Clotting the earth with more useless crap

I’ve launched dozens of projects in my career, and never once did I even consider the possibility of crowdfunding.

Now, I personally think it’s wonderful that crowdfunding exists as a standard business practice. The fact that over a hundred billion dollars is raised each year through these platforms is extraordinary. In fact, I have contributed to a handful of campaigns for friends and strangers alike, and I enjoyed both the process and the rewards.

Economically speaking, crowdfunding is quite literally capitalism in its simplest form.

Here’s my new idea, who wants to give me money for it? Period.

Businesses have been doing that for centuries. It’s nothing more than using today’s technology to simplify the process of soliciting investors for a product.

My issue with crowdfunding is, it doesn’t align with my values and preferences. Whether I am creating a movie or a musical album or hard cover book or software app, my projects are optimized for joy and speed and expression and freedom. That’s my currency.

The idea of giving away control in exchange for money pledged gives me stomach cramps. Because I am not a startup founder. I am not a project manager. I am not a community coordinator. I am an artist. I am person who takes his precious time and energy to create things that nobody needs, wants or even likes.

And so, the prospect of having to make a business case for my art, demonstrating the return on investment people will get from consuming it, is sheer madness.

What’s more, crowdfunding becomes a toxic version of the observer effect. Quantum physicists define this principle as the disturbance of the state of an observed system by the act of observation.

Like when an electron is detected upon interaction with a photon, and this interaction inevitably alters the velocity and momentum of that electron.

Same goes for crowdfunding. The fact that you’re running a sixty day campaign for your project changes the project. It adds unnecessary compression on the creative process, imposing an arbitrary timeframe and pressure for success or failure.

On many platforms, if the fundraiser doesn’t garner a certain level of support to achieve their set financial goal, then by definition, they lose. Their project doesn’t get funded. They didn’t reach the minimum threshold they set for making their project viable.

Sorry, but there will be no kickstarting today. Try again next time.

Well, that’s not the way my life works. I refuse to introduce false binaries that externally classify my art as either successful or failed. It’s not about that for me. Even if it was, I would be the determinant of such labels. Not some platform. Not the marketplace.

I’m not so thirsty as to surrender my creative fate into the hands of internet strangers. Nobody gets to decide whether I win or lose but me. My internal locus of control is too strong to outsource my sense of worthiness.

I remember when crowdfunding first went mainstream in the early twenty tens. People criticized it as internet panhandling. Just a lazy waste of time and money. Gizmodo published a takedown piece that went viral, and here’s my favorite excerpt:

Crowdfunding leads to hundreds of stupid ideas by stupid people who think their stupid idea will become real because strangers will shovel them money. Traditionally, to get your new company out of the kitchen, you needed to save and scrounge and beg your parents for money. And move into some tiny apartment and persuade your friends into helping you and sweat for months and then make a prototype.

Then the really hard part is, to get some seed money for your product, you’d have to convince people who actually knew what the hell they were talking about to fund your work. A lot of people failed. Many succeeded. And the ones who won had the support and wisdom of some really smart cats helping them refine their products and turn them into something that wouldn’t just clot the earth with more useless crap.

That is not happening with crowdfunding. Now the only people you have to convince that your idea is worth turning into a reality is a mob of drooling optimistic simpletons like me, resulting in another piece of wannabe signal destined for the landfill.

Gizmodo may have been a little harsh back then, especially considering the tens of billions of dollars crowdfunding has now raised since its inception. But their point is well taken.

My take on the matter isn’t so much about the objective value of the strategy itself, but its reflection of and impact on the creative process.