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John Rogers wrote a post and engaged in a lengthy twitterbuster (filitwit?; really 21st Century filibusters could be conducted via twitter) with a writer of an article critical of the very recent (and already funded) Veronica Mars Kickstarter. FWIW Kickstarter is a tool not an ethos or a culture or a moral judgement. It or clones of it will be used by everyone and everything, inc. from now on in an ever increasing scale. Money raised from Kickstarter is data-laden money — it’s capitalism plus and that will make it worth it to all kinds of companies to pursue.
Step back for a sec — I am not an economist but I’m going to play one on the Internet today — capitalism is the exchange of money for goods and services; it’s the wikipedia of marketplace systems. It works well because of one key aspect of it which is that money serves as a unit of information that is widely distributed; and fairly efficient. Money moving around tells society what is valuable and lets society, in theory, make collective decisions about how we are going to use our existence — time, labor, materials, etc.
Money from Kickstarter is like packing additional valuable information into each dollar above and beyond the basic value of the buck. It’s market research; it’s emotional investment; it’s likely an indication of further investment in the future. Traditional companies want this — they will start looking into how to adapt it to them.
Also — I would never want to get into an argument with John Rogers about stuff he knows a lot about. That was a pretty hard tweetslap he delivered.
