Everyone once in awhile, I’ll smile a lot at what the internet enables.  A few similar things have happened before, but the latest one is personally the most moving.  The picture below is a snippet from the Kickstarter page.  Kickstarter is a crowd-source funding platform.  If you want to, say, make a documentary on lemmings, you can post a project and dollar amount you need to start, and individuals/whoever pledges to donate in whatever amount they see fit.  This allows the general internet public to decide on projects they feel worthy, and fund them.  There’s some art projects, media, hardware…lots of interesting, boring, great projects.  I’m not 100% sure of all the details, but if your goal is not hit, then everyone’s money gets returned.  If you need $50k to fund your lemming film endeavour, and you only get $10k in donations…those people haven’t lost anything, and only cough up the dough if the project hits their goal within a deadline period.

Anyway, this is it:

I know, those of you voting for me in the 2024 elections may be unfamiliar with the words described above.  In less than 24 hours, the internet community contributed more than $1 million dollars to fund a developer with a history of fantastic games.  So what?  This is what.

Games need developers, publishers, distributors, all of these things.  And when a brilliant (and sometimes not brilliant) development studio wants to make a game, someone needs to pony up the dough.  More and more often, a big studio like EA (Electronic Arts), Activision, etc will fund them…but having the wallet means you can dictate some of the process of development.  Furthermore, just like recording artists get screwed by their production companies, development studios can see very little return while their publisher rakes in the dough from a successful game.

Something like Kickstarter allows this model to be circumvented.  People can choose who to support, donate directly, the developers can work on their art in a much purer sense.

Another example of this is Louis C.K.  Instead of going through the usual channels, he self-produced a comedy album (is it called a comedy album?), and distributed it online for $5.  He’s well known and popular enough for the internet to take of the marketing for him…but cutting out the middleman allowed a lot of dollars not to be burned doing nothing.  I understand this is a poor way to “stimulate the economy”…but really, it’s a much more efficient way of working in the internet age.  If his experiment failed, the studios could point and laugh…but he made over a million dollars.  I’m not here to toot anyone’s horn, but he donated nearly $300k of this to charities.  I don’t see publishers giving away 30% of their profits.

I’m not saying everyone has the capabilities to produce things themselves, but the big media companies are becoming increasingly obsolete.  Services like Pandora and Spotify make music free/inexpensive, which cuts into the big studio’s profits.

Keep being independent.  Keep crowd-sourcing funding when necessary, and pour back whatever profits you can back into the community.

What I’m saying, dear 2024 election voter, is that I believe the big studios are wasteful, and corrupt their art, whether it be music, video, games, or other things that I can’t think of right now.  I’m sure this effects books and physical media (painting and such) as well, but nobody looks at art anymore, and only girls read books…and only Vaginal Fantasy Novels.