Paying one’s own way, as comedian Daniel Tosh’s recent “Daniel’s Kickstarter” routine reminds us, is a self-sabotaging Ponzi scheme.
“Like a lot of you,” he deadpans with Sarah McLachlan’s signature gut-wrenching somberness, “my goal in life is to be extremely wealthy, but I have a horrible work ethic.”
“That is why, with this Kickstarter campaign, I am asking you to help me become the world’s first trillionaire,” Tosh – not entirely insincere, I surmise – entreats the audience of his Comedy Central series “Tosh.0.”
Kickstarter, the self-styled world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, is a crowdfunding community of handouts and hoopla, the place where penny-ante angel investors grant penny-strapped entrepre-no-names their wings.
The former are the “backers” of Kickstarter, the community’s funders of “creators” and followers of creativity. They’re modernity’s Medicis, as it were, part-and-parcel patrons of today’s Da Vincis – Tosh’s project actually promises to purchase the “Mona Lisa.”
“And run [it] through a paper shredder.”
“I will purchase Facebook and rename it ‘The Facebook,'” he further appeals. “I will also shut down Instagram so that girls can’t use filters to trick [guys] into thinking that they’re pretty.” “You’re eyes aren’t that blue,” Tosh addresses them. “And you don’t glow.”
The “Tosh’s Trillion” project also plans to “convert Disney World into a luxury resort for gay weddings,” as he proclaims, voiced-over a photoshopped polaroid of two Mickeys, arm-in-arm in the “Happiest Place on Earth.”
“I will then rename it North Carolina,” he announces.
And if that doesn’t win the ambitious kickstartee a bevy of crowdfunding benefactors and benefactresses, there’s an additional incentive to back his project – the “pure joy of watching me achieve my dreams,” as he puts it.
Which is precisely crowdfunding’s ultimate payoff: altruism. Kickstarter, though, which pinches 5 percent of its creators’ proceeds, isn’t without its fallen angels, as Tosh’s parody-project suggests.
In August 2011, for instance, one such Lucifer tempted backers to bankroll his unproven “Tech Sync Power System” project, a prototypical light switch for mobile devices pledged $27,637 – more than ten times its $2,000 goal. Puzzlingly, Kickstarter powered down the popular project’s page and its creator’s account days later and with no explanation – and the project’s 419 backers, it seemed, had been bedeviled.
Earlier that year, a student of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts got to his “Synchronized” project’s $1,700 goal within 90 days. The kicker: his short film had been synchronized with – plagiarized from, that is – “Replay,” another filmmaker’s project.
One month before that, in turn, the aptly-titled project “Mythic: The Story of the Gods and Men,” an undeveloped video game with a goal of $80,000, was really a rip-off: The de facto mythic project was pledged $4,000 on the strength of other titles’ screenshots it had stolen.
And then there’s “Tosh’s Trillion” – which, for all its idiocy, makes it amusingly apparent how far and how fast crowdfunding’s gratuitous gravy train can potentially travel. Kickstarter’s success is arts’ success, ultimately – but not all projects are created equal.
There’s always one that’s worth backing, though. It’s just not Tosh’s.
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
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