (2018) who, in the second edition of The New Spirit of Capitalism, conveyed the importance of another city, the project-based city. Governed by the proliferation of projects, by activity rather than labour, by the need to make connections, this city displaces the orders of judgement and size. In this city, quality and size are judged in light of one’s flexibility, skill set, activity, and autonomy—in other words, one’s employability. As a result, the distinction between private life and professional life ceases to exist.
In line with these analyses, crowdfunding platforms contribute toward a managerial reorganization of the social world. In fact, beyond ‘creativity’, the ‘innovation ecosystem’, and the ‘experiences’ they propose, it does indeed seem to us that such platforms involve ‘not just technical activity, but also imply social engineering […]. The logics at work in the diferent platforms have been designed, and this work of design is a political gesture’ (Rieder 2010: 51).
To clarify this debate, the book consists of the introduction followed by chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, and a conclusion. Each chapter ofers a distinct but complementary analysis of these questions. In the second chapter, we situate these platforms in their historical context. Vincent Rouzé shows that, far from being new, these phenomena have their roots in far older practices which they bring up to date with the use of digital technologies—fundraising, iquib and tontines are all examples of the existence of such practices before and without digital technology. He traces the ideological foundations of the participation and collaboration underlying these platforms, showing that debates about the ideas of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding typically operate with a ‘managerial’ conception of participation.
In the third chapter, Rouzé approaches crowdfunding through the question of the ‘alternative’. The alternative may be promised by this sort of apparatus, or it may be more directly defined by these platforms’ work, where the expression ‘alternative finance market’ is used. In either case, we should question this potential alternative, and its ‘disruptive’ character—in terms of the logics of intermediation involved, the partnerships forged by crowdfunding platforms, and the competing economic logics they establish. Rouzé shows how, far from being ‘alternative’, these platforms are new intermediaries in this creative ‘ecosystem’, which efectively reinforce the tried and tested logics and strategies of the capitalist cultural industry.
Introduction
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