Cultural Crowdfunding Platform Capitalism, Labour And Globalization

As in the financing stages of traditional cultural or audio-visual projects, the alternative seems to be not so much an alternative approach to ‘creation’ or difusion. Instead, it is as an intermediate phase in which one seeks financial support, including making a personal and financial investment, and this may succeed or fail.

Well, it’s good that we asked for too much. For one, we didn’t manage to get as much as we wanted, but then there were people who contacted us afterwards because of it. People who came to it a bit late. So even though it failed, we tried, and now it also means that we’re better known. (Musician, 45 years old)

Certain skills beyond the ‘creative’ talents specific to the project itself are needed for a successful crowdfunding campaign. Prescribed by the platforms (see chapter 3) and largely self-taught, these are basically marketing and communications skills. In terms of project management, they primarily involve creating and activating the network, generating a sense of, and creating and managing a community (Matthews, Rouzé and Vachet 2014; see digital appendixes, chapter 5). While crowdfunding is often presented as an alternative to the restrictive logics of the cultural industries, in this respect it seems more like a publicity and communications tool which drives other types of promotion.

This dimension of communications and publicity is well illustrated by museums. In turning to these modes of financing, museums aim to increase the visibility of their projects, and to build loyal communities around them. For instance, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux used the platform MyMajor-Company to collect funds for the restoration of a number of historical monuments, including Mont St. Michel. Ulule has hosted projects by the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de la Marine. In the United States, the Smithsonian, MoMA, and the Marina Abramovic Institute have all used Kickstarter campaigns to restore or finance projects on various scales.

In France, as part of its policy for digital modernization baptized ‘the digital Louvre’, the Louvre has created an internal platform, ‘Tous Mécènes’, to publicize its restoration projects and to create a community of patrons to take on activities that were formerly the province of groups like the ‘friends of the museum’ (Mairesse 2016). Note that these campaigns should be understood more broadly, in the context of a network of injunctions that go beyond the question of funding innovations alone. In the heritage sector, for example, in 2007 Joëlle Le Marec conceptualized the modernist injunction to the museum to ‘get moving’ (Le Marec 2007, 169) and to be digitally up to date as a structural logic at work transversally across institutions, their services and their projects. Far from being an alternative, the use of such platforms is above all strategic. The opinions of members of staf may difer, and they might not always see such initiatives in a positive light.

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Conclusion

As a conclusion, we would like to return to the significance and role of these platforms in the development of culture. Although they allow some projects to meet their goals, or partial funding for more ambitious ones, many other projects are held back by the forms of competition involved and do not have such opportunities. This clearly calls into question their capacity to foster cultural diversity. The projects that will flourish are those that already boast a large community with suficient financial resources, whose tastes and cultural and social practices depend on their class allegiances (the impact of cultural capital, Bourdieu 1979) as well as their age range (generational impact) and their geographical location (Hugues and Peterson 1983). Our research shows that, apart from the class logic in play, and the inequalities in the distribution of backers and project creators across the country (see the conclusion to the preceding chapter), ‘innovative technological projects’ generate more interest and attract funding decisions, to the detriment of other cultural categories.

The same logic also favours projects which comply with pre-existing tastes and fashions, to the detriment of projects whose aesthetics, format, or concerns are remote from common preoccupations, or on the fringes of traditional or mainstream cultural expressions. This question is rendered still more acute by the ambiguity of the partnerships between private and public players, who support projects in line with their communications and marketing strategies and their own economic logics. Far from being alternatives to the logics and strategies of the cultural and creative industries, these platforms follow the logic of the capitalist ecosystem: stimulating competition between projects, and contributing to competitive hierarchizations of projects which are correlated with the necessity of rendering them visible, a process reinforced by inegalitarian forms of access and sharing (size of community, social origins, etc.). Finally, as we saw above in the case of the 2018 appeal to fund the rail workers’ strike in France, it raises questions around the systematic integration of any alternative or protest movement, a mechanism necessary to the survival of the capitalist economy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018).

