Creators Shaped By The Crowd That Shares In The Creation: Kickstarter

I dabbled in Kickstarter, once, but didn’t get very far. I wrote a proposal for an art project called Eighth Continent, and it was accepted by Kickstarter’s team:

The social web is now central to modern human identity and social cohesion. Many consider it a place: a region we inhabit. Online, we share time, not space: but time is the new space.

The web is an ‘imagined community’ as defined by Benedict Anderson, with its own implied sovereignty. This means the members of this imagined community — The Eighth Continent — believe that other nations should claim no authority over it.

I propose to design and manufacture Eighth Continent passports, and to distribute them to all who believe themselves to be part of this imagined community. This is an act of political and artistic solidarity and a rejection of the premises that underlie the current world order, that acts to divide us and illegitimize us.

I decided not to go ahead with the project after a friend pointed me to the work of NSK, a European art collective that created passports as part of a not dissimilar conceptual purpose, indicating solidarity of the members.

But I am going forward with a new Kickstarter project in the next week, one I have been working up to for some time: a Kickstarter project to underwrite the work on a new book about the present and future of social tools and their impact on media, business, and society, provisionally entitled ‘A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine’. About that I will be writing more this week, and starting the Kickstarter side of things, too.

Because of that situation — both my earlier experimentation with Kickstarter, and my plans for the book project — I have been more attentive to information floating past about Kickstarter, so a piece today in the NY Times caught my eye. It is written by Rob Walker, who has raised funds through Kickstarter, and his experience led him to become curious as to how the company does what it does.

I was particularly struck by his description of the necessary but somewhat unobvious match between creators’ visions and the form factor and aesthetics of the service, embodied in the way that projects have to provide tangible value back to the donors in order to be funded, and the way that creators make their case:

Rob Walker, The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter

Most project creators I spoke to were interested in how to get the attention of potential donors and were especially curious about how the company makes certain decisions. For example, Kickstarter highlights projects on its blog and names three “Projects We Love” in a weekly e-mail newsletter. Those projects seem to quickly rack up pledges. The crowd may be voting with its dollars, but Kickstarter’s endorsement does seem to matter, just like any other gatekeeper’s.

I sat in on a meeting where the newsletter picks were made. During the half-hour or so Strickler and the team discussed the choices, I was struck by how often they talked not about the projects but about the pitches. “His video is so boring.” “What are the rewards?” “Why is this cool?” They were focused on the project ideas through the filter of “the Kickstarter project” as a form. “We have values,” Chen told me, and they boil down to prizing creators who respect its proc­ess. They favor creators who think through the rewards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience. In other words, the process doesn’t shape the aesthetic. It is the aesthetic.

Strickler sees this in a larger framework. Commerce, he says, shapes cultural output in subtle ways; he sees Kickstarter’s approach as a new alternative. “Money demands answers,” he told me. “People want to put money into things that they think will be successful, and to be successful you have to participate in the market, and the market has very specific rules.” That traditional set of rules, he continues, “dictates what people make” — like paparazzi photos, let’s say. A Kickstarter project, as a form, “really does open up what forms art can take,” Strickler muses.

That’s a great pitch. And the fact that Chen and Strickler have a genuine point of view about the forms creativity can take, and how to expand them, is the reason that Kickstarter is the breakout star of the crowd-funding notion. They embrace the crowd but don’t allow a free-for-all. They champion the underdog — but in particular the underdog who self-markets with aplomb. But if they hadn’t cared what “a Kickstarter project” would mean, then it would not have meant anything at all.

So, the background story is that Kickstarter is not some passive disposable launchpad for conventional creative projects, like a truck that carries paintings to a gallery. Kickstarter is the gallery, and like a gallery owner, Kickstarter’s part in the presentation and socialization of the artistic work being created and distributed is significant, at least in those cases that best typify the company’s arc. They are actively involved in the work, and its promotion and reception.

As I approach the second experiment in Kickstarter, I am going big, and embracing the deeper premise: there is a community of people — starting with the Kickstarter team, and then the larger community of donors — that I will be working with, hopefully, to create something really worthwhile.Worthwhile for me to invest the time and thinking in the work, but worthwhile for the donors, in terms of the investments of time and attention they give, and the value that they will get back.

And instead of just amassing a fat pile of paper in a box at the end of the 10 months I plan to dedicate to writing the first pass of the book, my writing will be shaped by the participation of the community of donors.

Part of that is based on the core Kickstarter credo: Money Demands Answers. People pledge cash to things that matter, that can make a difference in their own lives, that are about something other than the creation itself.

I already feel like the work I am undertaking will be more worthwhile, since I am already being shaped by the as yet imaginary crowd that will share in that creation.

And so I plan to involve participants in the development of the book, on a chapter by chapter, month by month basis, and to hold monthly webinars with the donors, including one-on-one conversations with the highest level patrons of the work.

More about the book project will be forthcoming — presuming that Kickstarter will approve my project — but I have delayed the launch several months, in part because I have been thinking about the basics of Kickstarter. I now see this as the direct echo of the themes in the book — the power of social tools to connect and change us, and through us, everything else — so it is especially pertinent to me, but it holds true across all those who take the Kickstarter path to crowdsource creative work.