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# Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization

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In summary, our fundamental question is as follows: to what extent is the emergence of crowdfunding in these countries characterized by the replication of dominant Western logics or, on the contrary, by hybridizations and unforeseen alternatives? This chapter contains three sections which ofer some responses to this question. The first gives a brief survey of the diferent categories of players present in the field of crowdfunding (and particularly crowdfunding for cultural production), and their distinctive strategies and logics. The second provides a clearer understanding of the discourses produced and/or propagated by the players involved in crowdfunding and its potential development. The third section addresses a specific aspect of the discourse and practice of the players in crowdfunding: eforts at ‘pedagogy’ and ‘education’ aimed at local populations.

The Diferent Categories of Players Present in the Regions

A survey of cultural crowdfunding in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa allows us, firstly, to identify a category of endogenous actors. The most emblematic representatives of these are the South Africa-based Thundafund, which remains financially independent, and Ideame, the principal Latin American actor, which is now established in seven countries, including the US. This platform claims to be a regional replica of the American model, while afirming its specificity by espousing a form of local legitimacy: it presents itself as a

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Latin American platform for Latin Americans, including those living in the US (demonstrated especially by the ‘Create Miami’ campaign). There are other endogenous platforms in the region—in Brazil, for example, which occupies a distinctive position in the south of the continent, especially because of its language, and celebrates this distinction beyond the language itself through a refusal of the North American model. Brazil is home to companies like Catarse, Kickante and Queremos, which was later adapted to the US under the name Wedemand—with \$900,000 in support from an English investment fund, Talis Capital. Most endogenous Latin American platforms were launched using their own money, often that of their founders, who are mainly urban youth from the upper 5% of the population. The endogenous platforms with the greatest growth are those specializing in loans, such as Afluenta in Argentina and Kubo Financiero in Mexico. (When we interviewed the latter’s CEO, it was the only platform to be regulated, holding a bank licence granted by the government; a law has since been passed modelled on the US Jobs Act.) These are also the platforms most exposed (and disposed) to foreign investment—particularly American capital, which counts on and shares in their rapid growth.

Endogenous platforms have also emerged in West Africa. But their level of activity remains low, and they too are being supported by large Western companies or banks like Société Générale, which has developed incubators and various other projects in the region, often in partnership with national public agencies and international organizations. Almost all these initiatives stem from the wider emergence of fintech and its players—either banks and banking-related (Waalam is a secondary spinof of a financial assets consultancy), or telecoms and telecom-related (Orange, Paydunya, Intouch). Crowdfunding is seen as a set of services that can be ofered to users, but whose ‘value added remains to be proven—something evident in an interview with an executive at Orange:

We’re looking at crowdfunding tools. Through the Orange Digital Venture fund, Orange has invested in a player that is the French and European leader, KissKissBankBank, which has three types of sites [...] and obviously they have some interest in Africa, which is currently looking at everything that is emerging right now. No one knows the truth in this area, and we don’t have a clear idea of the dynamics of the market, what the uptake will be […]. We’re going to launch the first platforms, and what interests us is the lessons we can learn from the experience.

We encounter both a keen interest and a wait-and-see attitude on the part of Western players in crowdfunding, with large conglomerates moving their pawns and cautiously observing the developments and experiments that are underway. We find the same slow wait-and-see attitude on the part of national economic players, as illustrated by an interview with a representative of Intouch, a ‘mobile money’ aggregator solution, working on a white label basis for the

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French conglomerate Total. Numerous players are focusing on this area, and it seems crowdfunding is currently being approached through this prism (for example, by sending premium SMSs). Answering a question about the risks of direct competition with European and North American players, in the case where a platform such as Kickstarter allies itself with Intouch to launch a service specific to West Africa, the Intouch representative responded:

We need patient players who have already tested certain models. And it will be dificult to avoid international players—in fact, they are already readying themselves for Africa. You wonder who will dare take the first step, even if we have seen some preparing to do so, but we’ll see what comes of it.

For all these reasons, it is dificult to consider these players as properly endogenous, and one should emphasize that development is still low compared with the situation in the North and in East Asia. This is particularly the case for many of the countries where we carried out fieldwork, such as Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, where at the time of writing no endogenous crowdfunding platform had emerged and almost all fundraising campaigns have been realized through Western players, generally by soliciting contributions from people living in the countries of the North, including diaspora communities. This comparatively low level of development is partly a matter of Internet penetration and the technical resources available to local populations, even though the use of mobile telephones and collective computer stations has grown sharply over the last fifteen years. The limits of social financing in sub-Saharan Africa and some Latin American countries are also related to the low usage of banks by local populations (10 to 15% of the population in Senegal, for example), and to the fact that, until now, crowdfunding has been the province of economic players (contributors, large groups and platforms) based principally in the West. We do, however, observe certain adaptation strategies by platforms, or strategies of circumvention by project creators. (In Africa, these strategies include building links with ‘mobile money’ applications and encouraging users to contribute directly. In Latin America, they include the use of MiCochinito, which enables cash payments in local shops.)

