Yet to our eyes this seems to be more like a specific way of developing and legitimating services that are an integral part of the informal economy. Here again, as with other ‘mobile money’ services, what is being sought is not so much a formalization of the economy as an adaptation to its informal character so as to render it productive (financially, at least).
Latin American endogenous players seem somewhat more ready to express their reservations about the perceived risks of universalizing Western-style crowdfunding. Rodrigo Maia, founder of the Brazilian platform Catarse, is wary of the standardization of project pages that he sees underway in a number of his competitors on the continent:
They produce the page for the project creators. Which isn’t good because, when you do that, you sever the link with the reality of the campaign, and you sell something that isn’t authentic […]. Of course, no doubt you’ve seen that there are companies in the US that now ofer to produce crowdfunding campaigns as a service. That’s because the ecosystem is already burgeoning and moving in other directions. Here, we have to support [authentic] behaviours and make them accessible to the people.
Paradoxically, the strategies of these players may end up consolidating the Western, ‘entrepreneurial’, fundamentally pro-capitalist discourse, and in particular the version of it that promotes the ‘sharing economy’ and forms of deregulated labour through digital intermediation platforms (Scholz 2017). We can see the limits of positioning oneself as ‘alternative’ when this player justifies the growing precariousness of his own platform’s workers:
We don’t have trainees who work for nothing, but nevertheless we don’t pay people what they deserve […]. We’re not proud of it, but I don’t know whether crowdfunding or any other kind of initiative or attempt at innovation would be possible without this kind of arrangement between the workforce and the founders.
The local players interested in social financing we met in Ethiopia set out a similar vision of innovation, one dependent on the flexibility and precariousness of workers. Semina Hadera, owner of a marketing company who became involved in crowdfunding a photography book, described recruiting helpers on Facebook: ‘Social media allows the efective and inexpensive promotion of your work […]. If you use it strategically, it works.’
Other singular configurations in terms of the management of internal labour of platforms were indicated to us—for instance, the two sister platforms Thundafund and Backabuddy. Both are based in South Africa, but fully integrated into international financial flows. This sometimes proves paradoxically counterproductive:
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization