What Is the “Real Deal” at Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot?

“However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.”

I have a problem: My interests are esoteric, and most people are simply not very interested in the things that get me going. I do not often have an opportunity to discuss deeply the ideas that I am passionately interested in. So I was excited when Jordan Peterson announced his backing of the social networking website Thinkspot in June of 2019. I hoped that Peterson’s involvement would attract enough people who were Maps of Meaning (Peterson’s earlier and more involved book) readers, as opposed to say 12 Rules for Life (his more recent and popular work) fans. I hoped this would be a place where I might find the types of discussions I was looking for. However, satisfying my personal desire for stimulating conversation was not exactly why Thinkspot was created in the first place. All of the articles that I have read about Thinkspot make many assumptions and usually start with an ill-defined, sweeping gesture towards “free speech.” However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

The “In” Crowd

In 2006, crowdsourced user-generated content was the rage. Time’s “Person of the Year” was “You,” alluding to those individuals creating the content for Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, and countless other sites that would be empty, uninteresting deserts were it not for the content created by users themselves. Around that same time, a group of art lovers was creating a website called Indiegogo to crowdsource fundraising—or, as it soon became known, “crowdfunding.”

So thanks to the demonetization trend, more and more creators needed to find alternative sources of revenue for businesses they had spent significant effort building, businesses that in some cases disappeared nearly overnight due to demonetization.

By 2013, seven years after Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of Youtube, user-generated content was becoming nothing short of big business. And Youtube was accounting for $3.5 billion in advertising dollars being collected by Google. So, for some creators on Youtube, things were getting increasingly serious. Youtube was no longer about a teenager sitting in his or her bedroom talking to the camera; creators such as Jack Conte were raising the bar on production values, creating full-fledged short films. At this point, Indiegogo (and other crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter) was becoming a viable option for well-known artists to seek funding for specific projects, such as the $5.7 million raised to create the 2014 film Veronica Mars or the $3.1 million Zach Braff raised for a film sequel to Garden State, the 2014 film Wish I Was Here. However, there was still no platform for artists to seek an ongoing stream of revenue: basically a salary. So Cone created one, Patreon, and he announced its creation in one of his Youtube videos.