An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The idea for Capsule started with a tweet about reinventing social media. A day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi -- best known for authoring the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) -- had pulled in a pre-seed investment of $100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J. Pulte and Wamda Capital.

The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype -- hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps. For now there's nothing to see beyond Capsule's landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept.

"I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I'll set up a Kickstarter," he tells us. Instead the tweet "just completely exploded" and he found himself raising $100,000 "in a single day" -- with $50,000 paid in there and then. "I'm not a startup guy. I've been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services," he continues. "But by the end of the day -- last Sunday, eight days ago -- I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane."

The BBC reports: Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago.

Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times.

Kickstarter said the emails were "auto-generated in error... The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while working on a clean-up task completely unrelated to the ticket from 2013," a company spokeswoman said.

"It's important to remember we are still a small team at Kickstarter and mistakes can happen."

AmiMoJo quotes SlashGear: Remember the Pebble smartwatch? Despite being officially discontinued and several years old at this point, there are still some diehard fans out there keeping the hardware alive, and a team called Rebble Alliance plays an important part in this.

Whereas the web services for Pebble watches used to come from Pebble Technology Corp., they now come (unofficially) from Rebble, which has announced a new initiative called Rebble Grants... Rebble Alliance is, as explained by iFixit in an editorial last year, a group of former Pebble employees like Katharine Berry, as well as enthusiasts who are working hard to keep the defunct hardware operational. Key to this is the Rebble web services, which includes a replacement cloud infrastructure that was coded by Berry over the course of a couple of weeks...

The team says they've been saving some of the funds received from running the Rebble web services and that they plan to invest $25,000 into a variety of Pebble-centric projects.

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) explains why he's crowdfunding his new audiobook online. Despite the large publishers for his print editions, "I can't get anyone to do my audiobooks. Amazon and its subsidiary Audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook sales, won't carry any of my audiobooks because I won't let them put any of their digital rights management on it.

"I don't want you locked in with their DRM as a condition of experiencing my work," he explains in a video on Kickstarter. "And so I have to do it myself."

He's promising to sell the completed book through all the usual platforms "except Audible," because "I want to send a message. If we get a lot of pre-orders for this, it's going to tell something to Amazon and Audible about how people prioritize the stories they love over the technology they hate, and why technological freedom matters to people.

"It's also going to help my publisher and other major publishers understand that there is an opportunity here to work with crowdfunding platforms in concert with the major publishers' platforms to sell a lot of books in ways that side-step the monopolists, and that connect artists and audiences directly."

it's the third book in a series which began with the dystopian thriller Little Brother (recommended by Neil Gaiman) and continued with a sequel named Homeland. ("You may have seen Edward Snowden grab it off his bedstand and put it in his go bag and go into permanent exile in Hong Kong in the documentary Citizen 4," Doctorow says in his fundraising video.) The newest book, Attack Surface, finds a "technologist from the other side" — a surveillance contractor — now reckoning with their conscience while being hunted with the very cyber-weapons they'd helped to build. "There are a lot of technologists who are reckoning with the moral consequences of their actions these days," Doctorow says, adding "that's part of what inspired me to write this...

"Anyone who's been paying attention knows that there's been a collision between our freedom and our technology brewing for a long time."

Just three days after launching the Kickstarter campaign, Doctorow had already raised over $120,000 over his original goal of $7,000 — with 26 days left to go. And he also promises that the top pledge premium is for real....

$10,000	You and Cory together come up with the premise for his next story in the "Little Brother" universe.
$75 or more	All three novels as both audiobooks and ebooks
$40 or more	All three novels as audiobooks
$35 or more	All three novels as ebooks
$25 or more	The audiobook and the ebook of Cory's new novel, Attack Surface
$15 or more	The audiobook for Attack Surface
$14 or more	The new book Attack Surface in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$11 or more	The second book in the series, Homeland, in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$10 or more	The first novel in the series in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$1 or more	Cory will email you the complete text of "Little Brother," the first book in the series, cryptographically signed with his private key

The board game Frosthaven has become Kickstarter's "most-funded board game on the site ever, with nearly $13 million pledged toward funding the game's development," reports NPR. "Only two projects have ever crowdsourced more funding on the site."

NPR sees a larger trend: Frosthaven's success seemed to exemplify a shift that has been happening in the tabletop gaming community for years: toward games that are not only focused on strategy and adventure, but also a new type of funding model where fans have more say than ever in which games move from the idea stage to their living rooms. And hobbyist tabletop games are a different breed of entertainment altogether. For many of these smaller games, funding from fans has proved essential... These makers have become part of one of the country's most popular quarantine hobbies, but they've done so through a mini-economy that relies on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter...

Creators use Kickstarter like a social media site, an advertisement and a fundraising tool all in one, and they use it more successfully than nearly any other game creators on the site. In 2019, fans pledged more than $176 million toward tabletop games — up 6.8% over the previous year, according to Kickstarter data gathered by the entertainment site Polygon. In all, more than 1 million people pledged to games on the site last year... "For the board game community, there's a culture of looking on Kickstarter ... and being more willing to fund things," said Isaac Childres, the CEO of Cephalofair Games and creator of Forge War, Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. "It's like a larger avenue for board game creators to use that automatically picks up a following."

This is what makes Kickstarter so attractive to individual makers and less attractive to other gaming industries — like video game makers. It takes a lot of startup value to create your own video game, for instance, but for board games, you only need a good enough idea and a well-placed Kickstarter page to gauge public interest... [T]here are drawbacks to the funding technique, too. Creators are responsible for everything if their goals are reached. They have to print the games and send them to their customers on their own — a process that can be grueling, time-consuming and even detrimental. One board game creator miscalculated the amount of money it would cost to ship games and lost his house due to the unexpected financial burden.

But, for many creators, the positives outweigh the negatives. Childres said it's hard to imagine where he might be without crowdfunding. Offering his game Forge War as an example, he said had he "somehow found the money to publish it on my own and get it into stores, I don't think anyone would have paid attention to it."

Now, he's one of the most successful hobbyist tabletop board game creators in the country.

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter filed a regulatory notice in New York last week revealing it had laid off 25 employees, or about 18 percent of its workforce. But according to The Verge, Kickstarter told them that its workforce reduction "is more than twice that, as close to 30 employees decided to take voluntary buyouts as negotiated between the company's management and Kickstarter's employee union." From the report: "The filing is correct, however, it does not reflect an international employee that was affected, nor does it take into account further staff reduction via the voluntary buyouts offered to staff. In total, we'll see a 39 percent reduction in staff," a Kickstarter spokesperson tells The Verge. "The majority of those leaving chose voluntary separation packages, and everyone affected is staying on through this week through the transition."

The layoffs were first reported on Wednesday by Business Insider. The Verge reported last month that Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan had informed staff that the layoffs were imminent in an internal memo. At the time, Hasan cited a 35 percent drop in new projects on the platform with "no clear sign of rebound." [...] As part of deal, Kickstarter ultimately offered departing employees a severance package that includes four months' pay, four months of health care coverage for employees making more than $110,001 a year and six months for those who make less, nullification of any non-compete agreements in place, and a chance to rejoin the company if their job reopens within the year.

"The COVID crisis has led to a 35% drop in live projects" says Kickstarter communications officer David Gallagher -- who points out that fees on those projects are the company's sole source of income. This led Kickstarter's CEO to announce "sweeping layoffs of up to 45 percent of employees," the union of Kickstarter employees tells Gizmodo. (Though Gallagher says the final numbers will first include some voluntary buyouts, followed by a re-assessment to "better understand the scale of any layoffs that may be required.")

But Kickstarter is also the first major tech company to unionize. So what happened next? An anonymous reader shares this report from the two-months-old Kickstarter United (KSRU) union: The bargaining unit was faced with the prospect of involuntary layoffs with two to three weeks of severance per year of employment in the midst of a global pandemic... After two weeks of bargaining, we negotiated a severance package that we are incredibly proud of, which has been unanimously ratified by KSRU.

