A crowd can riot. But can it fund a revolution?
When Richard Nixon tumbled in disgrace from the White House, an axiom was wheeled out among the political classes: it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.
In Turkey, where thousands have been clashing with police over the past few weeks, there has been no cover up, just violence and unrest.
It all started when a small group opposed plans to rebuild the small Gezi Park — plans championed by controversial prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — were met with a mighty overreaction. Protesters staged a sit-in; police tear-gassed them. Angered, they rioted; Erdoğan dismissed their rage as the effluent of social media. The result? A trickle of protesters swiftly became a swollen river.
In these churning crowds on the streets of Istanbul, a parallel axiom to Nixon seems to have developed: it’s not the protest that takes you down: it’s your response. Fuelled by 21st century communications and news coverage and social media, Erdoğan’s folly is more frail and exposed than ever, and an increasing number of Turks are looking for an alternative.
People who use crowdfunding sites are looking for alternatives too, although usually economic, not political, ones. Services such as Kickstarter are, from one perspective, part of an alternative economy — and that’s one reason that their creators often rail against being coopted by the establishment, or bring in rules and restrictions to try and shape things and keep the spirit alive (read this good piece from Quartz’s Chris Mims for more on that).
But while there is a natural overlap between these political and economic countercultures, you don’t actually see the two connect together very often. Or at least not successfully.
So when Zeynep Tufecki pointed me to the Full Page Ad for Turkish Democracy in Action campaign on Indiegogo, I saw the intersection of those two things and threw in $50.
A strange choice, perhaps, for my ongoing experiment to understand crowdfunding. After all I don’t know much about Turkish politics, I knew nothing about the campaign’s creators, and I’m not sure they will have any impact. But by the time my money went into the pot, the campaign had already met its $53,000 target — in fact, it had already completed its initial objective by purchasing a full-page ad in the New York Times.
As I write, there’s still a few hours to go and the amount of money raised is double the original ask $107,189.
So what was the reason I backed them, even when they’d got what they wanted? I was interested in seeing what a crowdfunding campaign that has one very specific target — and achieves that target — does next.
The answer appears to be that it opens up the next stage to the crowd itself. Right now voting’s taking place on what sort of thing to spend the extra money on, which will then narrow down to a selection of different projects. I’ll report back on what happens, and see if it tells us anything.
