geekosystem

Thursday I wrote about a Kickstarter campaign that was trying to raise money for Death Star research, and I called it the crowdfunding site's jump-the-shark moment. My concern was that if Kickstarter starts letting stuff like that through, it would soon be overrun with nothing but joke campaigns. Now there's a campaign to fund an X-Wing squadron to stop the Death Star campaign. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

Fifty years from now, when we all look back at what once was, and we fondly remember how Kickstarter used to be a great way for artists and inventors to fund projects that might not otherwise be possible, we could very well remember this campaign as Kickstarter's jump-the-shark moment. After the White House refused to build a Death Star, someone started a joke Kickstarter campaign to build one anyway, and it already has more than 1,000 supporters.