Comments:"Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter? - NYTimes.com"
Illustration by Tom Gauld
On one site in particular, I became a regular — not only in conversations about Magic rules and strategy but on general issues like politics, culture, science and sports. Over time, even as my interest in the game waned and I played less, my connection to the people I met stayed strong, and I was spending more and more time on the site. Many regulars and I became close friends. Yet my family was still freaked out when one community member, having decided to leave the game of Magic, sent me a huge box of his old cards.
When my mother found out that my mysterious benefactor by mail was a guy in his 20s, she immediately took the position that he was a child molester trying to lure me out to California from Minnesota. In all fairness, I have no evidence that he wasn’t a predator, but the simpler explanation seems much more likely: he just wanted to give me a gift.
When a person is open and giving, our default reaction is often suspicion, especially when the Internet is involved. And it’s exactly that sort of suspicion that has underscored much of the media reaction to Kickstarter, an online crowdfunding platform. More or less anyone is allowed to post a project on Kickstarter with a stated financing goal, and more or less anyone is allowed to contribute to that project. The major caveats are that the projects must be creative and that the creators must offer rewards at different tiers of contribution, much in the way that PBS offers you a tote bag if you donate a certain amount during a fund-raiser.
In the beginning, Kickstarter seemed primarily like a venue for upstart bands or small theater companies to raise a few thousand dollars to get projects off the ground. Over the past year, though, Kickstarter has played a surprising role in gathering increasingly astonishing amounts of money for increasingly well-known artists. In March 2012, the video-game auteur Tim Schafer sought $400,000 to make a new game but ended up with $3.36 million; in May, the musician Amanda Palmer set a goal of $100,000 to record a new album and raked in more than $1 million.
Along with a rise in the site’s public profile, the media narrative about Kickstarter has changed from one of astonishment (“So, people will just give you money?”) to one of skepticism (“All right, who’s getting hosed here?”) to the current uneasy middle ground — optimistic but ready to jettison the whole thing as soon as some opportunist abuses it to abscond with a bunch of cash. Kickstarter-financed projects that run into trouble or fail to materialize are often cited as a flaw in the model: to take only the two examples above, Schafer has documented for his backers that his project is on a pace to run over its budget, and Palmer, following her windfall, has faced criticism for soliciting free help from local musicians while on tour. The suggestion in both cases is that their Kickstarter contributors were somehow duped, like suckers who fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.
The common thread in all of this coverage is that it typically uses the language and logic of simple supply and demand, regarding Kickstarter essentially as a meeting place for entrepreneurs and investors. Which is a big reason the site’s success seems so hard to explain. Kickstarter, like the box of Magic cards I was given, is baffling by the tenets of a self-serving marketplace. (“What’s in it for him?” was the question my mother was trying in vain to answer.) And if you allow for things like file-sharing — and many Kickstarter rewards and projects are the types of things that could be pirated, like games, albums or films — then it becomes fairly clear that pretty much none of the people donating have a purely economic incentive to participate at all. Why not just let everybody else finance this new album and download a torrent of it later?