Hence, we observe a substantial number of players from the North interested in crowdfunding in various ways, beginning with the two major US platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, for funding local projects. This includes South Africa, where Thundafund, Backabuddy and Jumpstarter nevertheless strive to compete with the US ofer by highlighting their supposed proximity to project creators and contributors. In Latin America, we also see a substantial number of exogenous players, along with an apparent retreat on the part of financing players from the North in terms of participation in local companies: it very much seems as if they are waiting for the market to crystallize around a small number of players in order to work out how to invest or what acquisitions to make. There is also a significant local implantation of North American players in Latin America. Kickstarter is the most present: according to Sebastian Di Lullo, CEO of Ideame, it alone is responsible for half the total amount raised by all Latin American players in 2016–17. Ideame also pursues a strategy of purchasing national players and opening ofices in diferent countries in the hope of attracting diferent categories of the population—particularly the most wealthy and those who see themselves as being part of a ‘creative class’. We therefore observe a domination characterized both by the consolidation of a number of players present over the whole territory and by pressure from the most powerful players on the international level. This twofold domination is on the one hand a brake on the emergence of local players (numerous platforms have closed or are barely surviving in various Latin American countries, including KapitalZocial in Peru or La Chèvre in Colombia) and on the other hand manifests itself in the normalization and standardization of these apparatuses on the North American model. Although the expansion strategy of Thundafund, for example, is more limited, these remarks generally hold for sub-Saharan Africa, but with one caveat: the presence of large players from the North seems to go hand in hand with the emergence of seemingly endogenous players, whose crowdfunding platforms constitute only one element in a wider palette of mobile services.

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A Diversity of Players, a Repertoire of Common Discourses

1. Project Creators and Endogenous Cultural Workers

Predictably, our interviews with potential or actual project creators have generally been marked by their overt enthusiasm, summed up by Gaissiri Dia, founder of the platform Waalam: ‘I have confidence in the next generation to take the initiative, they will grasp the opportunities that are beneficial for us’. Emphasis is placed on a supposed ‘entrepreneurial culture’ in sub-Saharan Africa, and to a lesser extent in Latin America. The discourses of many project creators frequently express a desire to contribute to alternative forms of social financing that lie of the beaten track of Western platforms. Despite a reminder of the pitfalls, Heinz Winckler, a South African musician who funded the production of an album through Thundafund, displayed such enthusiasm when we interviewed him about the challenges faced by social financing in his country:

I think it’s the lack of knowledge of the general public of what it is exactly, of what it means, so there’s just a, there are some kind of education needed in a way, for people to understand […] it’s mainly knowing what it is, how it works, you know, that it’s worked before, you can trust it, you will get what you paid for and it must be easier, it must be easy to work with. And I think it sounds like Thunderfund have sorted that out so, you know, hope […]. I’m sure they’ll get better.

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In Senegal and Burkina Faso we interviewed a number of musicians who had used platforms based in France (Ulule, KissKissBankBank) to finance the production of albums aiming at niche ‘world music’ markets. In these cases, the campaigns had been successful because the artists already had a ‘market in France’. One interviewee in Senegal explained the success of such campaigns (and, in contrast, the limits of crowdfunding for cultural projects on potential national or pan-African platforms):

It isn’t something we’d be afraid of doing, but it’s just that it may be a bit early for it. In any case, I see artists trying to do something on Facebook because it’s true that it the sector is a little neglected. In France it’s diferent, artists like Grégoire are crowdfunded, but here people don’t take the risk because money is complicated here. People don’t talk about it, they are incapable of defining what they expect to make.

This is an interesting remark, invoking one of the ‘mythical figures’ of crowdfunding, Grégoire: the success of that particular campaign (and the ‘expectations’ in terms of the funds that could be raised) had been carefully prepared and orchestrated by the platform MyMajorCompany well ahead of its launch, in particular by signing a publishing contract beforehand with the distributor Warner Music France. Not that this matters: the same myth of quasi-organic crowdfunding in the West, which will inevitably ‘trickle down’ to the South, is expressed by Ken Aicha Sy (a member of the collective Wakh’Art, which led a fruitful crowdfunding campaign). He unhesitatingly places music production, healthcare application development, and a very specific context of work organization on the same plane:

Especially in music, there are so many artists who use these sites to fund foreign tours and records, those who have a following abroad ask their audience for help. I think it’s because there is a demand that young people develop a distinctive ofer, and then the more that ofer is developed, the more it will be suited to people’s needs. For example, I’ve met people who make applications for healthcare here in Senegal, I know social entrepreneurs in the prison system who use it to enable their work with prisoners. Once the platforms exist, demand will grow, and today we’re a country with 8 million people connected to the Internet, there are 14 million Senegalese, so it’s a big market.

