In the introduction to a mega-interesting interview with Goteo commons-crowdfunding project co-founders Olivier Schulbaum and Enric Senabre, the interviewer Felix Stalder makes a brilliant assessment of the weaknesses of current crowdfunding models.

The interview is here and a must-read.

Felix Stalder writes:

“We are reinventing social and cultural practices. By necessity and desire. New ways of collaborating require, not the least, new ways of organizing financial means. In the cultural sector, commercial models based on copyrights (selling copies) and government funded models (subsidies) are in crisis and are increasingly inadequate or politically unsustainable.

If we take the crisis of (cultural) production seriously and are looking for alternatives, three developments need to be taken into account. First, while we should not let the state simply skip out of its responsibilities, it’s unlikely that public cultural funding will ever expand at the same rate as cultural practice. Second, producers and users are coming in much closer contact with one another and in the process the roles in between “artist” and “audience” are multiplying. Third, the control of the distribution and use of copies cannot be a way to finance the creation of the first copy.

The most innovative answer to these issues has been the rise of crowdfunding, as a way of pre-financing the first copy by creating a community around emerging projects. Kickstarter.com has established itself as the dominant model and countless derivatives are imitating it.

Unfortunately, Kickstarter is, in essence, simply a reverse market. Rather than buying the product after it has been produced, one can now buy it before it is produced and, if one donates more than a certain amount, inscribe oneself to a very limited degree into the product itself (e.g. by being mentioned a co-financier in the credits of a film project). Besides that, very little chances.

But does that need to be? Crowdfunding is a promising field because it can address many of the dynamics that underlie the crisis of the cultural economy and its transformation from a commodity- to a commons-based environment. So, it’s high-time to think about and experiment with this approach in a more comprehensive way and explore more radical approaches to alternative cultural economies. How can these new means be used to fund the commons, rather than to kickstart yet another round of “cool” new products?

To explore this question, Felix Stalder caught up with Enric Senabre and Olivier Schulbaum who recently launched the Spanish platform Goteo (which means “to drip”) which bills itself as a “social network for co-financing and collaborating with creative projects that further the common good.”