The package prioritizes extended severance payments and health insurance coverage, and we were inspired to see dozens of our highest-paid colleagues volunteer to take layoffs in order to save jobs and increase payouts for lower-paid bargaining unit members. We also negotiated additional terms that are previously unheard-of in tech severance agreements, fulfilling another of our longstanding goals: moving our industry forward and demonstrating the necessity of organizing in tech.

The terms we won for our 86-member bargaining unit include:

- Four months of severance pay for all laid-off employees, both voluntary and involuntary.

- Continuing healthcare coverage increased by salary: four months for our higher-paid colleagues, and six months for those who make less than the bargaining unit's median salary.

- Recall rights for a full year, so that if an eliminated position becomes open again in the future, qualified laid-off workers will have priority consideration in filling it.

- A release from the non-compete and a modification of the non-solicitation clauses included in our original hiring agreements — an allowance unprecedented in tech that will enable our members to pursue new avenues of employment unfettered...

This experience has shown us how crucial it is for tech workers to unite, to leverage our collective strength, and to focus on lifting each other up and protecting one another. Kickstarter United is committed to standing alongside workers everywhere, helping to bring our collective visions for a fairer, more just world to life.

The Verge takes a 5,000-word look at a Kickstarter campaign "that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers."

"The difference in this story, however, is that for only the second time, the Federal Trade Commission is coming for the creator." The agency claims Doug Monahan took his backpack funds and spent them on "personal expenses," including bitcoin purchases, ATM withdrawals, and credit card debt. The agency says he threatened backers who pursued him for their bags. The state of Texas is suing him, too. A lot of people want a piece of Monahan, but he's not going down without a fight. He's serving as his own lawyer to dispute the claims in court, and he invited me down to Texas to clear his name and reputation...

He sold iBackpack as a high-tech wonder that would "revolutionize" backpacks and improve people's lives, whether they're eight or 80. On Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016, Monahan advertised the backpack as the bag of people's dreams: it'd feature more than 50 pockets, include multiple external battery packs, RFID-blocking pouches, a precipitation hood, a USB hub, charging cables, a Bluetooth speaker, and a mobile hotspot for a portable Wi-Fi connection. That's a lot of stuff in one bag that you could seemingly be talked into believing is useful...

He got addicted to pain pills, too. At the same time, the batteries that were supposed to go in the bag represented a liability. The iBackpack drama occurred around the same time that Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, and he didn't feel comfortable shipping lithium-ion batteries. Someone could have died, he says.... Monahan says they just don't understand him or crowdfunding, in general. He's not a bad guy, he says. It's just that businesses fail sometimes, which is what he invited me to Texas to prove.

Poking at Monahan's past, however, suggests this isn't a man with a one-time flub, but rather someone with a trail of failures. Is he a con-artist? An irresponsible businessman? Does the difference even matter?
The Verge also investigates a claim that the whole backpack idea was stolen from another company -- and talks to a former employee who says their manager at Monahan's company was a 14-year-old.

And at one point, Monahan "essentially crank calls the FTC's lawyers with me in the room."

J. Fergus, writing for Input: Someone finally did it. We can now follow who we want on our own terms and get that information chronologically. Fraidycat is an app and browser extension that allows just that. Though it launched in November 2019, Fraidycat recently got a massive update, widening its compatibility and adding a dark mode. The open-source tool, brought to you by Kicks Condor, is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows in addition to Mozilla Firefox and Chrome as an extension. Fraidycat definitely pulls from RSS feeds more easily, but it also works on Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud. You drop the link to the account you'd like to follow -- from Medium bloggers to Twitch streamers to vision board Pinterest-ers -- and set how frequently you'd like to see their posts. Label it, hit save, and posts will appear as often as you'd like. The recent update notably folds Kickstarter into the mix and collapses Twitter threads for readability.

hackertourist shares an update on the status of the "ZX Spectrum Next" Kickstarter campaign: In 2017, a Kickstarter campaign was started to design and build "an updated and enhanced version of the ZX Spectrum totally compatible with the original, featuring the major hardware developments of the past many years packed inside a simple (and beautiful) design by the original designer, Rick Dickinson, inspired by his seminal work at Sinclair Research."

