--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960" source_sha256: "f606a5887d9a922652cab2ab9e9a9ca32b5e7986b8e274343285a06aaee0e0ce" pdf_physical_page_count: 128 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 20 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960?start=20&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=20&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=10&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=30&limit=10" --- # Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=20 | PRINTED_PAGE=12 12 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=21 | PRINTED_PAGE=13 Introduction 13 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=22 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=23 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System? Vincent Rouzé The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the supposedly innovative nature of crowdfunding. We will illustrate how ancient practices, whether widely recognized or consigned to history, have been recuperated by players in the digital world in order to surpass or update them through ‘innovation’, but also to legitimate their own practices and stimulate a movement dependent upon ‘creative’ users, or even a ‘creative class’ (Florida 2014). The chapter will therefore address and challenge crowdfunding’s self-declared ‘revolutionary’ character—the claim that it necessarily represents the future of the financing of culture, since it rests upon collaborative and collective forms of creation, mutual assistance, financing, and participation. In reference to the work of Michel Foucault, what interests us here is a first attempt at an ‘archaeology’ of crowdfunding. Foucault emphasizes that archaeology is a ‘systematic description of a discourse-object’ (Foucault 1972: 156) which, rather than reducing observed contradictions, instead focuses on the history of ideas, multiplying discontinuities and describing ‘the diferent spaces of dissension’ (Foucault 1972: 170). He adds that archaeology is the ‘interaction of rules that, in a culture, determine the appearance and disappearance of statements, their persistence or their disappearance, their paradoxical existence as events and things’ (Foucault 2014: 708). The issue here, then, is to understand CHAPTER 2 How to cite this book chapter: Rouzé, V. 2019. Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System?. In: Rouzé, V. (ed.) Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization. Pp. 15–33. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book38.b. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=24 | PRINTED_PAGE=16 how current platforms have been constructed on multiple ideological grounds, all of them fertile, and how they are marked by ‘object-discourses’ that serve ‘reconfigured’ capitalist logics. For it is clear that the only new thing about crowdfunding is its name. Its participative and financial logics existed long before digital technologies and the Internet. The first part of this chapter seeks to define the neologisms ‘crowdsourcing and ‘crowdfunding’. This is a subject of debate between those who argue that crowdfunding should be seen as a particular type of crowdsourcing, and others who believe it to be something separate. In the second part, we examine the ‘revolutionary’ label often applied to these platforms, showing that, if anything, this refers in fact to the ‘permanent revolution’ proper to capitalism. We then situate the question of crowdfunding in continuity with a certain ideology of the Internet, and show that the origins of the logic of gift and counter-gift are pre-digital. We then question the logic of gift–counter-gift at work in the majority of cultural crowdfunding platforms, and conclude by examining the managerial and competition-led nature of these platforms. Far from generating truly revolutionary practices, they transform participation into an operational tool in the service of more traditional economic aspirations, ones that do nothing to reduce inequality. Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding: One and the Same Thing? To understand crowdfunding’s ideological basis, we must trace the word’s semantic genealogy. Today, crowdfunding often occupies a significant place in the discourse of political, economic, cultural, social, and even citizen players. But it rests on a broader concept, from which it emerged: crowdsourcing. This neologism designates a set of activities on the part of Internet users (design, production, expertise, valuation, promotion, broadcast, distribution) on specialized web platforms. Basing his own work on that of James Surowiecki (2004)—who defends the idea of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the need to develop ‘collective intelligence’, endorsed by the researcher Pierre Levy in the late 1990s—the American journalist Jef Howe (2006) has, strangely, become an academic reference for understanding the phenomenon. Howe gives a useful definition of crowdsourcing: Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the wide network of potential labourers (Howe 2006). 16 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=25 | PRINTED_PAGE=17 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’. This 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. The 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. Frank 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). Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System? 