Om Malik hat Perry Chen, den Gründer der Crowdfunding-Plattform Kickstarter interviewt. Kickstarter ist dank seines immensen Erfolgs das Aushängeschild für Crowdfunding geworden und ist auf dem Weg, für die postindustrielle Informationsgesellschaft so bedeutend zu werden wie die Wikipedia.
And now, Kickstarter is up to 23,000 successfully funded projects and more than 2 million backers. To date, more than $230 million has been pledged to products. Movies, music, city designs, watches, video games — Kickstarter has become an epicenter of creativity. It is funding everything from a pickle factory in Chicago that uses Bloody Mary marinade and wants to expand, to a live music-and-film series that would play in parks around Harlem.
Im Interview verweist Chen noch einmal auf die wirklich bemerkenswerte Tatsache, dass Kickstarter für die Finanzierung von 12 Prozent der Filme auf dem diesjährigen Sundance Festival verantwortlich war.
Perry Chen spricht auch im Interview an, was meine Ansichten zur gesellschaftlichen Bedeutung von Crowdfunding widerspiegelt:
I feel like we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history. People have been creating art for tens of thousands of years. Artists have always been hustlers, too.
In general, artists have always been extremely creative people both in art and in talking to audiences, and in hustling to get the things that they want done, to get their ideas out of their brains and expressed.
[..]
You can do a lot of art and creative projects in digital form. To make an album now, it probably costs 10 times less than it did 20 years ago. Even film being crazy expensive, is still coming down in cost. And now, hopefully, we’re helping build the pieces that help the funding of it and building the community around that as well. That is an explosion point.
I think the question or the point I was trying to make was that with the friction in the creative process going away, it’s getting harder to get people’s attention. I think Kickstarter is that platform of creativity. I think the emotional appeal of a platform is what works. I think the old-media entities still have not figured out that part of the game plan. I see Kickstarter as coming from left field, just like Twitter siphoned attention away from established media forms and in the process became a medium of its own.
Die wahre gesellschaftliche Bedeutung von Crowdfunding wird erst richtig deutlich werden, wenn sich neben den allgemeinen Plattformen wie Kickstarter sich auf die Besonderheiten einzelner Branchen ausgerichtete Crowdfunding-Plattformen etablieren werden. In Verbindung mit über Programmierschnittstellen verbundenen anderen Plattformen wird die Arbeitsteilung neu ausgehandelt und die neue postindustrielle* Infrastruktur gelegt werden. Die neuen massiven Distributionskanäle sind mit Facebook, Twitter und Tumblr bereits da.
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*Wie die industrielle Gesellschaft nach der landwirtschaftlichen Gesellschaft gekommen ist, die Landwirtschaft aber nur an den Rand gedrängt hat, drängt auch die vernetzte Informationsgesellschaft die Industrie 'nur' an den Rand, braucht sie aber als Basis für die eigene Existenz.