Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization

The support which these apparatuses provide no doubt serves as a political and communicative argument for the importance ascribed to digital technologies and citizen participation. Politically, many cities (including Paris and Grenoble) have launched initiatives with participatory budgets, allowing citizens to finance selected projects. But most of these initiatives are highly fragmented and maintain the established decision-making hierarchies, creating the suspicion that participation is just a way of giving a misleading new shine to existing structures while impacting them very little, if at all. Furthermore, under the guise of emancipation and freedom, ‘participatory’ digital platforms act as tools of systematic control—for instance, through geolocation, the requirement to use online services, and nudging. It is no small matter that most platforms use proprietary code, far from the values of free and open source software (Smyrnaios 2018).

This leads us back to the requirement/suggestion to participate, and the need to develop efective forms of communication—for instance, educational workshops which invite as many people as possible to participate. While we are not critical of this approach in itself, we are more cautious when this participation involves the outsourcing of tasks and the shifting of financial risk onto the citizen/user/consumer alone. This marks a possible disengagement on the part of institutions and new forms of digital labour which are often ‘free’, breaking with hard-won legislation and social advances over the course of previous centuries. They are accompanied by educational logics which blur the lines between work and leisure, part of a process of ‘gamifying society’.

Finally, there is the question of cultural diversity. The ‘community’ gives participation its strength, but it also marks its limit. The editorial logics which the platforms establish and community members ‘put into practice’ do not necessarily lead to openness and cultural diversity. Following other researchers, we have shown that the motivation for participation is based on afective proximity to the project and, often, to the person or people in charge. In such conditions, it is dificult to promote projects with aesthetic or original themes which lie on the fringes of traditional or ‘mainstream’ logics. Under the guise of ‘participation’ and freedom, the platforms valorize these disinterested, outsourced production methods using classic capitalistic logics: data banks, big data, outsourcing tasks, and reducing investment risks. Most of them serve as new intermediaries in cultural and media strategies which have been known for decades.

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Participation is therefore paradoxical: the majority of political, economic, cultural and social actors invite us to join in, but they take no responsibility for its ultimate end. In contrast to the emancipatory principles which are claimed, the participatory register is too often based on a sort of instrumentalization— one which involves nothing less than the shaping of socio-economic power relations, to the detriment of citizens and workers both nationally and internationally.

Living in Project Mode

More generally, these platforms raise questions about the displacement of social structures in which the project becomes central. Every moment of life is governed by a project. From an early age, one has to build a life project. Students, the unemployed, academics, retirees, politicians—all must base their lives and work around the constant renewal of projects. Managers define several diferent project models: project companies, project portfolios, project teams, and so on (Asquin et al. 2005). Mainstream media is full of articles encouraging us to develop our economic life, our entrepreneurial life, and our personal life in ‘project mode’. There are a vast number of books like Charles Smith’s (2017), full of tips for succeeding in these new approaches. The challenge is to overcome all possible barriers to achieving one’s goal, facing down constant challenges. ‘Project planning’ is defined by its unique, non-renewable nature. It involves the experiential dimension discussed above. Success depends on one’s ability to master these unforeseeable events and to monitor a range of environmental constraints, all in a determined, ‘irreversible’ period of time. Moreover, this conception of life in project mode correlates to a dynamic aim of progress and increased action on the part of citizens.

Paradoxically, the individualization which ‘project’ mode brings with it is necessarily accompanied by forms of collaboration and sharing. Crowdfunding platforms valorize this project mode, and are saturated with this ideology—a genuine instance of social engineering, based on the short term, the permanent fragmentation of individual social spaces, the multiplication and diversification of skills, and permanent competition. In their own way, they track broader transformations in social structure. For this reason, as the proponents of the most retrograde social reforms claim, ‘pedagogy’ is necessary. Any contradiction can supposedly be dissolved with some ‘educational’ efort. As we have seen throughout this book, we are far from Foucault’s disciplinary society: these platforms illustrate and contribute to the development of suggestions whose nature is, in reality, that of a command. These platforms seem to reject any obligation, and deploy discursive strategies where we can observe a shift towards forms of suggestion which should be followed—but without guaranteeing success for any users who comply. They participate in processes of normalization which, once accepted and naturalized, are no longer questioned. Criticising them becomes all the more complex as there is no longer any obligation—an argument used systematically by the platforms whenever criticism is raised. Lastly, crowdfunding’s use of brief, short-term modalities of action denies any form of long-term commitment.

General Conclusion

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Other forms of participation and collaboration exist, some financial and others not, and these deserve more attention. They are part of the logic of the commons, of a ‘commonwealth’ (Hardt and Negri 2009), and serve the collective on the basis of exchanging individual resources. The relationship between proposals and participative funding would no longer be exclusively monetary, taking in broader forms of exchanging and bartering skills, places, tools, and so on. Like some forms of crowdsourcing and some ‘alternative’ platforms, this approach is based on pooling services which can be traded in space and time— a collective commitment where each person contributes what they want (i.e. money, skills, or time), enabling the means of production to be reappropriated (Scholz, 2016). These forms of participation invite us to overcome the dificulties and contradictions of independent initiatives—for instance, independent media initiatives (Fuchs 2014)—and so revive the links between the individual and the community. They could draw inspiration from the modalities established by the open source community, for instance, or in agriculture by ‘short circuits’, which often aim to produce and share their goods on the fringes of capitalist economic market logic. Such forms of participation are based on solidarity and equitable economies, and demonstrate both eficiency and a willingness to consider digital tools as a means and not an end, tying them to democratic, economic and environmental goals.

