This claim associates social financing with the quest for an existence that is more ethical. But we might also ask how far this desire to short-circuit the omnipresent industrialization and commodification is, in fact, ‘recuperated’ by crowdfunding and its standardized processes of economic value extraction. For, as the interviewee admits: ‘because of our obstinacy in remaining independent and not associating ourselves with sponsors, we haven’t really made any money out of these concerts.’ Tired of such paltry revenues, Gerhard Maree eventually adapted his business model, integrating the fundraising tool into a more general strategy of data collection and trading, and organization of labour—a strategy characteristic of digital intermediation platforms, as we have seen in previous chapters.
Finally we should consider a remark by Ken Aicha Sy, founder of the collective Wakh’Art de Dakar. We asked him whether the Western model of crowdfunding platforms was applicable to Africa:
I don’t think so. If it was, companies would have set up here long ago. Google is in Senegal, YouTube is in Senegal, so why not?—but I think they don’t really know the market. They don’t understand how the young people live, how they talk, and the same is true in Benin, Ivory Coast [...]. Even with Orange it’s like that: they prefer to finance a concert by [Belgian pop musician] Stromae for €70,000 rather than three concerts a year for 10,000 CFA francs, even though that would be more popular. But Orange is a monster, and there’s competition between its diferent departments; there’s no global vision.
These comments remind us quite clearly of the limits of strategies which can indeed boast significant material power, but whose ideological efectivity remains limited due to cultural specificities—even though this phenomenon doesn’t seem as yet to contribute to the emergence of clearly alternative models to Western norms.
Notes
1 InfoDev is describes as a ‘World Bank Group program to promote entrepreneurship and innovation’ http://www.infodev.org/about Accessed 5 April 2019.
2 West African Economic and Monetary Union.
3 Central Bank of West African States.
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