{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","title":"Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","id":"171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","uuid":"171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","title":"Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization","normalized_title":"culturalcrowdfundingplatformcapitalismlabourandglobalization","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":128,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Cultural%20Crowdfunding%20Platform%20Capitalism%2C%20Labour%20And%20Globalization","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960/search"},"page":{"printed_page":17,"pdf_page":25,"physical_index":25,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b67edea7394a1a70a07c00f845e2e5fdf6eee6a398eca201d4ec296f05e0504b"},"chapter":"Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization","content":"Through a number of examples (including Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Inno-Centive, iStockphoto), he observes that new strategies are developing which rely on communities to produce content, resolve problems and ‘innovate through the work of a large number of participating Internet users, who are willingly described as a ‘crowd’.\n\nThis contemporary resurgence of the term ‘crowd’ tends to make each of its supposed members’ singularities invisible, and to gloss over socio-economic inequality. The fear expressed in early mass media studies of a supposed dissolution of the individual into unstable collectives, each with its own logic, each adding up to more than the sum of their parts, finds its counterpart in Surowiecki’s bestselling The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki argues that aggregating the information circulating between a weakly cohering set of individuals can yield results (in terms of cognition, coordination and cooperation) that are broadly superior to the performance of any individual member of the group. He writes that, ‘in the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them’ (Surowiecki 2004: xiii). This implicitly recognizes the importance of systems that allow the activities of these collectives of physically isolated individuals to be harnessed and stimulated. It recognizes, in short, that crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms are indeed dispositifs1 or apparatuses for the mobilization of economic players (of labour and of capital). In the article cited above, Howe adds that crowdsourcing should therefore be defined as the outsourcing of tasks to a large number of persons in view of constructing a project or resolving a problem, but from a strategic and economic perspective.\n\nThe issue is to put out a call for projects broad enough for a majority of ‘workers’ to take part. The term ‘work’ or ‘labour’ is all-important here, since the appeal is not made by a community, but on the initiative of businesses and/or institutions. As Howe explains in Crowdsourcing: A Definition (2006), crowdsourcing therefore cannot be compared to the Harvard economist Yochai Benkler’s concept of ‘commons-based peer production’, characterized by a decentralized collective production that is network-based, modular and open to all. The socio-economic model developed by Benkler (2006) is based on collective and collaborative production by individuals. From this point of view, hierarchical logics seem to disappear in favour of horizontal decision-making. Unlike in capitalist economic strategies, financial compensation and return on investment are either disregarded or relegated to secondary concerns.\n\nFrank Kleemann, Günter Voß and Kerstin Rieder reinforce this opposition: ‘The essence of crowdsourcing is the intentional mobilization of creative ideas and other forms of labour for commercial exploitation’ (Kleemann, Voß and Rieder 2008: 22). The researcher Daren C. Brabham adds that crowdsourcing is ‘a hybrid model that blends the transparent and democratizing elements of open source into a feasible model for doing profitable business, all facilitated through the web’ (Brabham 2008: 82).\n\nCrowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System?\n\n17","previous_page":16,"next_page":18}