You might have seen a lot of YouTubers, including me, talk about crowdfunding sites
like Patreon? Sites like these enable people to give a creators or sometimes just individuals
some of their money. And on the surface that all looks great, but is it?
In an article in the socialist publication Jacobin, Keith Spencer outlines two potential problems
with crowdfunding. The first, he says, is that crowdfunding might turn art
into content. Especially on Patreon. He says, "Art and content are not the same. Content
is produced with a specific, marketable goal in mind. Patreon turns artists into content-makers
whose creativity is moderated by their patrons." The idea is that if creators can only make
stuff that will be financially appealing to their patrons then that is a barrier to creativity.
And on Patreon, you can earn rewards by donating to creators. Spencer says that that means artists have to take
time away from making art to make those rewards.
Now full disclosure, this show is crowdfunded through Patreon, so rather than try vainly
to ignore that I'm gonna embrace it and talk about my experience with it.
I don't feel pressured to create a certain
type of content by my Patrons. The line between a good, educational video and "content"
that people will watch and share and enjoy is a line that I have to walk, but that
comes more from the format of YouTube than the fans of the show.
I'm also lucky with the rewards I give on Patreon too: I feel like the fans who support the show
know that they're not buying something from me so much as getting a nominal material
thank you in exchange for their generosity. And actually a lot say, "I don't need a reward"
and turn it down, so for me delivering the rewards isn't really much of a chore.
I think you can be clever with the rewards system you design as well, I mean
look at somebody like Jim Sterling, who runs an extremely successful crowdfunding campaign
but he doesn't really offer much of anything in the way of rewards, and that's fine.
That said, I don't live exclusively off Patreon. I don't make enough from Philosophy
Tube to survive off it exclusively... yet. It's in a weird place where it's not a career but it's not really nothing either... but that's not where my life is at
right now. I can see how if my survival depended exclusively on Patreon, which in the very near future
it may well do, I might well feel pressured then to create content that was appealing to patrons.
I think Spencer's article prompts us to consider what the value of art is - and whether art and creativity should really be beholden
to financial constraints?
That's something that artists themselves have historically resisted - conceptual art,
for instance, is a movement that grew partly out of the desire to create works of art that couldn't be bought and
sold and commercialised.
Here we're starting to get into questions
like "How do we value things?" and, "Are all things really valueable in money?" which is
a very interesting field in philosophy: I recommend Michael Sandel's book "What Money Can't Buy" if you"re interested in that.
But the other big problem that Spencer has with crowdfunding is that it doesn't address the systems
that make it necessary. This is more of a criticism of crowdfunding for things like
medical costs and legal bills. And the problem, he says, lies in the fact that crowdfunding
is an industry. When fans donate to this show, Patreon takes 5% of that, and that is how
they make profit. Not just enough money to keep the site running, but actual profit.
So Spencer says that when people crowdfund things like medical bills and legal costs, the crowdfunding
companies are profiting from a system in which people don't have secure access to
those things. He says, "it is in these companies' best interest that social security is cut,
that public housing is privatized, that supplemental nutrition assistance programs are eliminated.
It means more people will turn to their for-profit platform."
And yeah that might be a fair shout - I started Philosophy Tube because the British government tripled university tuition
fees and I suddenly knew people who couldn't to learn the things
I was learning, so I decided to give away my degree for free on YouTube. And
ultimately Patreon the company have profited from that - they have profited from the
gating off of higher education. Another example I can think of is LauraKBuzz, a creator whose work
I follow, who recently crowdfunded surgery for herself - and that's wonderful and I wish her a very speedy
recovery - but unquestionably GoFundMe.com has profited from a status quo in which that very important surgery is
not reliably available to everyone.
Spencer's not the only one to worry about this. In his essay "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction," philosopher Walter Benjamin notes that when film is produced
as part of a capitalist film-making industry it becomes very difficult for films to criticise capitalism,
because they're part of it. He says then when art is subsumed under capitalism
it becomes very difficult for that art to be vehicle for social change: "So long as the movie-makers'
capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film."
Spencer says that crowdfunding companies, for all the good they certainly enable,
assume, or encourage us to assume, that personal charity is enough, when actually, he says,
there are much deeper systemic problems. He writes, "Those with money are told the way to make the world a better
place is to donate; that they are the key to preserving art, ending poverty, or saving
lives. Yet there is a paradox here: the reason that schools, artists, and health care are
underfunded is because rich people are under-taxed in the first place." And yeah, that might be a
fair shout too. The dominant economic ideology in the West right now is Neoliberalism, which
assumes that when things like public services are cut and privatised, charity rather than
the state will step in to fill the gaps that private companies don't fill in. Certainly in my country right now, people are dying for that neoliberal
belief, although they may not be the people who believe in it the most strongly.
I don't think that makes it wrong to crowdfund or to support somebody through crowdfunding,
but it does raise the very important question - how do we resist unjust economic systems from within?
We've talked before on the show about how capitalism is great at creating new markets; it is Borg-like
at assimilating things, even things that are resisting it. And I think it's fair enough
to remind people that crowdfunding can't be a complete solution to the problems that
neoliberalism and perhaps capitalism more generally throw up. It's something, but it's not everything.
Even leaving aside the criticisms of mainstream economics which we may not agree with, questions
like this one - how do we be good and fair from within systems that can sometimes encourage us to do
the opposite - crop up a lot in the philosophy of global justice. We encounter similar questions
when we think about war, poverty, domestic policy, climate change, colonialism and reparations...
This is philosophy and it's about as real and as practical as anything in your life can get.
Now then, I could have just ended this episode there, but I decided to put my money where my mouth is,
so I emailed Patreon with these concerns. Spencer didn't for his article, but I thought
I'd give them a chance to respond, and Graham, their head of marketing, told me that the
way they see it a lot of artists would have to get freelance work or casual work anyway,
maybe working in a bar or something, so at least through crowdfunding they are getting
to make something. This dichotomy between art and content is maybe more of a spectrum than a dichotomy
and at least through crowdfunding they are getting to make something on that spectrum, even if crowdfunding does tends to tilt it more towards the content end.
With regards to crowdfunding not really challenging the systems that make it necessary, he didn't
so much have an answer to that one as admit yeah, that can really be a problem.
But at least, he said, more art is getting made. Patreon does take their 5% cut but their
line is that that goes towards improving Patreon as a service and that it is less than traditional publishing
companies would take from artists. You'll have to let me know what you think of that one.
What do you think? When we take a step back from crowdfunding
what kind of larger philosophical issues get thrown up? I hope that this episode hasn't put you off crowdfunding completely,
coz if did wanna help me give away free education on YouTube I could really really
use the help - and don't forget to subscribe.