Crowdfunding in times of personal crisis – especially for medical expenses – has grown exponentially in recent years. How have public narrative appeals for life itself become normalized in hyper- competitive attention economies? In US settings – where crisis crowdfunding is most prevalent – long-held historical practices entail that petitioning for aid requires not just demonstrating need, but also moral worthiness. This is further driven by moralistic ‘bootstrap’ ideals and ‘Poor Law’ frameworks – shaping who is thought ‘deserving’ – along with the valorization of self-help entrepreneurialism. Crisis crowdfunding has thus emerged both as a solution and extension of precarization modes of governance. What emerges in typical crowdfunding campaigns is an insistence on positive resolve despite hardship, along with presenting beneficiaries as wholly virtuous. Hence, already precarized subjects must curate an archive of their upstanding character and poignant narratives of their suffering. To put it somewhat glibly, the platform exploits the art of being pure of heart. This confessional labour of articulating misfortune, hope, and accountability can amount to a burdensome task. Moreover, crowdfunding platforms exacerbate inequalities of social and cultural capital, for campaign success depends heavily on leveraging support networks, technical capabilities, and emotional nuance. Nevertheless, this mode of advocacy and self-governance appears remarkably durable, transitioning away from rights-based enfranchisement and towards individual enterprise. Ultimately, by governing precarity through virtuosity, we are witnessing a reframing of vulnerability which implies that those who are morally deserving will ultimately be redeemed by the ‘crowd’.

About the presenter:

Matt Wade is a postdoc fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. He earned his PhD in 2016 at the Australian National University. Matt’s primary research interests lie within the sociology of science, technology, health, and conduct of the self, particularly with regard to increasing expectations of virtuosity levied upon subjects today.