Kickstarter is fast becoming a metaphor for a new kind of economy. The website’s crowdfunding model – allowing hundreds of individual users to donate money to fund creative works – has won praise everywhere from the US Congress to the Financial Times. Its cheerleaders cite the success of projects such as the Pebble watch (a Bluetooth timekeeper that syncs with your smartphone; total raised: $10,266,845), the 3Doodler pen (which writes in the air using extruded plastic; total raised: $2,344,134) and the Ouya (an open-source games console; total raised: $8,596,474). They even view it as a way to escape the global economic turmoil.
Yet while the financial press sees the potential for a new wave of self-made millionaires, Kickstarter has been changing its rules to prevent just that. Overly commercial proposals are now blocked because, in the website’s view, backing a project is like donating money to a struggling artist: a patron may get something in return but shouldn’t expect it to be equal in value to their gift, and they certainly should not expect that mere money guarantees the artist will complete the creative work. You win some, you lose some. For every musician who scrapes through a funding target and produces an album of beauty, there will be a photographer who gets ten times what he asked for but fails to develop a single image.
That spirit of creative endeavour vanishes when people feel as if they’re preordering a product. The ZionEyez (total raised: $343,415) was a set of HD recording glasses that was due to ship in “winter 2011”. Backers still haven’t received them, which must sting particularly badly for the two people who spent $1,500 for a bundle of ten. The company has clammed up and there’s a support forum, full of very angry people trying to get their money back.
Now the crowdfunder has a new danger to compete with: cynicism. As multimilliondollar Kickstarters became ever more frequent – there have been 35 to date – people with access to more conventional funding started to see the appeal of the site. Some, such as the musician Amanda Palmer (total raised: $1,192,793), used it to gain an element of creative control they were denied by record labels. Others, such as the campaign to film a big-screen version of the American detective show Veronica Mars (total raised: $5,702,153), used it mainly to show the studios that there was enough interest to bother pumping money in.
In their own way, these campaigns damage the patronage idea at the heart of Kickstarter just as much as gadgets that disappear into the ether after the money arrives. When a project fails to reach its funding, the site sends a chirpy email reminding you that “backing a project shows your support for a creator’s work. The value in that never expires!” Really? How likely is it that Zach Braff, the star of the popular US sitcom Scrubs (total raised for his next film project: $3,105,473), sees the value in having your personal support?
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