Kickstarting Utopia: crowdfunding lets you route around the Man.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

"The middle class is struggling," the longtime left-wing economics wonk Robert Reich notes in the 2013 documentary Inequality for All. Why? Because billionaires and corporations are bulk-purchasing congress-people like tube socks at Target, undermining democracy and turning America's once-vital middle class into disenfranchised, exploited exurban serfs, trapped in a downward spiral. "If you don't have a voice, if you don't have power, you are vulnerable economically in society," Reich says. "You don't have anybody to protect you."

But even as the former secretary of labor paints this bleak portrait of contemporary American life, the movie that was constructed to showcase his argument provides a curious counternarrative. Inequality for All was partially funded by Kickstarter. In November 2012, its producers took to the revolutionary crowdfunding platform to ask for money to pay the film's editors, purchase archival footage, and compose an original score.

A full 1,015 people came to their aid, contributing a collective $83,392. And thus, for a few weeks in the fall of 2013, Robert Reich's economically vulnerable voice rang out in select theaters nationwide.

The theater where I watched Inequality for All--the Balboa in San Francisco--was also a recent beneficiary of a Kickstarter campaign. This past September, 1,063 people contributed $101,957 to help the place purchase new digital projectors and a new sound system. When Reich explained that we are "losing equal opportunity in America," he sounded crisp, humane, vivid--and also a little dated, as if perhaps he hasn't changed his stump speech much since, oh, 1985.

"I've been saying much of the same thing for 30 years," Reich notes at one point. In that time, technology has been on a bit of a roll. First we got spreadsheets. Then we could obtain every song ever recorded for free. In the last few years, from a personal empowerment perspective, things have really been getting interesting. Airbnb helps you turn your couch into a profit center. Etsy and Shopify let you take on Walmart even if you have trouble calculating sales tax.

Finally, there are Kickstarter, Indiegogo, LendingClub, RocketHub, and countless other radically democratic platforms of alternative finance. Surely it's worth mentioning, somewhere among the lamentations over rigged games and middle-class voicelessness, that you can now get a home improvement loan, raise capital for your organic vegan food truck business, and in a few...