Veronica Mars,fandom,and the ‘Affective Economics’ of crowdfunding poachers

Veronica Mars as a ‘lovemark’: Towards the decommoditised commodity

Although it has been suggested that Henry Jenkins posits a theory of ‘affective economics’ in Convergence Culture (Busse and Gray, 2014: 438; Garde-Hansen and Gorton, 2013: 65–66), Jenkins (2006) makes clear that he is referring to

a new configuration of marketing theory … which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making … In many ways, affective economics represents an attempt to catch up with work in cultural studies … on fan communities and viewer commitments. There is a crucial difference, however: the cultural studies work sought to understand media consumption from the fan’s point of view …; the new marketing discourse seeks to mold … consumer desires. (pp. 61–62)

We could hardly expect marketing and cultural studies to occupy the self-same intellectual terrain, although Jenkins (2006) does presciently observe that ‘fans of certain cult television shows may gain greater influence over programming decisions in an age of affective economics’ (p. 62). The kind of marketing discourse being referenced by Jenkins is exemplified in Kevin Roberts’ (2005) Lovemarks (Jenkins, 2006: 69–70), a book that argues for the importance of consumers’ love for particular products: ‘Lovemarks are not owned by the manufacturers, the producers, the businesses. They are owned by the people who love them’ (Roberts, 2005: 74). Without any irony, Roberts suggests here that ‘lovemarks’ are not owned by corporations, despite the fact that he is talking about intellectual properties which do, indeed, have legal owner–producers. Roberts’ work is aimed at positioning ‘lovemarks’ against a cold, impersonal world of brands: ‘A crucial problem for brands in their battle against commodification is their growing apart from consumers. Distant, undifferentiated, unremarkable’ (Roberts, 2005: 129). Or, ‘That word “content” depresses me … A generic label for generic stuff … It’s for sworn-in members of the commodification mafia’ (Roberts, 2005: 88). In short, affective economics mobilises a concept of emotional engagement between consumers and branded goods in order to position itself as beyond mere ‘commodification’. It co-opts decommoditisation debates surrounding material culture (Appadurai, 1986), aiming to define ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ commodities. While ‘bad’ commodities fail to engender consumer emotions, ‘good’ commodities come to resemble pre-programmed decommoditised entities, inserting themselves into consumer sentiment, memory and identity.

In relation to my case study here, it could be said that VM’s creator and executive producer, Rob Thomas, has repeatedly sought to decommoditise the series in a range of ways akin to the strategising of Roberts’ ‘lovemarks’. As such, the VM Kickstarter campaign cannot be considered as a pure novelty since it is anticipated by decommoditising discourses linked to affective economics, and articulated with Thomas’ pre-existent showrunner ‘social front’, a ‘kind of performance [that] … defines the situation so that people will think of him in a certain way’ (Lancaster, 2001: 4–5).

Thomas’ presentation of self, a key part of VM backer emails attributed to him, works to secure ‘authentic’ consistency with his established industry persona. For instance, the VM Kickstarter had a series of specific prefigurations: it was not the first time Thomas had engaged with online fandom in a way calculated to garner publicity as well as rewarding loyal fans. Rather than issuing a press release regarding the show’s renewal in 2005, Thomas announced the news via Television Without Pity by informing its VM moderator, John Ramos. Sharon Marie Ross (2008) interprets this strategy as follows: ‘such a move would capture the attention of the mainstream press (thus bringing mutual good publicity to both the series and the site)’ (p. 192). This sounds uncannily like Thomas’ deployment of Kickstarter, calculated to win media attention for VM and the site.

By disavowing conventional industry routes – utilising TWoP and then Kickstarter – Rob Thomas is able to symbolically position himself as ‘closer’ to fandom and its interests, rather than self-representing as a distant, detached showrunner or part of the ‘commodification mafia’, in Kevin Roberts’ (2005) terms (p. 88). Indeed, Thomas’ prior engagements with VM fandom, and efforts to construct his industry position as irreverent and archly rebellious, amount to a mode of self-branding where ‘a carefully edited, purposeful construction of self … that appeals to … the networked audience’ is cultivated (Marwick, 2013: 238 and 242). This self-brand ‘requires frequent, ongoing emotional labor’ to maintain (Marwick, 2013: 211), but the benefit is that Thomas is positioned as fan-like rather than as an archetypal industry insider. He adopts this liminal role primarily by critiquing commercial processes in highly visible yet coded ways, as well as by moving into the cultural terrain of ‘unauthorized’ cultural production that usually falls, by definition, outside the remit of a creator/executive producer. Thomas’ fan-like persona thus appropriates fan snark and criticism of the TV industry, something that was dramatically enacted in the double-episode finale of VM series three, broadcast on the CW network:

Thomas and his writing team tried to … accommodate more and more product integration in the CW’s Veronica Mars through deals with Saturn, T-Mobile, and even Gillette’s Venus razors. Viewsers … were pleased that it was done in a self-reflexive manner that echoed the fan consensus on message boards that it was better to have ‘lame’ product integration than no Veronica Mars … [For example, following] a discussion of the superiority of Veronica’s Saturn VUE over other hybrids, Mac mentions a rumoured Matchbox 20 reunion and Wallace’s roommate Piz proclaims, ‘So? Rob Thomas is a whore’ (3.19). (Gillan, 2011: 74)

This may well be the only TV series finale in history to playfully incorporate such connotative sentiments about its showrunner’s complicity in commercial TV (albeit disguised as a denotative remark about the Matchbox 20 singer, Rob Thomas). The telling dialogue was duly celebrated by influential US champions of ‘quality’ TV (see Lacob, 2007; Sepinwall, 2007), its resistive knowingness aligning Thomas with discourses of fan critique against standardised industry practice. Indeed, Alan Sepinwall has been described, in a VM Kickstarter backer email, as ‘an old friend of the series’ (Thomas, 2014b), acknowledging earlier industry/press feedback loops which helped to reinforce Thomas’ ‘social front’ (Lancaster, 2001: 4) as a liminal producer, caught between industrial exchange value or commerce, and fannish use value or savvy critique. The sense that Thomas had infiltrated network TV, yet did not quite belong there, is also reflected in his account of VM’s creation, where the series is framed as a dark, edgy premium cable show uneasily realised as network television (Thomas, 2006: 6).

Rob Thomas has also racked up other related firsts across his TV career. Writing in Investigating Veronica Mars, David Lavery (2011) ruminates that

Thomas may be the only television auteur to have co-edited a critical book on his own show. Although it seems dubious that he actually compiled BenBella’s Smart Pop collection of ‘Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars’ as the ‘Edited by’ designation would suggest (I suspect his ‘with’ collaborator Leah Wilson did much of the work), the book does offer Thomas’ often insightful responses to each of the essays. (p. 30)

‘Unauthorized’ tie-ins do not usually feature a showrunner’s name prominently emblazoned on their cover. This movement across the official/unofficial divide represents Thomas as symbolically proximate to (scholar-)fandom, demonstrating that his output is not restricted to corporate culture’s licensed paratexts. Exaggeratedly bridging network TV and fannish appreciation, Thomas’ showrunner-fan hybridity contextualises his self-brand as a critique of television’s commodity culture. Just as Kevin Roberts’ Lovemarks and affective economics are premised on constructing a binary between emotional lovemarks and cold, impersonal brands, so too does the television fan/TV network cultural mobility displayed by Thomas allow him to construct his persona against that of the detached industry insider. The showrunner-fan bids for a cultural position fusing the role of industry insider with that of a snarky, critical audience member. As Eva Illouz (2007) has suggested, ‘emotional capitalism has imbued economic transactions – in fact most social relations – with an unprecedented cultural attention to the … management of emotions’ (pp. 108–109). By displaying the use value of fan sentiment – partly aligning his professional identity with fan cultural authenticities – Thomas can demarcate the ‘decommoditised commodity’ of both himself and VM. Self and show are branded via affective economics as playfully speaking back to the power(s) of network TV, and evading the limitations of corporately endorsed paratexts. Indeed, Kickstarter plays into this ‘lovemark’-style strategy extremely well; as Chuck Tryon (2013) has noted, it facilitates a ‘paratextual framing of … projects … positioning … [them] as products of the cultures of social media … existing outside of the mainstream’ (pp. 146–147).