They didn't quite make their original planned delivery date (2018), but they made good on their promise in the end: the first machine was delivered on February 6 of this year. The Spectrum Next contains a Z80 processor on an FPGA, 1MB of RAM expandable to 2MB, hardware sprites, 256 colors, RGB/VGA/HDMI video output, and three AY-3-8912 audio chips. A Raspberry Pi Zero can be added as an expansion board. The computer can emulate any of the original Spectrum variants, but it also supports add-ons that have been designed by the Spectrum community over the years, such as games loaded onto SD cards, better processors and more memory, and improved graphics.

DevNull127 writes: Let me get this straight. Peloton's main product is a stationary bicycle costing over $2,000 with a built-in touchscreen for streaming exercise classes. ("A front facing camera and microphone mean you can interact with friends and encourage one another while you ride," explained the Kickstarter campaign which helped launch the company in 2013, with 297 backers pledging $307,332.) Soon after they went public last summer, Bloomberg began calling them "the unprofitable fitness company whose stock has been skidding," adding "The company is working on a new treadmill that will cost less than the current $4,000 model, as well as a rowing machine."

Last March they were also sued for $150 million for using music in workout videos without proper licensing, according to the Verge — which notes that the company was then valued at $4 billion. And then this week Vice reported on what happened to one of their competitors.

"Flywheel offered both in-studio and in-home stationary bike classes similar to Peloton. Peloton sued Flywheel for technology theft, claiming Flywheel's in-home bikes were too similar to Peloton's. Flywheel settled out of court and, as part of that settlement, it's pointing people to Peloton who is promising to replace the $2,000 Flywheel bikes with refurbished Pelotons... When Peloton delivers these replacement bikes, it'll also haul away the old Flywheels."

The Verge reports that one Flywheel customer who'd been enjoying her bike since 2017 "received an email from Peloton, not Flywheel, informing her that her $1,999 bike would no longer function by the end of next month."

"It wasn't like Flywheel gave us any option if you decide not to take the Peloton," she says. "Basically it was like: take it or lose your money. They didn't even attempt to fix it with their loyal riders. It felt like a sting."

"Gig economy workers may have won an important, if conditional, battle in their push for better conditions," reports Engadget: Instacart employees in the Chicago suburb of Skokie have voted to unionize through their local branch of United Food and Commercial Workers, giving them more collective bargaining power than they had before.

The move only covers 15 staffers who operate at the Mariano's grocery store, but it's the first time Instacart employees have unionized in the U.S. and could affect issues like turnover rates, work pacing and mysterious employee rating algorithms. In a statement, Instacart said it "will honor" the unionization vote pending certification of the results, and that it intended to negotiate in "good faith" on a collective bargaining agreement. The company added that it "respect[s] our employees' rights to explore unionization."
Motherboard reports that prior to the vote Instacart had "enlisted high-level managers to visit the Mariano's grocery store where the unionizing workers pick and pack groceries for delivery. The managers distributed anti-union literature warning employees that a union would drain paychecks and 'exercise a great deal of control' over workers."

They also cite stats from the "Collective Actions in Tech" database showing there were 100 organizing actions in just the last year by workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft -- and note that this month will also see the results of a vote by Kickstarter employees on whether to unionize.

Antivirus software giant Avast has announced that it will wind down one of its subsidiary businesses just days after leaked documents revealed the extent to which the Czech company was selling users' browsing data to third parties. From a report: On Monday, Vice and PCMag published details about how Avast had been collating browsing data covering web properties such as Google Maps and Search, LinkedIn, and YouTube and then repackaging it for sale under a subsidiary called Jumpshot, which has claimed clients such as Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Pepsi, Home Depot, and Conde Nast. Although the data was not thought to contain any personally identifiable information, it is often possible to "de-anonymize" data by combining and aligning it with different data sets to unearth shared patterns. Jumpshot was founded back in 2010 but officially launched from a Kickstarter-funded project in 2012. In its original guise, Jumpshot offered a PC-based software that promised to rid machines of viruses, spyware, and the like, and the company was eventually bought by Avast.