17 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=26 | PRINTED_PAGE=18 This phenomenon is primarily analyzed in terms of ‘eficiency’, involving the relations between the tasks to be accomplished, the populations concerned and the returns (Corney et al. 2009; Geiger et al. 2011). It is overwhelmingly viewed in terms of productivity (Huberman, Romero and Wu 2009) or ‘open innovation’. Corney et al. (2009) propose that crowdsourcing can be defined in terms of three dimensions. Firstly, they categorize crowdsourcing depending on the nature of the tasks (for instance, creation, value creation, or organization). They then outline a second dimension related to requirements (what individual, collective and expert skills are needed). The third dimension concerns the sort of remuneration ofered (whether the work will be voluntary or paid, for instance). The French researchers Schenk and Guittard (2011) use a concept of crowdsourcing which encompasses the conclusions of earlier work, setting their argument in a managerial framework. Doan, Ramakrishnan and Halevy (2011) approach the problematic of crowdsourcing systems on the web from a broader perspective: as well as classifying the nature of the tasks and players that define the system, they also discuss the implicit or explicit nature of the collaborative labour, and its impact on the objectives to be achieved. The net outcome is a multiplication of activities, and dozens of potential definitions of crowdsourcing. According to the Spanish researchers Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara (2012) there are at least thirty-six original definitions, ranging across all disciplines. This means the term can be applied indistinctly to multiple activities, digital or not. The label has become an ‘umbrella’ term (Geiger et al. 2011; Ridge 2014), an ‘all-encompassing’ and ‘generic’ label (Belleflamme et al. 2011: 3). This often renders it ‘inoperative’ or, from the opposite point of view, makes it flexible enough to apply to multiple activities that are dificult to distinguish or define. In our quantitative study of a sample of French Internet users, only 9% were capable of giving a definition of crowdsourcing and citing specific platforms and projects. Nonetheless, in many respects these definitions intersect with the concept of convergence developed by the American researcher Henry Jenkins (2006). On the basis of his early research on fans, Jenkins suggests that participative culture marks a point of meeting and convergence between industrial and media strategies, on the one hand, and user-produced content on the other. With the same emphasis on ‘empowerment’ and collective intelligence, Jenkins sees this as enabling a transformation of traditional industrial logic. From that point on, the ‘ascendant innovation’ championed by researchers like Von Hippel (2005), and the ‘anointing’ and ‘cult’ of the amateur described by the French researcher Patrice Flichy (2010), were seen as emancipatory for individual and collective alike. A majority of works and articles follow this common theme of a ‘positivist’ return of the amateur, concentrating on the development of new digital usages, horizontal relations modifying the production and capitalisation cycle and increased cultural democratization. However, some critical assessments stand out, such as the work of former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen (2007) or that of digital media pioneer Jaron Lanier (2011), who both note new forms of alienation and subjection. For proponents of the ‘positivist’ position it is ‘natural’ (in Roland Barthes’ mythological sense of naturalization) that this turn toward the Internet user/citizen should be accompanied by a financial commitment, allowing them to realize the projects they are most passionate about. 18 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=27 | PRINTED_PAGE=19 Crowdfunding thus becomes the financial ofshoot of crowdsourcing (Rouzé, Matthews and Vachet 2014; Lebraty and Lobre-Lebraty 2015) The aim is not just to invite ‘amateurs’ to produce content, but more generally to encourage them to ofer financial backing to whatever they are passionate about, supporting projects run by their friends or which they believe in (a phenomenon sometimes called ‘love money’). In this way, the financial aspect of the arrangement disappears, and the participative, afective and experiential dimension takes centre stage. But other researchers claim that, while crowdfunding may be descended from crowdsourcing, it is a distinct phenomenon. According to Belleflamme, Lambert and Schweinbacher (2014), its primary aim is to optimize the flow of information between manufacturers and consumers, particularly by allowing the collection of consumer data, so that crowdfunding platforms can serve as tools for evaluating the quality of goods and services for prospective consumers. Ultimately, they see such platforms as promotional and marketing tools in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets: Crowdfunding can be seen as a concept that goes beyond simple fundraising: it is a way of developing industrial activities through the process of financing (Belleflamme, Lambert and Schweinbacher 2014: 586). For others, the diference between crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is related to collaboration: in crowdsourcing, participants influence content; in crowdfunding, they never do. This brief etymological and epistemic detour allows us to discern the main issues related to crowdfunding platforms. First of all, the protean logic of crowdsourcing is answered by the segmented logic of crowdfunding, as well as the importance of logics of outsourcing and gearing responses to a strategic demand produced by the greatest number. Far from the logic of the ‘commons the term initially flirted with, most players think of crowdfunding in terms of eficiency and the experience of the citizen/social actor. This paves the way for the development of its financial aspect, which combines the outsourcing of content production with the outsourcing of modes of financing, the reduction of risk on the part of consumers/investors, and the development of devolved modes of labour. Crowdfunding: A Revolution? Given the above definitions, it is intriguing how often crowdfunding is described as revolutionary. In 2013, the French website Mediapart published an article titled ‘What Is Crowdfunding and Why is it Revolutionary?’2 In the same year, a book appeared with the title The Crowdfunding Revolution: Social Networking Meets Venture Financing (Lawton and Marom 2013). A few years later, an article in Forbes declared that ‘Santander Joins the Crowdfunding Revolution’.3 Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System? 