Digital Sextant

• I have now been trained as a Level one swim official for YMCA swim meets.  Go ahead and try to use a dolphin kick before you start your breast stroke pull out.  I won’t see it, but I will know you shouldn’t do it.
• I forgot how crazy Mel Gibson looks in Lethal Weapon.
• I am enjoying Cloud Atlas but still don’t get why everyone thinks its amazing.  Perhaps the second half will do it.
• Re-watching The Running Man is a good idea, I think.  Jesse Ventura’s mustache should have gotten its own movie.

SF writer and excellent reviewer from Atomic Anxiety Mark Bousquet posted an interesting few tweets about kickstarter the other day, so I wanted to write a bit more about what I like about the platform.  First, here are two screencaps from Twitter.  The first is a few relevant tweets from MB’s feed and from my conversation with him.  The first list is reverse-chronological, the second is chronological.

Kickstarter tweets from MB

Kickstarter tweets from MB and me

I’ve already written about kickstarter a bit here, so I’m already appearing too much like a cheerleader, but here comes some more.  To start with, I can certainly see Bousquet’s point.  There is a big risk to choosing to finance a piece of art.  If you’re a mogul and deciding whether to spend some of your company’s capital on a project, you’d better know for sure what you’re getting in return.  You’re taking a big risk and expect big return.  As a consumer, you aren’t generally taking the risk that the product won’t get made, and with reviews and other means, you aren’t taking a big risk on the quality of the product you will buy.  (It’s also crucial to note that Bousquet makes clear he dislikes projects that abuse KS.  Not all KS projects.)

But the investor model has major limitations.  First, it skews conservative.  Because it puts all the risk in the hands of a narrow few, those few have to be absolutely sure about a project before the risk, and they expect a handsome return for taking the risk.  This has two effects, to my mind.  First, it means that proven projects and proven artists will get funding more easily and more fully than new or inexperienced ones.  It also means that the economics of the project depend on making a profit above and beyond what the artist needs to succeed.  We don’t just need to pay for the art and the success of the artist, we also need to pay for the risk the investors took.

By contrast, most Kickstarter projects ask the investors to give up the expectation of big profits.  They offer rewards that pay off in different levels of satisfaction and quality.  Usually the higher the investment level, the less monetary reward one gets for the support.  This is the part Bousquet seems bothered by, the idea that we little financiers are giving up the return on investment that the big guys would have gotten.

But I’d suggest that the well-crafted Kickstarter projects take advantage of the distributed-investment environment by diversifying the risk and reducing the needed profit.  For example, I invested in Castle Dice, a cool looking board game whose box-set retail price is about the same as any European style board game.  By taking the risk, I helped supply the capital that allowed for the game to be made.  Because there weren’t initial investors that would siphon off profits for having taken the risk, the game makers could produce a game and take away more profit than they would have had before.  This pleases me because it means they’re more likely to do another game like this in the future.

The long and short for me is that the diversified risk and low profit overhead allows projects to proceed that otherwise wouldn’t.