Far from being alternatives, today’s platforms are newly integrated links in the cultural sector. By way of the ecosystems they work to create and/or strengthen, they produce complementarities between diferent players in various economic and institutional sectors, and also seek to federate others. A competitive logic nevertheless endures in this ‘collaborative’ market, contributing to the growth of rivalry between platforms but also, and above all, between projects and between project creators—far from a logic of equitable participation or of the commons. They therefore contribute to what Lash and Lury (2007) have called the culturization of the economy, by placing the ‘experience’ of the consumer/ citizen (defending a project, raising funds for it, participating in its success) as well as the ‘local’ dimension (a strategic element of what some economists call the ‘purple’ economy) at the heart of a system supposedly dependent on innovation and brand-based capitalization.

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Notes

1 https://tousnosprojets.bpifrance.fr/Observatoire/(type)/don Accessed April 1st 2019.

2 Ambition numérique: pour une politique française et européenne de la transition numérique [Digital Ambition: for a French and European Policy of Digital Transition], report of the Conseil National du Numérique, 2015.

3 One should stress however that these diferent models and strategies are not fully exclusive, as some platforms borrow from one or another model.

4 In France, the fonds de dotation is one such endowment, dedicated to works or missions of ‘general interest’ or to assisting other non-profit organizations to accomplish such missions. The base amount needed to set up a fonds de dotation has been set at €15,000 by law.

5 https://nl.ulule.com/bnpparibas/#/ Accessed November 18th 2018.

References

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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization

Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour

Jacob Matthews and Vincent Rouzé

Our relationship to work, culture and knowledge seems to have been significantly altered by the rise of digital communications technologies. The neologism ‘Uberization’, derived from the web platform Uber, has become an apt term for the movement toward a so-called ‘collaborative’ economy in which salaried jobs no longer exist. At the same time, many of today’s platforms encourage the valuing of individual ‘creativity’, something that reshapes the definition of the artist and creative work.

In this chapter we examine the impact of these platforms on our relationship to labour, its reorganization and the shift toward a project-based model of work (Jaillet-Roman 2002). It seems to us that these platforms and the apparatuses they deploy raise broader issues about ‘creativity’ and the collaborative economy, as well as the type of labour involved both inside and on the platforms. As Fuchs (2014), Scholz (2012), Cardon and Cassilli (2015), and Simonet (2015) have shown, the activities conducted on digital platforms belong to the category of digital labour, and as such are subject to new forms of labour organization and exploitation (Dujarier 2014), including forms of ‘free’ labour (Terranova 2000) that may constitute a ‘cybertariat’ (Huws 2003 and 2014). In addressing the platforms from this perspective, we hope to enrich the existing literature,

CHAPTER 4

How to cite this book chapter: Matthews, J. and Rouzé, V. 2019. Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour. In: Rouzé, V. (ed.) Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization. Pp. 59–78. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ book38.d. License: CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0

which largely focuses on the supposedly unprecedented ways these platforms operate (Divard 2013; Boyer et al. 2016), on their capacity to act as tools for ‘liberation’ and ‘value sharing’ (Lemoine 2014) in the name of technological and socio-economic innovation (Kuppuswamy and Bayus 2013) and cultural diversity (Fohr 2016), and on participants’ motivations and the benefits they receive (Brabham 2009; Céré, Roth and Petavy 2015). We take a critical stance, examining platforms, players and their accompanying discourses in terms that go beyond gauging their functional efectiveness. To do so, we adopt a ‘dynamic holistic’ stance which pays attention to the way in which individual and collective behaviours are determined by structures and institutions, but also to social actors’ proactive capacities (Vercellone 2008: 7). From a structural point of view, it’s important to recognise that the platform economy relies not principally on commercial revenue deriving from the production of goods and services, but on a model stemming from the fields of advertising and finance; ‘commissions’ are justified by their ability to link up individuals and/or groups with commercial entities, brands or investment opportunities. And from an etymological point of view, the platform is indeed a space dedicated to the stationing of carriages that are to be unloaded or loaded with goods or persons: the platform constitutes a locus of transaction and translation – an instrument of ideological convergence.

