The patronage model à la Patreon that blind followers buy into

I'd never lock the content I research behind a paywall like Patreon, to coerce people to subscribe to my account and pay for what I've found and am willing to unveil, even if my research has been time-intensive. Patreon contributions may be voluntary, but the Patreon template, by having these entreaties to like and subscribe and pay money, involves coercion: readers who choose to not contribute are punished by being denied access to “exclusive” content.

People are increasingly turning to Patreon to make money. Patreon represents the “gift economy” solution to some enterprising Bundy researchers’ dilemma too: they're using a paying medium like Patreon to be heard, seen or otherwise recognized. Their content is considered to be a gift to the world, and some of their readers gift them some money in gratitude. This gives them nice warm feelings and tickles their narcissism.

 

There are people who will always try to make money out of everything, and they'll use any medium at their disposal to do that. What drives them is the old capitalism impulse, and it's what makes the web experience so frustrating too, in my opinion. Money obsession is an intrusion into the exchange of information, and Patreon is one of the gatekeeper media feeding into it.

 

I agree with Steve Albini’s perspective, which he shared in a radio show / podcast entitled “The Culture of Like and Subscribe” that you can listen to here: 

https://www.protonicreversal.com/2020/07/09/ep185-the-culture-of-like-and-subscribe-with-steve-albini/

 

According to Albini, the patronage model à la Patreon suits certain extraordinarily vain people, who also have an extraordinarily gullible and sycophantic audience. It suits tremendously well those people with a vociferous coterie, because it really doesn’t matter what content they produce, the audience is sort of defined by liking whatever they do. So that’s great for them: they’re going to be maximally exploiting that audience (who are willingly letting themselves be exploited as a lifestyle choice). 

 

Whatever happens in the universe of someone with a Patreon account, blind followers will buy into. And that unnuanced model works for that cultish audience extremely well.

 

To many people it boils down to... how are you going to make that pay for itself? If all of the things that I do have built into them some kind of natural way to cover their costs – like I’m in a band and my band can play shows, and those shows have a cover charge, and that cover charge pays for me the day-to-day activity of being in a band; my band makes records, we can then sell those records to whoever wants them, and that pays for the cost of making those records, and as a result it ends up being sustaining.

There’s work that goes into what I’m doing, so how am I going to pay for it?... How are you going to pay for this ambition you have to do this thing?... Albini’s retort for something like that is: “Well, how did you pay for having breakfast this morning? How did you pay for getting a good night’s sleep? How did you pay for walking the dog? What you do is you earn enough money to conduct your life, and you incorporate into your life those things that are important to you. And if doing a podcast is important to you, and you make space for it in your life, you are already paying for it. You are doing whatever is necessary to stay alive, and you incorporate as possible those things that matter to you. People do things that they want to do, and they incorporate those into a life that they are paying for somehow, someway, whether it’s a psychic toll that they’re extracting, or manual labor, or selling stuff out of the basement on Craigslist or whatever it is, they’re already paying for it. So I have little patience with that as an excuse for doing something that you might otherwise find distasteful. Like... I wouldn’t ordinarily want my music to be used in a Crisco commercial, but I have to pay for everything somehow...”

 

The model of “I’m-going-to-sign-up-for-this-subscription-service” to consume ONE thing, doesn’t seem especially intelligent to Albini, it seems superficial.

 

Albini: “People are constantly saying journalism needs to be supported, ‘we need to support these publications’, and I would happily support those publications if there was a mechanism where I could do it when I felt like reading as opposed to in the background all the time. It just seems too much like a scam then...”. And I agree with him, and that's why I want to avoid having this recurring account for someone's Patreon on my credit card.

 

More natural, sustainable models should be developed to access content, according to Albini, “rather than having to go to a website and subscribe to it and look through a list and click on a thing and decide how much value that has to you and commit your credit card... It just seems quite cumbersome, at the moment, and I think eventually things will simplify”. If he sees something that he wants to read, Albini would rather click the button and read it and be charged 50 cents, 25 cents or a dollar or whatever. 

 

And it makes sense to me: it would be overstating for me to say that it’s necessary to subscribe to someone’s Patreon, since not everything shared on it is engaging and enriching and engrossing for me. One Patreon account may not always provide valuable content to me.

 

Like Albini, I find the like and subscribe culture abhorrent. It's a badge of gullibility to be a patron of a Patreon account, to automatically buy into a “brand” or an “expert” trickling things down to you. I agree with Albini: like him, I'm not incentivized by the idea of making money at all costs. And I'd rather support people's research in a more discerning way.

 

Steve Albini said about the Patreon model of engaging with people: “I’m listening to something for its value and its meaning, rather than listening to it as a coercive effort. And whenever I detect that someone is trying to angle me, to manipulate me, that tells me something about that person, that he is willing to do that. That person sees me as a malleable thing to be won, as a transaction to be won. I don’t conduct myself that way, and I’m suspicious of the people who do, and I like to point out the fallacy of it whenever I see it.”

 

“Whenever you’re bargaining with somebody, whenever you’re negotiating with somebody, it makes you feel greedy and it makes the other guy feel cheap, or the other way around. And I don’t see that kind of emotional leverage as being a healthy way to conduct any kind of conversation. I don’t negotiate, I don’t make deals, I don’t bargain. I think those things are distressing and revolting, and they are an outgrowth of capitalism, and it stings quite a bit that so much of our world is being projected through that kind of lens. You often hear about the bargains people make in their relationships. Like... I get to watch my football, and she gets to watch her stories. That’s the deal we struck!... I’m allowed chili once a month, but we have to leave the windows open: that’s the deal!... All the horse-trading that people do on a moment-by-moment basis is a way of using the language and the logic of capitalism and markets and deals, and normalizing that as a way to conduct our daily lives.”