However, viewed purely as a matter of discursively decommoditised commodification, affective economics would appear to support a neoliberal ideology where the interests of producers and consumers are allegedly harmoniously aligned. Mark Andrejevic (2013) argues that the

notion of affective economics is not a thickly developed one in Convergence Culture … Jenkins references but does not engage with an ongoing conversation around the notion of affect by invoking the term … tipping his hat to its currency in cultural and media studies circles. (pp. 50 and 52)

Andrejevic (2013) reworks Jenkins’ appropriation of ‘affective economics’, arguing that in ‘an affective economy, a circulating, undifferentiated kind of emotion (neither solely “in” the stories nor “of” the audience) comes to serve as an exploitable resource’ for capitalism (p. 52). This appears to accord with the case study details I have set out thus far, where showrunner Rob Thomas is effectively able to exploit fan engagement (with VM and with its Kickstarter campaign) by discursively aligning himself with fan snark and anti-commerce/anti-industry knowingness. But the only remaining ‘subject’ in Andrejevic’s theoretical account is the capitalist system itself, capable of decisively exploiting fans who are problematically reduced to agency-less vectors of an affective economics that pulses through them. And meanwhile the master-theorist is able to identify affective relations from an expert perspective where fans’ empirical discourses are deemed to be irrelevant to their structural position within capitalist culture (Andrejevic, 2011: 91; Fuchs, 2014: 64).

Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton (2013) allow for a more complex scenario when they suggest that affective value inheres in media texts:

Contra Marx, this value already resides in signs and commodities, waiting to be activated, developed and sustained by the consumer … While affect does indeed circulate in an economy, it is also built in to the commodity or sign from its inception, and is inseparable from its use-value … [Consequently,] media fan cultures … trade in an affective economy. (p. 41)

In this reading of affective economics, media fans participate in the circulation of affective value, but they can also transmit, protect or dispel affect structured pre-emptively into media texts. By contrast, more strongly Deleuzian approaches such as Andrejevic’s harbour a danger of ‘misreading the persistence of institutional power as indicative of the total elimination of tools to disrupt it … [W]e need to remain conscious of the potential for tactical cultural expression … within … digital cultures’ (Johnson, 2013: 206), just as Garde-Hansen and Gorton allow for the possibility of situated fan agency.

By focussing on ‘tactical’ responses to cultural/capitalist power, Derek Johnson re-evokes the work of Michel de Certeau. And Johnson is not alone in reaching for this theoretical resource: in The Culture of Connectivity, Jose Van Dijck (2013) argues that

it is a common fallacy … to think of [Web 2.0] platforms as merely facilitating networking activities; instead, the construction of platforms and social practices is mutually constitutive … Michel de Certeau … proposes that people use tactics to negotiate the strategies that are arranged for them by organizations or institutions. That is precisely what happened with the development of social media platforms and … apps …: users ‘negotiate’ whether and how to appropriate them in their quotidian habits. (p. 6)

Crowdfunding platforms – whether Kickstarter, Indiegogo or others – certainly involve the exercising of strategic power (though specific sites have their own terms of use, and projects can utilise reward tiers very differently). Crowdfunding sites set the rules by which those seeking funding have to operate, taking a percentage of funds raised, as well as establishing templates through which funding campaigns are designed. In turn, these formatting strategies are reflected in the way that crowdfunding campaigns limit their backers to kinds of ‘implicit participation’ (Schäfer, 2011: 51), for example, choosing which reward tier to back rather than being involved in textual productivity. In the next section, I want to complicate this concern with strategy, focussing on the VM Kickstarter campaign in more detail, and considering how crowdfunding’s ‘dialectic of value’ (Hills, 2002: 35) can enable fans to tactically appropriate crowdfunding campaigns at the same time that their affective relationships are transformed into exchange value.

Veronica Mars and a ‘dialectic of value’: Towards auto-commodified fandom

Crowdfunding has typically been positioned as the lesser relation of crowdsourcing in academic commentary. Daren Brabham (2013) dismisses crowdfunding as lacking audience/fan creativity: ‘no creative energy or human intelligence is brought to bear on the product itself. Rather, the intellect required … is to choose a product to support’ (p. 39). And in Spreadable Media, Henry Jenkins et al. (2013) take a positive stance on the democratisations of crowdsourcing, but simply describe Kickstarter in statistical terms (pp. 248 and 251). Along with being presumed to lack fan creativity, crowdfunding has also been critiqued as a neoliberal exercise in individualistic consumerism: ‘Funders are … a crowd of individuals who act the same way … despite the intimation of co-activity and potential collectivism in the word “crowd”’ (Harvie, 2013: 173).

