kick in the pants

"It is necessary for me... To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich"

Benjamin Franklin

I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?

Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.

Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.

So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.

All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!

1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.

2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.

3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.

You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.

Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.