Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter?

Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter?
By ROB TRUMP

For about three years, between the ages of 12 and 15, I spent much of my free time on Internet forums devoted to the collectible-card game Magic: The Gathering. It became an obsession, consuming my mind and becoming the only thing I wanted to talk about. And once I realized that nobody I ever met face to face was particularly interested in a long debate on the merits of Zuran Orb vis-à-vis Claws of Gix, I turned to the Web.

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?

But Kickstarter backers aren’t investors, and they aren’t looking for the project that will give them the greatest return on their money. Kickstarter does not function as a store (as its Web site goes to great pains to remind you), any more than PBS is “selling” you a tote bag in exchange for your donation. Kickstarter as a phenomenon is made much more comprehensible once you realize that it’s not following the logic of the free market; it’s following the logic of the gift.

In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber examines our history of debt and money, concluding, in part, that humans do not naturally tend toward impersonal, reciprocal exchange. Instead, exchange usually develops in cultures first as a part of a larger social and cultural ritual. One of the most compelling cultures Graeber profiles is the Tiv of West Africa, who have very particular rules about exchange. For starters, they believe that bringing an economic transaction to full completion is essentially immoral, or at least frowned upon, because it implies that one party doesn’t want anything to do with the other in the future. If a Tiv man or woman gives you a gift, you are supposed to respond with another gift of slightly greater or lesser value. The outstanding debt between the two of you is a signal that your relationship is going to continue. To respond with a gift of equal value would be to say implicitly that you wish to even things out and draw your relationship to a close.

Kickstarter is run according to a similar form of gift logic. The artists create a short video, explaining themselves and conveying their personality. People contribute to them because they’re friends who know the artist personally; they’re fans engaged in a highly personal if unidirectional relationship with the artist; or simply because they’re intrigued by the project and want some sense of participation in it. (Though it has been estimated that only 10 to 20 percent of contributors find projects this way, through the Kickstarter site rather than through the artists’ own social-media promotions — and on average, these people donate less money.)

In response to the contribution, as in Tiv custom, the artist gives something of slightly greater or lesser value to the person who contributed. And it’s almost always the case that the rewards for donations have a lower market value than the money being asked for (much like that public-television tote bag). There’s one notable reason for this: the highly personal logic of the gift exchange, a transaction by which a personal relationship is strengthened, not diminished.

There’s also an odd symbiosis created by Kickstarter, a reversal of the way the culture industry traditionally operates. On Kickstarter,if not enough backers pony up, the project quite likely won’t exist at all. This makes its projects oddly impervious to piracy. If all your potential fans are freeloaders inclined to download something only if it’s free, your project won’t be financed in the first place, and there will be nothing for them to pirate.

Some critics of Kickstarter have objected to the transaction fees collected by the site itself, which is the source of its revenue. Josh MacPhee, writing in The Baffler (for which Graeber often writes as well), complained that Kickstarter extracts value from social networks while giving nothing social in return.

Admittedly the interaction with Kickstarter Inc. is an impersonal, business transaction, but it’s not an exploitative one: artists choose to use Kickstarter because it’s a known entity, it adds some legitimacy to their projects and helps them with presentation. Communities flock to donate to Kickstarter projects for the same reasons. And it’s not correct to say that Kickstarter gives nothing back. To the contrary, it provides something increasingly rare in today’s society: a platform for an essentially noneconomic transaction, the kind that builds friendships and communities. Some of the more innovative users of Kickstarter, like Schafer, have even offered a kind of forum membership as a donation reward; an invitation into a place where fans can congregate and socialize online, much as I did in my early teenage years.

And unlike the individual projects featured on the site, Kickstarter, the business, is susceptible to market forces. If at some point we all decide that its fees are too high, there’s nothing to stop people from migrating to any of Kickstarter’s increasing number of competitors, like Indiegogo or RocketHub. Kickstarter is replaceable, in competition with other more-or-less-equivalent services, and it keeps no relationship with us after we’ve donated. We are free to leave it whenever we please.

In 1983, Lewis Hyde, another writer inspired by gift economies, published “The Gift,” an examination of the nature of the creative impulse and its relationship to the market economy. Hyde emphasized the forward motion of the gift, arguing that artistic creation is propelled by eros, or love, rather than the logos of number-crunching, and as such it is incapable of being subsumed by the market. Even if art is sold, the forces that led to its existence operate according to the need to share something with the world. Hyde’s focus on the artist as creator and gift-giver is narrower than Graeber’s more historical approach, but it made “The Gift” a sensation and an inspiration to writers like Margaret Atwood and David Foster Wallace. And if Graeber’s work helps us understand the psychology of crowdfunding, then Hyde’s work is vindicated by Kickstarter’s success. The desire to make art has always been inherently social, not economic, and now, even in a society defined by the free market, the means to produce art can come from an inherently social mechanism as well.

As with the Tiv, on Kickstarter, the reward gift doesn’t bring the transaction to completion. After financing a project and dispensing rewards, artists who use Kickstarter are in a permanent debt to the fans who supported them. This is borne out by their actions: pretty much no one who has had a successful Kickstarter project has ever been able to shut up about how thankful they are. Many have subsequently donated to or helped promote other projects. And if the artists don’t show the appropriate reverence for their benefactors, public opinion can turn nasty. The reaction against Palmer’s use of others’ volunteer labor occurred not because her call for free help indicated some maddening market inefficiency. (Unpaid labor, after all, is the height of efficiency.) What really upset people is that her actions seemed to indicate an insufficient appreciation for the gift she received.