Harvie is right to highlight that the ‘crowd’ of crowdfunding is not necessarily a community: any aggregate of backers will likely be composed of those with many different reasons for deciding to support the particular campaign. Although clearly many VM Kickstarter backers will have been self-identified fans of the show, dismayed by its prior cancellation, others may have funded the project thanks to their memories of enjoying VM, without having been active members of fandom:

the $50 I spent … was the first time I actually spent money on one of my favorite media texts. So while on the one hand I was pre-buying access to the film, I was also finally paying for the many hours of pleasure that Veronica Mars has given me. This type of serial investment is hard to quantify … but I felt moved to buy a stake in its continuation … because I felt I owed the series something for that past pleasure. (Mittell, 2013)

Meanwhile, others may have funded VM out of (intellectual/ethical) curiosity, primarily paying for access to backer emails and to the campaign’s post-funding developments: ‘What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass … it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents’ (Scott in Scott and Mota, 2013b). The VM Kickstarter will have attracted a range of differently-motivated backers, not wholly reducible to atomised neoliberal consumers, but instead patterned across a range of interpretive communities: self-identified fans, scholar-fans, nostalgic audiences and those attracted by media ‘buzz’ generated around the campaign. Jen Harvie suggests that crowdfunding campaigns can typically be divided into distinct phases, with early backers – friends, family or dedicated fans – securing the confidence of later waves of backers less socially proximate to the campaign. The ‘entrepreneurial commitment’ of early backers ‘suggests that successful crowdfunding … is a sphere in which those with … the material resources and cultural capital to “kickstart” the appeal will … prove the most successful’ (Harvie, 2013: 172). For VM, of course, it was fan cultural capital and economic capital which offered resources that could ‘kickstart’ the Kickstarter campaign for Rob Thomas, ensuring a wave of early take-up and generating publicity from this fan support. However, considering media fans only as first-wave backers neglects the possibility that some fans’ ‘entrepreneurial commitment’ may, in other contexts, lead to them setting up their own crowdfunding ventures. And though the VM campaign revolved around a studio property rather than fan-generated material, its backers cannot be assumed to be atomised ‘consumers’, as Harvie (2013: 172) implies. Many were perhaps seeking ‘a badge of honor for being a member of a … tribe of supporters’ (Mittell, 2013), that is, the enhanced fan cultural capital of participating in securing VM’s return, and/or the symbolic capital of ‘being there’ as part of a record-breaking Kickstarter (McNutt, 2013). Fans were being targeted as a community who might be prepared to voluntarily put a price tag – an exchange value – on their affective relationship with the series. While offering merchandised rewards for funders, the VM Kickstarter therefore enabled a range of use values on the part of backers – moreover, these use values could not be guaranteed by, or structured into, the campaign itself (even if fannish conversions of affect into exchange value were hoped for). In Van Dijck’s terms, ‘the construction of platforms and social practices is mutually constitutive’, and VM backers tactically negotiated with strategic reward tiers, making these meaningful in terms of pre-existent fan affect, or scholar-fan concern, or the ‘tribal’ belonging of ‘being there’.

By tactically poaching from the crowdfunding campaign, backers engaged with it personally and socially via different agendas, experiences, memories and emotions, ‘expressing … pre-existing social commitments and cultural interests’ (Jenkins, 2013: 34). To one-dimensionally stress that there is ‘no creative energy … brought to bear’ by backers, as Brabham does, is to downplay the energy mobilised by VM fans in their appropriations of the Kickstarter campaign. While it is evidently the case that fans are not making ‘strategic’ decisions about the content of Rob Thomas’ script for the VM movie, to therefore position backers purely as non-creative consumers returns us to the kind of account that fan studies emerged in opposition to (see Jenkins, 2013).

