Against the Crowdfunding Economy
&gt; Parker thinks Patreon works for some artists — like those who have heavily cultivated their social media presence — but the major drawback is that artists are forced to spend more and more time creating exclusive content for the highest-paying patrons to continue receiving funding. As she elaborates:<p>&gt; They start to get pissy when you make art they don’t want. Like they have a right to be involved in your life.<p>Yes, how positively odd that after giving you lots of money, they want something specific in return.<p>&gt;  Friendster seemed lucrative, so why not try something similar in Myspace? Facebook? Snapchat? They’re all variations on a theme.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed this attitude is widespread among marxists: glossing over differences between businesses, or the products they offer. To a marxist, as long as the high-level descriptions of two products are similar, the products are functionally equivalent. That Myspace got crushed because its UX was basically a dumpster fire means nothing to them, they just seem to view one company winning over the other as the whims of unknowable capitalist machinations.<p>They view business as a whole as essentially a big black box. This is not because they are stupid, but rather because, to borrow a phrasing from Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his ideology depends upon his not understanding it.