In enthusiastic accounts, the platform economy is based on a worldwide market, open to a multitude of player of all sizes, linked together by digital networks. The regular emergence of new markets and conversion of users into economic players gives this project an allure of realisation – as long as one ignores the fact that a powerful oligopoly has emerged (Smyrnaios, 2017), and that even fringe players objectively dominate individual users. Moreover, we have shown that web platforms innovate mainly by reducing costs and allowing for an ‘alteration of perceptions’ that the various players have of the capitalisation process and the internal organisation of economic sectors (Matthews and Vachet, 2014).

Kenney and Zysman (2016) identify as privately generated platform-based ‘ecosystems’, companies which fundamentally ‘are not delivering technology to their customers and clients—they use technology to deliver labour to them’ (Smith and Leberstein 2015, 3). Moreover, it is apparent that the ‘bargaining power of workers is undermined by the size and scope of the global market for labour; the anonymity that the digital medium afords is a double-edged sword, facilitating some types of economic inclusion, but also allowing employers to discriminate at will’ (Graham, Hjorth and Lehdonvirta 2017: 16). And as De Stefano points out ‘the possibility of being easily terminated via a simple deactivation or exclusion from a platform or app may magnify the fear of retaliation that can be associated to non-standard forms of work, in particular temporary ones’ (De Stefano 2016: 10).

These perspectives in turn us to consider the phenomenon of crowdfunding in the light of the constraints and opportunities it presents for the productive activities of the artist as ‘project creator’—a version of the ‘artist as labourer’ figure proposed by Menger (2002)—as well as the characteristic of the other players involved, and in particular the work of those who manage platforms. Our hypothesis is that both emerge as ‘polymorphous entrepreneurs’. At the intersection of multiple, often contradictory players and logics, their work consists fundamentally in trying to synthesize them so as to optimize the economic value extraction upon which their livelihood depends. This hypothesis converges with that of Marine Jouan who, following the works of Bergeron, Castel and Nouguez (2013), introduces the notion of a ‘border-entrepreneur’, defined by their position ‘on the border of many worlds in tension’, and their strategic reshaping of these into a ‘new world of which they will be the centre’ (Jouan 2017: 335).

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This chapter is divided into three complementary parts. In the first we analyze the structural modifications of labour carried out by and on these platforms, and the representations they produce. In the second, we focus specifically on the forms of labour organization deployed within platforms, and examine how the work of project creators and members of their ‘community’ is framed and optimized, before considering how this process echoes platform managers’ eforts to optimize their own projects and communities. Finally, the third part develops the hypothesis that platforms (and their various uses) can be understood as instruments of ideological production; to do this we analyze the ‘pedagogical mission’ emphasized in the guidelines issued by many platforms.

Towards Gamification, or Invisible Labour

Human activities that take place on and around these platforms are obviously embedded in commercial relationships, and cannot escape the transformation of labour power into commodities, one of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism. And yet, in the case of cultural production financed through crowdfunding platforms, this transformation does not take place by way of a salaried workforce (which indeed has long been the case in the media and culture industries, where salaried jobs are the exception rather than the rule). Consequently, these apparatuses apparently consolidate pre-existing forms of labour organization, in particular by extending them to encompass cultural workers who had previously been spared to some extent, either because they were somewhat protected by public institutions or because their ‘amateur’ practices still put up some resistance to commodification and industrialization. It should also be recognized that intermediation apparatuses existed within the cultural field long before the emergence of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platforms.

Nevertheless, what is most characteristic of cultural crowdfunding is its capacity to extend commercial prospecting into specific areas of cultural production, including alternative, or even oppositional, creative labour, and places where production merges into ‘social’ or ‘community economies’, drawing these diferent forms into an eminently ‘entrepreneurial’ project-based model through the consecration of the figure of the artist as ‘project creator’. Secondly, if platforms do indeed bring about a structural modification of labour, they now do so, as Marine Jouan’s (2017) research suggests, in an entirely ideological way, acting as ‘pathfinders’: that is, although they no longer fundamentally transform labour per se, they show the way.

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