However, fans’ tactical poaching is usually figured as an aspect of textual productivity, represented via selective interpretations that run counter to canonical media franchises. Poaching from a Kickstarter campaign involves rather different processes, as fans ‘“negotiate” whether and how to appropriate’ the Kickstarter (Van Dijck, 2013: 6). For example, the decision to become involved in a Kickstarter can involve selecting specific tiers/rewards that offer fan cultural capital (in the form of exclusive merchandise), or those which proffer symbolic closeness to the production itself (e.g. backers’ set visits), or those which offer social capital in the form of belonging to an imagined community of supporters. These forms of poaching do not produce ‘resistant’ or reworked fan texts, but they do articulate Kickstarter options with fans’ pre-existent affects and authenticities in ways that cannot be presumed a priori to simply be structured into the campaign’s design. These are imaginative forms of poaching, resembling the textual poaching identified by Owain Gwynne (2014: 79) in which fans speculated over unreleased, in-production Lord of the Rings films rather than reworking and rewriting actual, released texts.

And yet critics of affective economics would view the activities of fans as crowdfunding poachers as structurally irrelevant: by buying into the VM Kickstarter, no matter what the underlying motivation or imaginative tactical use, backers are funding a media product, and hence supposedly being exploited as an industrial resource (Andrejevic, 2008, 2011). Rather than being sold to advertisers, VM’s audiences are presented with the opportunity to voluntarily auto-commodify their love for the show, transforming their own use value into exchange value by converting affect into capital – selecting a reward tier – without being granted any degree of profit sharing whatsoever (Pebler, 2013). And as Tiziana Terranova (2004) has argued,

Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational capitalism for decades … This has often happened through the active participation of subcultural members … The fruits of collective cultural labour have been not simply appropriated but voluntarily channeled … within capitalist business practices … In this sense, the digital economy is not a new phenomenon. (p. 80)

In Fan Cultures, I put forward the notion that either/or approaches to media fandom, viewing it as either possessing meaningful agency or as structured into capitalist exploitation, failed to consider the ‘dialectic of value’. Fandom, I suggested, occupies a cyclical process in which fan affects are co-opted by industry, with this economic co-option then being open to further fan resistance:

The fan’s appropriation of a text … pulls this text away from (intersubjective and public) exchange value and towards (private, personal) use value, but without ever cleanly or clearly being able to separate out the two. It is for this reason that fan ‘appropriations’ … or ‘resistances’ to consumption can always be reclaimed as new instances of exchange value. (Hills, 2002: 35)

As an example, I referred to the market for collectibles, whereby out-of-production, ‘vintage’ merchandise can take on new exchange value, driven by a fan culture’s affective relationship, and stabilised in fan-compiled price guides (Hills, 2002). However, this formulation problematically over-aligns use value with fans’ affect, and exchange value with industrial processes, positing an incessant tension between exchange value (which cannot wholly anticipate poachers’ use values) and use value (which cannot wholly evade capitalist exchange value). The result is a rather ‘strange economy in which one side is in it more for play, and the other only for money’ (Stalder, 2012: 247). But what the VM Kickstarter illuminates is an intensification of this dialectic of value where both fans and producers can become self-reflexively engaged in circuits of exchange and use value: fans by self-commoditising the emotional use value they experience, and producers by emotively decommoditising the exchange value they professionally oversee, akin to Roberts’ (2005) anti-commodification commodity discourse of ‘lovemarks’, as discussed in the previous section. Rather than the poacher turning gamekeeper (Hills, 2002: 40, 2010: 57), in this case the gamekeeper turns (discursive) poacher.

Fans, meanwhile, enact their own related dialectic of value by converting aspects of use value into exchange value. Previously, this typically happened through the purchasing of official merchandise or DVDs, but Kickstarter extends this relationship into reward tiers: fans can now acquire merchandise which feels closer to the production rather than being mass-produced; digital, personally-watermarked copies of scripts (not something that would usually be made available commercially) or the likes of signed posters and exclusive backer T-shirts. At a price, the VM Kickstarter promises to bring fans symbolically closer to production: they are helping to fund the movie, as well as gaining access to ‘insider’ backer emails and a range of discursively decommoditised commodity merchandise (autographs and so on) objectifying pronounced fan cultural capital.

