So everybody is throwing cash at Zack Danger Brown’s kickstarter campaign for potato salad. He was asking $10 to make an admittedly unskilled bowl of potato salad. The internet being the fickle and often fad crazed whore that it is pounced on his campaign and it has now grossed more than $70,000 dollars at the time of the post.
It’s a mixed bag of spuds for me. Part “hey that’s cool” and funny, and part disgusted “fuck off”. So here are my two glorious and germ covered Yukon Golds worth on the subject.
If people are stupid enough to continue funding a shitty potato salad well beyond the 10’s of thousands of dollar range then screw them and their own personal debt load. If in your daily lives you think pissing away another dollar on someones “one hit wonder” kickstarter campaign then by god do it. Especially if it makes you feel good.
If you are the stupid shit that copy catted your own “make a pie”, “Make me own sandwich” campaign or “supply the beer” campaign on kickstarter I beg you for your own sake and your desperate lack of dignity just fucking stop already. It’s a pathetic rubbing yourself against someones leg type of thing.
Kickstarter went for a cash grab when they changed their platform from serious to laughable with an anything goes model of crowd sourcing campaigns. They have reaped what they have sown, more wasted time, wasted money, vepid and vacuous bullshit and the erosion of the model they helped to build.
Yes it’s kind of clever and a bit cutesy but it is mostly without substance and it is unfair to people who are trying to do real good shit on kickstarter right now.
How many of the $2 trolls who think their $2 “fuck you to the serious pissants who criticize this campaign” are anything less than trolls to begin with? Have they ever funded a kistarter before, do they loan money on kiva, have they ever bought someone a chicken in Africa, Do they buy food vouchers for the homeless. do they bother to even give a homeless person a coin on the street? I get the feeling they aren’t the types of people who have been working to change lives and needed to blow some steam off with a $2 contribution for “Shits and Giggles”.
It is a boon for kickstarter in the publicity department or is it? I wager that I will make own potato salad and eat it if this campaign results in even a modest spike in real projects getting funded on the platform. (FYI I fucking hate potato salad.)
Zack Brown could make an extremely powerful point in several key ways.
- He could make a $10 bowl of potato salad and keep every other penny for himself and pay off student loan, buy a house, or buy a fucking Tesla. That would be the ultimate jab in the eye to the model and would be a nice lottery prize for him. (Let’s face it many of the gamblers who win the lottery or the slots likely don’t deserve it any more than Brown, and Brown did slightly more to earn it.)
- He could try to do something inventive and decent with the money that would somehow contribute to something more meaningful than the joke it is. But somehow I don’t see a potato salad eaters against battered women NGO springing up out the ashes of this campaign.
- He could take a big shit on kickstarter by cashing his chips and coming clean on how dumb the platform is for allowing a $10 potato salad to grow to such absurd proportions.