"How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?"

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..."

He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space." Eldorado will later this year begin launching into low earth orbit CubeSats up to 12 kilograms in weight. Doing a space startup may seem like the stupidest, highest-risk way to go about restarting a career, but I thought it would be fun and it has been. Fortunately, we found a visionary billionaire to be our seed investor. We will shortly close our Series A round with most of that money already committed...

[F]or Eldorado, we (which means my co-founder Tomas Svitek -- a real rocket scientist who used to report directly to Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin -- seven engineers and me) pledged to invent nothing and to avoid liquid fuels if possible. We took 50-year-old ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (the same solid fuel used in the Space Shuttle's strap-on boosters) and improved it using modern materials, processes, and some common sense. NO 3D printing! The result is a cheaper rocket that can sit on the shelf for years then be launched as-needed within hours...

[W]e've offered to launch on FOUR hours notice and then launch again every TWO hours after that until they tell us to stop. So if Bond villain Ernst Blofeld, for example, figured out a way to take down the GPS system, we could replace the whole constellation in less than a day, then do it all over again as often as needed. That would probably deter Dr. Evil from even trying his trick in the first place.... Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit drops its rocket horizontally from a Boeing 747 flying at 35,000 feet going Mach 0.7. We "toss" our rocket while flying in a 45-degree climb at 78,000 feet going Mach 2.2, which is much more exciting. You can see the curvature of the Earth. Launching higher, faster, and at the proper angle lets us use a smaller cheaper rocket on a smaller cheaper aircraft for a lower launch price. Virgin charges $12 million per launch while we charge $1 million for up to 12U into any orbit....

"But how do you protect your business if you aren't inventing anything? Where is your intellectual property? Where is your defensive moat?" There's actually plenty of clever IP inside Eldorado, but what mainly keeps another startup from just copying our work is the required fleet of Mach 2.2+ launch aircraft. We bought all of them, you see... all of them on the planet.

The nonprofit Open Source Technology Improvement Fund connects open-source security projects with funding and logistical support. (Launched in 2015, the Illinois-based group includes on its advisory council representatives from DuckDuckGo and the OpenVPN Project.)

To raise more money, they're now planning to offer "hacker-themed swag" and apparel created with a state-of-the art direct-to-garment printer -- and they're using Kickstarter to help pay for that printer: With the equipment fully paid for, we will add a crucial revenue stream to our project so that we can get more of our crucial work funded. OSTIF is kicking-in half of the funding for the new equipment from our own donated funds from previous projects, and we are raising the other half through this KickStarter. We have carefully selected commercial-grade equipment, high quality materials, and gathered volunteers to work on the production of the shirts and wallets.
Pledges of $15 or more will be rewarded with an RFID-blocking wallet that blocks "drive-by" readers from scanning cards in your pocket, engraved with the message of your choice. And donors pledging $18 or more get to choose from their "excellent gallery" of t-shirts. Dozens of artists have contributed more than 40 specially-commissioned "hacker-themed" designs, including "Resist Surveillance" and "Linux is Communism" (riffing on a 2000 remark by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer).

There's also shirts commemorating Edward Snowden (including one with an actual NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden) as well as a mock concert t-shirt for the "world tour" of the EternalBlue exploit listing locations struck after it was weaponized by the NSA. One t-shirt even riffs on the new millennial catchphrase "OK boomer" -- replacing it with the phrase "OK Facebook" using fake Cyrillic text.

And one t-shirt design shows an actual critical flaw found by the OSTIF while reviewing OpenVPN 2.4.0.

So far they have 11 backers, earning $790 of their $45,000 goal.

Netflix's reboot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 made this year's "Best Of" lists from both The New York Times and Rotten Tomatoes. Yet apparently their bosses didn't like them, and have shot them into space.

