A Diversity of Players, a Repertoire of Common Discourses
- Project Creators and Endogenous Cultural Workers
Predictably, our interviews with potential or actual project creators have generally been marked by their overt enthusiasm, summed up by Gaissiri Dia, founder of the platform Waalam: ‘I have confidence in the next generation to take the initiative, they will grasp the opportunities that are beneficial for us’. Emphasis is placed on a supposed ‘entrepreneurial culture’ in sub-Saharan Africa, and to a lesser extent in Latin America. The discourses of many project creators frequently express a desire to contribute to alternative forms of social financing that lie of the beaten track of Western platforms. Despite a reminder of the pitfalls, Heinz Winckler, a South African musician who funded the production of an album through Thundafund, displayed such enthusiasm when we interviewed him about the challenges faced by social financing in his country:
I think it’s the lack of knowledge of the general public of what it is exactly, of what it means, so there’s just a, there are some kind of education needed in a way, for people to understand […] it’s mainly knowing what it is, how it works, you know, that it’s worked before, you can trust it, you will get what you paid for and it must be easier, it must be easy to work with. And I think it sounds like Thunderfund have sorted that out so, you know, hope […]. I’m sure they’ll get better.
Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism
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