The design of the VM Kickstarter did not only offer merchandise, however. By offering to incorporate backers into the primary media text itself, either via character names, as background artists, or in a speaking role, the most expensive reward tiers (Kickstarter, 2013) simultaneously recognised the fan cultural desirability of (temporarily) closing the gap between the ‘ordinary world’ and the ‘media world’ (Couldry, 2003: 85), as well as reinforcing this naturalised boundary:

the closeness of ‘ordinary people’ [e.g. fans] to media sites seems strange … whereas the closeness of media people to media sites seems right, indeed, ‘natural’. This precisely duplicates the category difference between media people/locations and non-media people/locations that underlies the ritual space of the media. (Couldry, 2003: 89)

For audiences to get inside the text meant crossing the culturally powerful and significant ‘boundaries’ that Nick Couldry (2003) argues are essential to the ‘myth of the mediated centre’, that is, the notion that being ‘in’ or ‘on’ the media confers cultural status in relation to an otherwise devalued position of existing outside the media world (p. 47). Indeed, this Kickstarter-driven process of getting ‘in’ to the media world is dramatised in the bluray/DVD extra that accompanied the release of VM (the movie), ‘By the Fans: The Making of the Veronica Mars Movie’. Here, a series of non-media professionals who attended the film shoot as paying backers are shown on-screen, identified by name and by the category ‘Kickstarter Backer’. One backer, Cindy Au, says, ‘Never done anything like this before. I definitely feel like I have memories for a lifetime, it’s amazing’, testifying to the ‘basic category difference between anything “in” or “on” or associated with “the media”, and anything which is not’ (Couldry, 2003: 47). Via this highly unusual blurring of media people and ordinary people, fans’ voluntary commodification of their attachment to VM can be legitimated as a boundary-crossing movement into the beloved text, as well as being tactically appropriated through the production of fan memories that are linked to ongoing self-narratives. And even fans who cannot afford US$2500 to appear as an extra can boost their fan cultural capital by paying US$500 for a personalised voice mail message from Kristen Bell, or US$750 to attend the film’s red carpet premiere in Los Angeles (Kickstarter, 2013). The emotional investment of fans’ use value is therefore ‘costed’ – transformed into exchange value and production capital for the movie – on the basis of offering experiences and products which feel personal rather than standardised commodities, again drawing on the underlying logic of affective economics’ ‘lovemarks’ where brands supposedly ‘battle against commodification’ by making sure that they do not grow ‘apart from consumers. Distant, undifferentiated, unremarkable’ (Roberts, 2005: 129). The VM Kickstarter paratextually positions itself against conventional industrial/cultural divisions of ‘media people’ versus ‘ordinary people’, and hence is presented as a way of unifying fans and text. But this fan cultural wish fulfilment hinges on accepting the transformation of use value into exchange value, and willingly switching fan passion into a ‘price point’ (Kickstarter, 2013). Although the transaction may be discursively detached from ‘mainstream’ and impersonal commodification, it nonetheless remains an auto-commodifying, neoliberal choice made by a consumer-fan. Busse and Gray (2014) have distinguished between ‘traditional fan communities and [the] new industry-driven fans … [of] contemporary convergence culture’ (p. 431), and although this binary may be overly rigid, it does indicate a willingness to engage with ‘industry-driven’ discursive practices among sectors of media fandom.

Rather than a cycle of appropriation and co-option occurring between fans and industry, where fans resist an industry that ultimately reclaims their resistance, the case of the VM Kickstarter therefore suggests that both producers and ‘networked audiences’ engage in their own inter-related dialectics of value. Producers can emulate decommoditised fan ‘resistance’ within their own industrial practices, and fans can voluntarily convert non-commodified affect into exchange value rather than their practices merely being co-opted by the media industry.

Viewed from a structural perspective, this may once again seem to correspond to a one-way capitalist appropriation of fannish passions, in which fan agency is rendered irrelevant by systemic reproduction. But any such stance neglects to consider how an intensified dialectic of value plays out for both media fans and producers: VM’s crowdfunding poachers encounter a showrunner ‘social front’ which itself is positioned as decommoditising industry norms and practices, even while fans voluntarily assent to the commodification of their affects. Suzanne Scott usefully summarises arguments that the crowdfunding ‘model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production’ (in Scott and Mota, 2013a). In relation to the VM Kickstarter, such liminality also needs to be extended to the hybridised places of strategically fan-like producers and tactically (rather than unwittingly) self-commoditised fans, aiming to secure new VM by assenting to Kickstarter’s terms and conditions.

