The Kickstarter Diaries 9: Watching the Wheels Go Round
The latest episode in my tragicomic behind-the-scenes account of life in a crowdfunding campaign deals with something close to addiction. Addictive behaviour, I suspect, can inspire addictive feelings in others. Be warned.
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round/
I really love to watch them roll….”
John Lennon
A few years ago I was in a cafe in Plattsburgh, upstate New York, when a rustling in the grapevine told me to log on to Kickstarter, even though I had no campaign going at the time.
What I saw was epic, astonishing–history in the making, a subscription-based publishing of four “secret” novels by author Brandon Sanderson (i.e., novels which Sanderson wrote without telling anyone that they were in progress). It reached $10 million in under 10 hours, $20 million in under 60 hours, ending at $45,574,127. I think I saw it around the ten million mark. The numbers representing the units, tens and hundreds were moving much too fast to see individually. Even the thousands were hard to discern, and the hundred-thousands were moving jerkily, but still almost never coming to a halt for more than a second.
It was so astounding I wasn’t even envious. I felt like an inferior kind of being, watching a higher species playing a version of chess in so many dimensions I couldn’t hope to understand the rules or predict the moves. All that was left was agogness. Agoggity. Agogdom.
That’s not how it works for ordinary mortals. When you go to the Kickstarter home page for your campaign, it takes a few seconds for the page to refresh/update, so you typically see the last total you saw, which is of course disappointing. You have three options, all of them indicative of addictive behaviour in different ways.
- You can quickly go elsewhere, which makes no sense as you have gathered no information, and it’s really a way of whistling past the graveyard—it’s a fake attempt to show yourself you’re in control of your impulses and your fate.
- You can hit Refresh right away to try to hurry up the process and get the current information more quickly, but again this is a form of self-deception: you are doing it just to show you are doing something, that you are in control of your fate. You are busily getting on with business, you tell yourself, but even you are not convinced.
- You can do nothing, eyes glued to the total, waiting and hoping for it suddenly to free itself and scroll like crazy. And here is why it is so addictive: you have no control. If it doesn’t move, you have no way of making it move and no way of knowing when it will move next, if ever. But if it does start twirling, you can’t tell when it will stop. It might move up by ten; it might keep scrolling, on and on, because some unknown benefactor has, for reasons that are entirely of your own imagination, decided to pledge several hundred thousand. Something distantly like that happened to me once, but that’s a story for another day.
But how long do you wait? Two seconds? Five seconds? How long will the page take to refresh? You can keep convincing yourself that the page is about to refresh, and the number start spinning, for ten seconds, in my experience, even (at desperate times) twenty.
So then I’m left staring at the unbudging total. Should I try to affect it by positive thinking a.k.a. manifestation? In other words, visualize what I want the total to be? I have tried this 137,338 times, and it has worked maybe twice. Or, before I open the page, should I glumly recall the previous total and hope to be pleasantly surprised? I have tried this 137,338 times, too, and it too has worked maybe twice.
There’s no end to the possibilities of self-deception. If I go out of the room and do something virtuous, like cleaning the kitchen counter or even the lavatory, will that make the number move? I avoid thinking about it altogether for ten minutes, will a new and higher total come out of hiding? Or will it be offended that I’m ignoring it?
I am ashamed to say that at 4:29 p.m. yesterday I resorted to threatening the number. In case you are wondering, it did no good.
Twelve hours later, desperate to try to exercise some control over my fate, I posted to all my social media: “My Kickstarter campaign has been stuck for 24 hours. Will someone please make even a tiny donation so I don’t have to keep staring at it any longer?”
Lennon’s song continues, “No longer riding on the merry-go-round/I just had to let it go.”
I wish I could say I have reached his state of amused detachment. No such luck. In the end, my only successful strategy is to distract myself from the addiction. Work on a carving. Go to London to scout flats for my daughter. Write a tragicomic, self-mocking diary about what it’s like to be caught up in the process.
Yep. Now you know.
PLEASE PLEASE back my campaign HERE.
