Do-It-Yourself and with the Crowd. Promises and Exploitation in the Field of Cultural Production

Countercultures of twentieth century’s last decades adopted an economic and productive model based on voluntary, not immediately paid work. Since then, the debate around selfproduction has pointed to specific issues related to work, income and widening access to the public. The same individual investments – of time, labor force, technical skills and social capital – in view of a desired goal can be found in the adoption of crowdfunding for the realization of cultural projects, and more generally in the use of web platforms and services to support self-production. This kind of work is inscribed within an “economy of promise”, that historically governed much cultural and intellectual work and which today invests the whole sphere of labour: what remains in a potential state, both in creative and traditional sectors of work, is precisely the possibility that the reward arrives, that the promise of the economy is maintained. The DIY enabled by digital media seems to allow, thanks to the intermediation of dedicated platforms, the valorization of the social and economic capital of the individual and a diffused profit-making from collaborative practices and the activity of connected audiences. Drawing on data emerging from past and current researches on cultural crowdfunding and selfproduction, our contribution intends to problematize these theoretical and political issues, focusing on the limits of the democratization of access to resources for producing and distributing creative contents, on the experimentation of alternative modes of production to hegemonic ones on the market, and on forms of economic exploitation of self-production.