Of course, any generalising account of fan ‘exploitation’ must fail to address non-fan or ‘digital tribe’ backers, curious about the Kickstarter campaign as an ‘experience’ in its own right (Bogost, 2012; Jones, 2013). Mel Stanfill’s consideration of this issue suggests that ‘[f]ans aren’t duped. Or, at least, they aren’t uniquely duped’ by the ‘hegemonic economic thinking’ of Kickstarter (2013). Here, crowdfunding is merely one manifestation of a neoliberal ‘austerity logic of socialized risk and private reward. It is symptomatic of the way we have come to think about financial relationships between regular people and the structures of capital’, and needs to be viewed in this cultural-economic context rather than considered too narrowly as an industry shift, or too monolithically as capitalism-in-action (Stanfill, 2013). Yet Stanfill’s analysis implies that fans and non-fans alike may be ‘duped’ by austerity ideologies, problematically assenting to risks of financial investment without sharing in (privatised) rewards accruing to corporate owners.

Although this identifies a significant cultural context to crowdfunding, it still somewhat misses the poaching of participants who negotiate how they engage with specific campaigns, backing those which are emotionally meaningful; those where they wish to gain access to ‘insider’ information; those where specific reward tiers promise symbolic proximity to the media text/industry; those where being a backer carries specific social capital, as arguably became the case for VM; and those where there is a semiotic continuity with an established showrunner persona (something, I have suggested, that was especially important to the VM project and its dialectic of value). Fans may poach from a Kickstarter project by interpreting it not only as securing symbolic proximity to the showrunner/production, but also as offering limited edition or time-sensitive merchandise not otherwise available. In this sense, supporting a Kickstarter can mean collecting rare merchandise, for example, accruing the objectified fan cultural capital of a ‘Mars Investigations Official Kickstarter Backer’ T-shirt. As Henry Jenkins (2013) has recently observed: ‘fan labor may be “exploited” for the profit of the “owners” … at the same time as fans benefit … in nonmaterial ways’ (p. xxvi). And to reduce these varied affective engagements to austerity logics or one-dimensional capitalist exploitation assumes that ‘economic interests trump any other benefit from participation’ (Jenkins, 2013: xxvii), along with downplaying the situated agency of media producers.

Conclusion

To conclude, in a media culture framed by emotional capitalism (Illouz, 2007) the VM Kickstarter is far from ‘unprecedented’, but it is also far from being just predictable ‘exploitation’. Instead, my main argument here has been that the VM Kickstarter can be understood as a series of multiple transformations between use value and exchange value, where both fans and producers display agentive dialectics of value, especially in terms of discursively decommoditising and voluntarily recommoditising the culture that matters to them. Strategies and tactics emerge through these processes, to be sure; crowdfunding poachers are only able to poach from the projects, reward tiers, and possibilities that they are offered by commercial rights–owners/creators. Yet the VM Kickstarter demonstrates how affective economics offers ways for producers and fans to agentively navigate contemporary emotional capitalism.

Contra Hills (2002), then, affective economics calls upon producers to perform fan-like identities and (commodified) discourses of decommodification here – that is, ‘lovemarks’ – rather than merely co-opting fandom. And contra the notion that fans’ ‘use value’ can exceed industrial norms of ‘exchange value’, fans participating in the VM Kickstarter instead auto-commodify their own use value, acting functionally and structurally as if they were the ‘exploitative’ media producers/corporates. Power relationships between fans and producers are not, after all, radically reconfigured, yet producers enact fan discourses, and fans adopt producer-like commercial functions, shifting their own use value into exchange value in return for the promised recompense of VM’s return (De Kosnick, 2013: 110). In terms of areas for future research opened up by this case study and theoretical framework, it would be useful to consider to what extent Kickstarter’s ‘paratextual framing of … projects … positioning … [them] as products of the cultures of social media … existing outside of the mainstream’ (Tryon, 2013: 146–147) will be eroded as it potentially becomes less symbolically distant from established old media and their corporate concerns. The ‘social fronts’, and associated emotional labour, of other TV showrunners could also be analysed in relation to decommoditising discourses: is Rob Thomas’ position relatively unusual, or has it been mirrored in relation to a range of other media franchises? And although I have not focussed on it here, there is clearly a need for further research that engages in greater ethnographic depth with producers’ and fans’ understandings of crowdfunding, both via Kickstarter and through other sites.