We wish to end by stressing this particular point, for we must indeed question platforms and their usages with regard to the impact they have on the environment and on global warming. So often referred to in terms of creativity, innovation, democratized usage and other such ‘one-click wonders’, these platforms – like all ICTs – clearly no longer correspond to the angelic expectations formulated in the 1990s (reduction in ink and paper consumption and waste, limited transport-related pollution thanks to remote working, etc.), even if they have increased knowledge transfers, exchanges and thus productivity (Rodhain and Fallery 2013). Upstream however, before we even begin to discuss either the cultural merits or the ideological threats posed by these apparatuses, we must recognise that as part of the digital economy, they require the extraction of costly raw materials, the exploitation of precarious labour, ‘big data’ and ‘cloud’ storage centres which are of course far from immaterial with regard to their high energy consumption. Downstream, the functions these platforms perform and their usages also imply ever increasing consumption of energy and contribute to climate change. Without a collective awareness and appropriate decisions on the part of all players ‘participating’ in this inherently reckless activity, the cultural show will go on, but until when, in what conditions and with what ultimate results?

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References

General Conclusion

105

The Editor and Contributors

Competing Interests

All the chapters in this book are the result of research carried out within the framework of the Collab research project, financed by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and directed by Vincent Rouzé (2015–18). This publication was made possible thanks to the support of the ANR, University Paris 8, CEMTI and the University of Westminster Press.

The Editor and Contributors

Vincent Rouzé is Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris 8 and a member of the Centre for Media, Technology and Internationalization Studies (Cemti). Author of numerous articles, his work deals with musical and artistic practices with regard to digital technologies and the evolution of their methods of valorization and circulation. He has participated in and directed research programmes related to those matters and was the leader of the ‘Collab’ research programme (2015–18) funded by the French National Research Agency. He is the author of Mythologie de l’iPod (2010), co-author of La Culture par les Foules (2014) and coedited the volume Financement Participatif: les Nouveaux Territoires du Capitalisme (2019).

Email: vincent.rouze@univ-paris8.fr

Jacob Matthews is Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris 8, France. He is the author of Communication d’une Star, Jim Morrison (2003), co-author of Le Web Collaboratif (2010), La Culture par les Foules (2014) and Platform Economics (2018). He has directed several research programmes looking into evolutions in the culture industries and the development of the collaborative web and was head of the Centre for Media, Technology and Internationalization Studies (Cemti) in 2017–18. He is currently an associate member of the Laboratory of Applied Research in Social Sciences (Lerass, University of Toulouse 3) and the Inter-university Research Centre on Communication, Information and Society (Cricis, University of Quebec in

Montreal). His research now primarily focuses on the political economy of the Internet and digital intermediation platforms.
Email: jacob.matthews@univ-paris8.fr

Stéphane Costantini holds a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences and is an associate researcher at the University of Paris 13. He was a research engineer within the ‘Collab’ research programme (2015–18). His work in the area of socioeconomy of cultural and communication industries, focuses on the strategies of industrial players and user practices in the field of digital and collaborative web, as well as the uses of amateurs and professionals in the music world. A decade of professional experience in the field of cultural communication (music, audiovisual, theatre, copyright) has enabled him to crossreference the views of cultural and digital professionals with academic research. Email: steph.costantini@gmail.com

Alix Bénistant holds a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences, and is an associate researcher at the Centre for Media, Technology and Internationalization Studies (Cemti, University of Paris 8) and at the Research Centre on Mediations (Crem, University of Lorraine), where he was a research fellow in the ‘Collab’ research programme. His current research concerns the production and circulation of cultural products on a transnational scale, and the role played by large metropolitan areas in the context of globalization. His field of analysis focuses more specifically on the music industry that has settled in the city of Miami.

E-mail: alix.benistant@gmail.com

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Index

A

absence of control of projects 51 aesthetic experimentation, absence of 51 afective and identity-based ties 6,
19, 102 Africa Connected 94 African Crowdfunding Association (ACfA) 48, 91, 93 ‘Africa[n] rising’ narrative 96 Africa (see also Global South; South Africa; Africa, West) 3, 8, 26, 48,
70, 80–97 Agamben, Giorgio 9, 36, 39, 49 Agence Française de Développement. (AFD) 91 agitation 73, 93 Airbnb 2 Albert, Michel 39 algorithmic automation 22, 49
Alphabet ( see also Google) 94, 97
‘alternative’ crowdfunded projects as 25, 88 character of 36–39 image of 7 to finance markets 7 forms and systems defining 36–38 image of 46
alternative currencies 37
alternative media practices pitfalls for 37
amateur-professional opposition 51, 61, 63, 108
amateur, the ‘cult of’ 18
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk 17
American model of crowdfunding 82
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) 49, 64
apparatuses

adapated to market strategies 39–45 for political and legislative action 47–48 L’Appel de Cthulhu (game) 4 Appleby, Joyce 30 Argentina 8, 83, 92 Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) 26 artists as ‘project creators’ 50, 61–62 ‘just want to be artists’ 73 Artistshare 2, 21 ‘ascendant innovation’ 18 Asefa, Getnet 87 attention 27 author-reader distinction blurred 27 AXA 45, 46