Forbes reports: In a controversial move poisoning Thanksgiving for many indie comedy fans, Mystery Science Theater 3000 host Jonah Ray tweeted that Netflix has cancelled the young reboot after two seasons... The reprise of Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- whose maiden incarnation made hordes of fans airing on Comedy Central and Syfy throughout the '90s -- ran on Netflix for two seasons and 20 episodes beginning in 2017 after a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign by creator Joel Hodgon fueled its return.

"We don't know what the future holds for the show," Ray added in a later tweet, "it always seemed to figure out how to survive. From Comedy Central to Syfy. Then kept alive by RIFFTRAX & Cinematic Titan. Whatever happens, I want everybody to know that getting a chance to be on this show was a dream come true." Shortly after news of the show's cancellation, Hodgson tweeted reassurance to fans that he'll look to revive the series elsewhere....

Earlier this month, Shout! Factory TV announced the debut of an MST3K Twitch channel that unspools the series and promises to feature "related programming...." Fans can also turn to Pluto TV's 24/7 MST3K channel to gorge on the series pre-Y2K catalogue (1988-99).

The MST3K staff is also currently on a sprawling 60-plus city tour that will stretch into March 2020. In 2008 Joel Hodgson, the show's creator, answered questions from Slashdot readers. "I've been a fan so long, I can't even remember when," posted CmdrTaco. "I've been shuttling my MST coffee mug from desk to desk for like 15 years now, so I'm pretty pumped that he'd waste your time with us."

In a gracious note this week, Hodgson emailed fans that "We've had a wonderful time working with the Netflix team, and will always be grateful to them. After all, they gave us the opportunity to spend the past few years aboard the Satellite of Love, and made it possible for new generations to discover the joys of riffing cheesy movies with your friends..."

Brad McQuaid, best known as a formative hand in the creation of EverQuest, has passed away at the age of 51. From a report: McQuaid's death was reported by the official Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Twitter account, which is the MMO he was working on until his death. A message was also left on the Pantheon MMO forums by user BenD -- Visionary Realms' director of comms Benjamin Dean -- who writes that McQuaid passed away in his home. "Brad was a visionary, a mentor, an artist, a trailblazer, a friend, a husband, a father," the message reads. "He touched thousands of lives with his dreams and concepts. He changed the landscape of video games forever. He will be deeply missed and forever remembered in life and in Pantheon. Thank you, Brad, for bringing us together through your worlds. Rest in peace, Aradune. All of us at Visionary Realms offer our deepest condolences to Brad's family and during this most difficult time, we kindly ask that you respect the privacy of Brad's family."

Known as Aradune in the MMO community, McQuaid joined Sony Online Entertainment in 1996 as a lead programmer and later producer on EverQuest, before later becoming chief creative officer. In 2002 he left SOE and founded Sigil Games, which shipped the MMO Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Sigil Games was eventually purchased by SOE. He briefly rejoined SOE in 2012-2013 before going independent. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen was successfully Kickstarter funded in 2014.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In early September, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter fired two union organizers in 8 days. One of them was Clarissa Redwine, who considered her termination to be a blatant act of retaliation for organizing what could become the first union at a major tech company in the United States. Although Redwine lost her job, she has not given up her vision. Today, she launched "Solidarity Onboarding," a new project designed to help workers unionize the tech industry -- using her former employer's platform. A collaboration between current and former organizers at WeWork, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies and coalitions, the project consists of an onboarding kit (booklet, pin, pencil, sticker) for tech workers interested in unionizing. "This kit is passed between coworkers as an act of solidarity and a signal that there is room to organize at your company," the project states.