19 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=28 | PRINTED_PAGE=20 Is the financing of projects by supposedly numerous and unknown donors, in a horizontal community-based fashion, really revolutionary? If we look at the dictionary definition of ‘revolutionary’, applying it to crowdfunding platforms implies that they ‘overturn established principles; transform modes of thinking and action and procedures of fabrication’ by allowing collaboration and forms of horizontal participation. The use of the term is not neutral. In the case of crowdfunding, it refers to a wider conception. Texts such as those of CerPHI (Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur la Philanthropie) [Cazemajou] 2013), with evocative titles like ‘Crowdfunding as an Innovative Technology for Financing and Promoting Business Projects’, emphasize the revolutionary character of these platforms: It can be argued that crowdfunding [is] an innovative financial service; the main idea is based on cooperation in the form of the collective funding of diferent kinds of projects to achieve set objectives, implemented through capital formation, which comes in small amounts from a large not previously known number of people on the basis of open competition using Internet technologies. (Hryhoruk and Prystupa 2017) Berg Grell, Marom and Swart (2015) add that we must embrace this revolutionary character by integrating crowdfunding as a new instrument, whether internal or external, in the service of businesses—an instrument that promotes cohesion, team spirit and competition. The revolutionary dimension of crowdfunding, then, seems to rest upon the innovative nature of the way in which it generates collective cooperation to finance projects on the basis of open competition. This tells us everything we need to know. All of these terms illustrate the necessity of a ‘permanent revolution’.4 But this is not the revolution of the emancipation of the people and the proletariat, reinventing themselves on an egalitarian basis, which Marx and Engels, and later indeed Trotsky proposed, rather, it is that of capitalist exploitation, an economic, ‘open’, ‘innovative’, ‘competitive’ revolution which occurs in a context of cyclical crises. Crowdfunding: An Old Story Reinvented As we have seen, discourses about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding both conceptualize and facilitate the creation of economic models that transform existing relations between the sphere of production and that of consumption5, formerly organized on a ‘top-down’ model. This strategic recuperation of horizontal models of action, creation and sharing is legitimated through references to historical forms, which the players of crowdfunding attach themselves to and rely upon. Two mutually reinforcing stories of crowdfunding are told: one about ideology, described above, which is based on the history of a collaborative Internet; and one that identifies it with older practices like fundraising. Whatever the references and examples used, this historicization of the phenomenon raises challenges for the various players involved. It seeks to secure the legitimacy of these practices through their naturalization, but also and above all to promote the ‘pioneering’ contribution and ‘innovative’ character of these digital platforms. 20 Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=29 | PRINTED_PAGE=21 1. A History Legitimated by the Internet In an article that proposes a ‘brief history of crowdfunding’, the American researchers David Freedman and Matthew Nutting (2015) situate the birth of the crowdfunding system in the US, prior to the emergence of the aforementioned dedicated platforms. They argue that the phenomenon emerged in 2004 on the platform Artistshare with the jazz musician Maria Schneider. Following a call for backers via this platform, Schneider succeeded in raising \$130,000 to produce a new album, which won a Grammy Award in 2005. Crowdfunding was born in the music sector—so often a pioneer in the metamorphosis of the so-called ‘creative’ industries. Kappel (2009) documents the many initiatives in operation, dividing them into two financing models (the ‘betting model’ and the ‘investing model’). Slicethepie (UK) finances bands and musicians on the betting model. Sellaband.com (UK) and Bandstock.com (the Netherlands), both founded in 2006, instead developed the ‘investment’ approach, and are the forerunners of today’s crowdfunding platforms. We might situate the birth of crowdfunding even earlier, with the innovative initiative of British prog-rock band Marillion, who in 1997 launched a pre-sale of their album on their website, successfully raising \$60,000 to finance a US tour. Other researchers, including Flannery (2006), locate the birth of crowdfunding in 2006, with the website Kiva. Following Maguire (2013), the French management science researchers Méric, Jardat, Mairesse and Brabet (2016) note that the first use of the term ‘crowdfunding’ goes back to August 2006, on the blog of Michael Sullivan, in reference to his project ‘Fundavlog’: ‘Many things are important factors, but funding from the “crowd” is the base on which all else depends on and is built on. So, crowdfunding is an accurate term to help me explain this core element of Fundavlog’. In tracing the history of crowdfunding by way of the Internet, the aim is to place it in the ideological lineage of the free and participative, DIY nature of its precursors. This involved a mobilization of the community in the service of furthering knowledge, and a common culture proper to the Internet (open source movements, the first bulletin board systems, and more broadly speaking the alternative technology movements that appeared over the course of the 1970s). Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding: The Origins of a New System? 21 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/171eb612-d523-4536-900d-5453dce83960.md?start=30&limit=10)