{"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":62,"pdf_page":70,"physical_index":70,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"257d29b545177624ecc017c36e3eea9bf82e1b2e5d5ca1eb576c4867c19003d5"},"chapter":"Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization","content":"The hypothesis can be sharpened by looking into the terms used to define and circumscribe the phenomenon. The idea of ‘crowdfunding’, like ‘crowdsourcing’, refers to the idea of a corporate sponsor outsourcing tasks to the ‘crowd’ (Lebraty and Lobre-Lebraty 2015). Note once more that the current resurgence of the word ‘crowd’ not only implies the erasure of the singularity of each supposed member, but also tends to remove all trace of structural economic, social and cultural inequalities between those who purportedly make up this crowd. As suggested in preceding chapters, platforms are constructed as intermediation apparatuses and therefore as apparatuses for the mobilization of disparate players thus committed to ‘collaborating’ together. In this sense, they also set themselves up as the real drivers of the logics of trans-media convergence somewhat enthusiastically highlighted by Henry Jenkins (2006).\n\nThis mobilization is promoted by a profusion of evangelical technophile discourses consubstantial with the ‘collaborative web’ (Bouquillon and Matthews 2010), which advocate ubiquity of access, the omnipotence of the network, sharing, and diversity of content for all—so long as it is strictly contained within the framework of assent for these means of communication and content as private property. These discourses would have us believe that, thanks to digital intermediation, everyone is now in a position to engage in new creative ‘experiences’—experiences that blur the lines between production and consumption, as anticipated in the neologism ‘prosumers’, coined by the American futurologist Alvin Tofler in the 1980s. Alongside the promotion of personalized, individualized ‘experience’, all reference to labour as a social relation is gradually abandoned, even though it is this labour that enables the productive process and the capital accumulation realized through it. In this way, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding become original, indispensable methods for the creation, publicization and funding of cultural projects—methods that nevertheless remain entirely in line with the industrial strategies into which they are more or less obviously integrated. As entrepreneur and social media analyst Romain Péchan wrote in 2010 on OWNI’s website, ‘What is at stake for artists is no longer to produce, it is to face their audience, and to make sure this audience knows and recognizes them.’1 What we see taking shape here is a metadiscourse produced by platforms as they attempt to mobilize labour (in ‘creative’ and other forms) without naming it, while dissimulating the inequalities and exploitation concomitant with it. The (free) participation of each person is foregrounded and capital is ‘democratized’, while all reference to labour as social relation, object of commercial exchange and site of conflict disappears entirely.\n\n62\n\nCultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization","previous_page":61,"next_page":63}