B

B2B (business-to-business) 19, 100
B2C (business-to-consumer)
19, 100
Backabuddy 70, 81, 84, 88, 94
Bandstock.com 21
banking partners 46–47
banks 70, 82, 83
usage of 84
Banque Postale, La 45, 46, 70
Banque Public d’Investissement
France 3
Barnes, John A. 10
Barthes, Roland 2, 19
Bartholdi (designer) 26
behaviourist psychology 5
Benfeitoria 93, 94
Bénistant, Alix 8, 79–98
Benkler, Yochai 17
betting model, the 21
de Beukelaer, Christiaan 80–82
Bihr, Robert 73
Blue Bees 42, 69
BNP Paribas 46
Boltanski, Luc 7, 37, 49, 53, 73
Le Bon, Gustave 29
Bourdieu, Pierre 53
Brabham 4
Brabham, Daren C. 17, 60
Brazil 8, 83, 88, 92–93
Breton, Philippe 22
Bulgaria 89–90
Burkina Faso 8, 84, 86

C

capitalism 30, 61, 99 neo- 2 permanent revolution of 16, 20
capitalist logics 63, 103
Cardon, Dominique 102
Caruso, Felipe 94
Cassavetes, John 25–26
Castells, Manuel 22, 23, 30
Catarse 83, 88, 93, 94, 96
Central Bank of West African States (CBWAS) 89, 97
Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur la Philanthropie (CerPHI) 20
Centre des Monuments Nationaux 52
Chèvre, La 85
Chiapello, Eve 7, 37, 49, 53, 73
Chile 92
CIPE (Centre for Individual Private Enterprise), US 91
Citysoirée 89, 94, 96
class 15, 29, 53, 85, 95, 99, 101
co-innovation 49
collaboration 2, 20, 22, 81, 103, 104 diference between crowdsourcing and crowdfunding 19 ideology of 7, 79 internal 45
‘collaborative’ economy 38, 59, 63, 74, 96, 101

110

Index

‘collaborative’ web, the 1, 4, 45, 62

Crowdfunding France 3, 67, 69, 72

Collab research project 8, 107

Colombia 8, 85 crowdfunding (see also ‘platforms’ and ‘projects’) 2–9, 15–33

commitment, long-term 104

‘archaeology’ of 15–16

commodification 38, 61, 68, 97

within company strategy 5

commons-based peer production’ 17 as a complementary tool 101

distinct from crowdsourcing 19

commons, the 19, 37, 45, 54, 81, 104

financial ofshoot of crowdsourcing 19

commonwealth 104

french translation of 29

communication-monde, la (1992) 30

generous image of 71–72

legislation concerning 5, 47–48

community building 5, 65, 72, 101

origins of 15–32

community management 52, 64, 66–67

platforms and labour 59–78

competition 20, 29, 45, 49, 53, 54, 67, 74, 84, 97, 103

platforms as cultural intermediaries 35–58

politics and ethics of 5, 99–105

losers in 68

as a pre-sales system 5

Conseil National du Numérique en France 39

as publicity and communications tool 52, 101

consumption 27

described as ‘revolution’ 19–20, 28

content management 64

secondary literature on 4–6

convergence 18, 39, 62

valorizes ‘project mode’ 103

Corcuf, Philippe 36

crowdfunding week 92

corporate crowdfunding 44

crowd psychology 29

corruption 96

Costantini, Stéphane 8, 79–98 crowdsourcing 2, 4, 15–33, 44, 62, 99, 104

‘Create Miami’ campaign 83

as apparatus 17, 61

creative class 15, 29, 85

definitions of 16–18

creative economy 81, 91, 92 discourse of 80

diferent from commons-based peer production 17

creative ‘experiences’ 62

and ideas of participation 7

creative industries 4, 21, 36, 41, 46, 50, 53, 64, 80, 92, 99

influences content 19

origins of 15–32

creative work

‘umbrella’ term 18

disintermediation of 4

creativity 7, 38, 39, 46, 49–50, 59, 64, 81, 100

Crowdsourcing: A Definition (2006) 17

‘crowd’, the term 28, 29–30, 62

Credofunding 43

cultural

Crowdfunder 46

capital 53

CrowdFunding4Culture 48

crowdfunding day 92 diversity 51, 53, 60, 63, 81, 102–103

Crowdfunding en Méditerranée 93

financing 24–25

Index

111