IMDBLR: Son of IMDBLR
November 2015 was my fifth anniversary of my first joining and participating in the Kickstarter community. Slightly less than a year later, I backed my one hundredth project. In that time, I’d spent approximately $1,200 each year on autographs and comic books and albums and wedding presents and lithographs and fundraisers and film productions. I’d read articles decrying the fact that Kickstarter took advantage of funders because it wasn’t an investment system. If I’d been a producer on those films and albums and comics, and they’d proved to be successful, then I would have enjoyed a return on my investment. Instead, I would receive a shipment of tat, critics scoffed, and someone else would reap the real benefits.
I’m sure that somewhere in those 17 projects each year that I backed, one or two of them would be considered “successful”, but for me, the main draw of Kickstarter has always been the projected sense of “participation” in a given creative project. The updates from the creators are key to this: a regular series of follow-up messages about the progress and process of the actual project do make me feel like I’m involved, even if all I did was be part of the crowd of funders. It’s the — perhaps illusory — feeling of participation and pride that is the best part. And so the ability to point at one’s name and say, “I made this happen!” has become the real reason I continued with Kickstarter so avidly for so long.
Shortly after the end of the projects listed here, I backed off of Kickstarter. Not because of the money — although that clearly should have been a consideration, now that I crunch the numbers — but because I did come to the understanding that my internal sense of my “involvement” in these things was overinflated, and that they were part of a larger project of retail therapy I’d been participating in for some years. I enjoyed the vicarious thrill of the projects and the stories I was able to absorb from the production updates, but what I was really doing to a large degree was spending money to have exciting mail show up at some unexpected future date — and with Kickstarter projects, that date was almost always in significant flux… I needed less stuff in my life, and I needed less momentary novelty and excitement provided via the acquisition of said stuff.
There are still eleven outstanding film projects that I have backed — only four additional since I hit a hundred backed projects four years ago — and only three of which I believe will list my name in any manner (not including the Kurt Vonnegut documentary that already has me listed on their website). While I’m no longer actively chasing this kind of validation, I might as well keep cataloguing the last five projects that do name me and the last five that didn’t…
STANDING IN THE STARS: THE PETER MAYHEW STORY (Raised its minimum funds on Sept. 14, 2013, still unreleased)
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