Alongside these positively motivated users of the platforms, we also met numerous cultural workers who seemed overcome by the obstacles they met when setting up a social financing campaign. They were often eager to get started and already users of networks for information and computer technology, but were held back either by the everyday business of ‘survival’ or by other timeconsuming and financially indispensable work. This is the case of an Ethiopian engineer, Getnet Asefa, the founder of IcogLabs. He launched an unsuccessful campaign on Indiegogo to finance an educational project involving artificial intelligence. According to him, the attempt failed principally because he lacked the time necessary for preparing and promoting the campaign, since he was busy with accounting and financial data management tasks outsourced to his ‘laboratory’ by Australian companies. Here the limitations of the enthusiastic discourses become quite clear: stories of successful project creators are the exception, and campaigns are marked by vicissitudes and obstacles that were underestimated at the outset. The Afrikaner protest musician Koos Kombuis emphasizes this, based on his experience with Jumpstarter:

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You don’t count the sleepless nights. Like, I heard only after I’d signed up that I need a launch video, so you’ve got to find a professional person to take a decent video. That costs money [...]. Getting everyone together, for this, it was a headache you know, because when you put [...] the record label, I mean it’s horrible, but they do everything for you. You don’t have to think […]. It took a whole year, I mean I researched it, starting thinking about it, getting the CD done, it was like a year of my life that I don’t want, I had one year, one week holiday last year that I took of with my family. It was the most exhausting year of my life. So I wouldn’t do it again. But I’m not dissatisfied, I’m a happy customer, I believe in crowdfunding.

2. Platform Managers and Other Endogenous Entrepreneurs

Among those who work for local platforms (or those that belong to the ‘ecosystem’ of digital technologies and mobile money) we find a similar zealotry, tempered with a certain realism about the constraints that are slowing down the development of social financing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Christian Palouki, CTO of the payment solutions aggregator Paydunya, ofers an example of this wishful thinking. He envisions a future where the population may still not have fully adopted bank account usage as in the West, but where mobile money devices will play an analogous role:

It’s this habit of paying with cash that slows everything down here in Africa […]. People are afraid of paying on the Internet and it slows everything down. They are afraid they won’t receive what they’ve paid for, or they’re afraid someone will steal their data. What would be interesting for us would be to succeed in convincing people that there are structures in place, and that’s what we’re working on. We are looking for innovative means of payment so as to achieve what is called financial inclusion.

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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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With Thundafund we did initially have our dev partners in Bulgaria, that’s where the actual programs were based. What we realized over here, was, and actually our initial tech partners were based in the UK, and the dev team in Bulgaria [...]. But we discovered that having your tech partners in another country, while it made financial sense it was a nightmare when it came to cultural and social diferences. What I mean by that is they run on an Orthodox Christian calendar, and we run on the Western Christian calendar—Easter happens this weekend, Easter happens that weekend. We’re on holiday, they’re on holiday. Thirty holidays, 30 days of holiday in South Africa, 30 days holiday in Bulgaria— 60 days in which neither of us can actually work. You just don’t think of that stuf, well we didn’t, so it became an absolute nightmare.

Other local players turn to complementary service oferings, confirming the results of our research into the uses of crowdfunding in Europe and North America. Whether in the case of project creators or platform entrepreneurs, numerous examples show how fundraising becomes a pretext for (or a prelude to) other activities, like marketing or brokering. As an example, Gerhard Maree, founder of Citysoirée, a South African social financing site for private concerts, reoriented his oferings toward consultancy and services such as audience profiling, marketing, and ticket management for shows organized by third parties via the platform: ‘I think Citysoirée’s brand as a creative entity has become more valuable than as a crowdfunding platform.’

