Crowd control

Abstract

We examine the rise of crowdfunding platforms in the wake of the global financial crisis, particularly the claim that they offer an alternative to established methods of raising capital for real estate investment, enterprise development, and civic projects. We interrogate how these novel methods of aggregating users and their money in digital space produce different collective subjectivities. Drawing from an industry study of civic crowdfunding portals in the United States and legal research into the regulatory apparatus governing them, we put forth a two-part typology to help make sense of the varied business models of crowdfunding platforms and the ways in which those models invoke and harness crowds as concrete social formations. The first distinguishes crowdfunding platforms based on what is being circulated—the substance of the payment and the economic relations it embodies and creates. The second focuses on the legal dimension of these relations, both within the transaction and in the way sites constitute the crowd through the inherited financial-regulatory vocabularies governing the issuance of securities.