Well, I do, for one. I watched the video and read the kickstarter page, and came close to donating. But the more I learned, the more I thought: "wait. this is trying to leverage my childhood nostalgia for a good public television show into a donation to what amounts to an internet startup with a paid product." And then, once I'd re-framed the project in that light I started comparing it to other worthy causes, and it didn't stack up.

The thing is, it took me a lot of thought to get to that point, and I'm pretty sure that most people just punched the money button because Levar Burton and "OMG cute childhood memories!" I'll even wager that a fair number contributed because reading and/or attention span isn't a strong suit (irony!), and they thought the thing was to bring the show back to PBS since there were lots of reading rainbow logos everywhere.

A "consensual relationship" it may be, but the old adage about a sucker being born every minute was also rooted in consensual relationships. It's why we have (had?) those pesky securities laws that prevented direct consumer solicitation of investment in private companies.

But aside from the article's shortcomings, I do agree with their sentiment. You typically see Kickstarter pages explain what they need the money for in some level of detail -- who would want to give strangers money otherwise?

The idea of promoting literature to children is great, but that's just a mission statement. The entire pitch is frustratingly unspecific about what exactly they're making with their million dollars. I can take some pretty good guesses, but why should backers need to guess at that?

But when the history of this day and age is written, we're going to look back at Kickstarter as a candle in the darkness -- right now it's one of the very few ways in which "new media" is grappling seriously with the idea of figuring out how to get consumers pay content producers for content they want, rather than requiring content producers to figure out how to turn their creative endeavor into a convenient medium for advertising. The way some people want to throw it under the bus just because people are actually using it to make money rather than keeping it "pure" for the starving artist annoys me. I want people to make money off Kickstarter. I want more and more content to be made because it's what consumers want, not because it's how advertisers can reach consumers.

The author says that crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster start-ups and small-business owners. The next sentence says that it's not supposed to be used by people with profit motives and private investors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't startups and small businesses usually have investors and want profit?