3. Exogenous Players and International Organizations

Within the context of our research we have been confronted by the importance of very active exogenous stakeholders seeking to create ‘inclusive’ dynamics in the interests of large industrial or financial groups or that of the economic powers they represent and assist (in particular the embassies of major Western powers). In West Africa, this type of process is typically encouraged by international organizations like the United Nations Program for Development (UNPD), as well as by supranational financial bodies like InfoDev1 and the World Bank, WAEMU2, and CBWAS3. In our research we were able to interview at length a representative of the French company Orange who was in charge of developing digital economy initiatives in West Africa. Having pointed out that he was not ‘a great expert in development aid’—which he argues is fundamentally counterproductive—he explained Orange’s general approach, which consists in ‘contributing to endogenous development’ by developing ‘an SME ecosystem using digital technologies’. To this end, the group deploys a long term strategy that will most likely be unprofitable in the early stages, ‘opening local funds, on a per-country basis, run locally by local teams’: ‘the aim of those who invest in these vehicles is not to make money, or to lose it, but above all to consolidate the stronger SMEs and guide them toward better instruments that are a little larger and more profitable.’ Careful to make it known that these funds operate ‘autonomously’, he clarifies:

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We didn’t want to put Orange solutions in place, because it’s not necessarily our speciality, we don’t necessarily have the skills, and we wanted to establish structures that have legitimacy. We can’t legitimately do the work of banks, do guidance work, make up for all the deficiencies around us. On the other hand, we can legitimately go and meet with certain players in the public sector, the private sector, the civil sector, and get together and set up projects.

As we can see, there is a good deal of careful wording in this discourse. It is a matter of Orange’s ‘legitimacy’ to intervene economically in these former French colonies alongside partners as illustrious as Total and African states. The supposed aim is to enable the financing of local SMEs, including in the domain of crowdfunding. To back up the idea that this is a matter of ‘local bodies, directed and run locally for local bodies’ or ‘true tools of endogenous development’, the Orange representative insisted that:

If we create a cultural incubator, on the board we’re going to have the minister of culture, that’s how it goes—and then we’ll go look for people who can put a bit of money on the table, without it being too much of a problem for them, so as to bring to life a space that will make a structural contribution in the cultural domain. And it will do its work with a degree of independence, because it is an intersection between these diferent people and has to manage relations between diferent stakeholders and organize its work for the benefit of the cultural domain. […] This empowers the local players who will do the work.

This is a significant example, not only insofar as this type of body is efectively being called upon to construct an ‘ecosystem’ in which the budding platforms will eventually participate, but also because in it we find the very principles that lie at the basis of the activity of intermediation Marine Jouan describes, referring to the notion of ‘border-entrepreneur’ which was evoked in the previous chapter (Jouan 2017: 335). In this type of structural initiative we can see at work both the transference of a discourse of ‘empowerment’ and the implementation of mechanisms that clearly restrain the supposed autonomy of endogenous entrepreneurs.

If the forms of intervention are more discreet in Latin America, they are certainly not absent, as shown by the growing importance of liberally-oriented public policies which encourage ‘individual responsibility,’ inspired by the great Western discourses. In April 2016, FOMIN—or Multilateral Investment

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Fund, created in 1993 to promote the development of the private sector in Latin America and administered by the Inter-American Development Bank based in New York—released a report, Economia colaborativa en América latina. This gives a good illustration of this process, as does the US’s readiness to support this type of development, which is centred on a ‘creative economy’ in which the state plays less of a part, and which sees the individual-entrepreneur as the creator of wealth and the vector of growth.

In addition, we must recognize that the endogenous players we met emphasized the use—or even necessity—of this kind of partnership. Representatives of the African Crowdfunding Association (ACfA) told us:

Our objective for 2017 is to exert pressure on a number of agencies with which we are in contact, notably international ones, for whom South Africa is not a priority. They tell us they are interested if we initiate projects in West Africa or East Africa. There is the CIPE. There is also the Agence Française de Développement.

The AFD is well known in France. The CIPE (Centre for Individual Private Enterprise) is less so: it is one of the four central institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy, a ‘non-profit’ spinof of the US Chamber of Commerce.

4. National Public Players

Finally, our research in diferent regions of Latin America and Africa has enabled us to collect some revealing evidence on the discourses that accompany national and local policies directed toward the diferent players involved in crowdfunding, although it would be dificult to draw any unified conclusion from them. Two major trends are however evident, ranging from a relative avoidance or misunderstanding of the question to an apparent desire to place it in the most general register of the neoliberal transformation of public policy, driven in particular by the international organizations and major Western players mentioned above.

In Ethiopia, and in South Africa to a lesser extent, we observed a certain bewilderment on the part of public oficials we met. This was confirmed, among others, by Lunda Wright, a representative of the ACfA:

When public institutions want to establish partnerships with us, they come with a preconception of what crowdfunding is, based on how they see Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Some have understood that there are contextual factors, and that we therefore have to take local platforms into consideration, but others are stuck in this idea that we have to work with the big Western platforms. And they treat local platforms with a degree of mistrust.

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