"Imagine the mirror image of a company's onboarding kit but for the tech labor movement," Redwine told Motherboard. "The focal point of this onboarding kit is a booklet of anti-worker statements. It's a collection of common talking point companies use to dissuade employees from taking collective action. Think of it as a union-busting artifact passed across companies from worker to worker." Within four hours of the project's launch, Redwine raised over 3 times her goal of $1000. The kit's booklet includes a collection of real anti-union quotes from tech CEOs -- including one from an email Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan sent to his employees in September, in response to the firings of Redwine and another union organizer: "The union framework is inherently adversarial. That dynamic doesn't reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go." Another page includes a statement from an Amazon anti-union training video: "Our business model is built upon speed, innovation, and customer obsession -- things that are generally not associated with a union. When we lose sight of those critical focus areas we jeopardize everyone's job security: yours, mine, and the associates." "Clarissa's creative project is, of course, welcome on our platform," a spokesperson for Kickstarter said. "Kickstarter is a place where creators can share their ideas with the world and find people who want to support those ideas. We also welcome the continued dialogue among our staff members about the idea of a union at Kickstarter. We unequivocally support our staff's right to decide the unionization question for themselves."

"Kickstarter's CEO Aziz Hasan sent an email to staff Friday, explaining why the company fired two staff members and laid off another who played an instrumental role in organizing a union at the company..." reports Motherboard: Hasan insisted that the firings were related specifically to job performance issues, not union organizing. "We understood how these firings could be perceived, but it would be unfair to not hold these two employees to the same standards as the rest of our staff," he wrote. "It's worth noting that since March we've given raises to 14 people who have been public about their support for a union, and promoted three of them...."

In his letter, Hasan asserts that management believes a union would hurt the company and that union organizers have not made their complaints clear to the company. "The union framework is inherently adversarial," he writes. "That dynamic doesn't reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has."

If Kickstarter unionizes, it would be one of the first white collar tech unions in the United States.
The magazine Current Affairs has a different perspective: When the union organizers were fired, Current Affairs happened to be in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign. As a left publication, we were appalled, and didn't want to publicly support an anti-union company. So we got together with our colleagues at Protean Magazine, Pinko Magazine, the Nib, and the Baffler (all of whom had done Kickstarter campaigns in the past) and released a statement condemning the firings and expressing solidarity with the union. We invited other Kickstarter project creators to join us on the statement, which hundreds did, including well-known creators like Neil Gaiman, Anita Sarkeesian, Molly Crabapple, and Richard Herring. Collectively, the creators on our statement have raised millions of dollars on the platform (my estimate is $10 million, but I stopped counting around 5). We were united in (1) appreciating Kickstarter's staff and the great platform they have created and (2) being firmly opposed to the company's anti-union activities and supportive of the workers' rights...

As our campaign took off and started to attract press attention, I received a message from Kickstarter's chief communications officer. He asked me if I would like to talk on the phone so that he could address our concerns.... We did not resolve anything on the conversation, but he said the company was thinking through how to respond and he would be in touch. Saturday, Kickstarter offered its response. The communications officer emailed me, and said he would like to share a statement from the CEO with the project creators. The statement said that Kickstarter:

1. Stood by its decision to fire the organizers, and would be dispatching its lawyers to fight their claims.

2. Would not voluntarily recognize a union even if the vast majority of workers signed in support of one.

3. Would not pledge to remain neutral on unionization, and would continue to actively oppose the effort.

The statement was the most blatant slap in the face imaginable to both the workers and the project creators. It says, in essence: drop dead...

For Current Affairs, it means that we now have to cease using Kickstarter for our fundraising efforts. Who can possibly partner with a company that is actively and proudly trying to union-bust? Why should we give 5 percent of our supporters' money to a corporation that will use it to hire lawyers and P.R. professionals to keep its workers from exercising their rights?

On Monday night, unionizing employees at Kickstarter filed a complaint with the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) for allegedly wrongfully terminating two employees. Both of the employees were on the Kickstarter United organizing campaign. Motherboard reports: Kickstarter told Motherboard that the workers, Clarissa Redwine and Taylor Moore, were fired over performance issues within the past two weeks. But employees at Kickstarter are accusing the company of "discharging employees" because "they joined or supported a labor organization and in order to discourage union activities," according to the NLRB complaint, which was first reported and obtained by Slate's April Glaser. A third employee and member of the Kickstarter United organizing committee, Travis Brace, was informed on Thursday that he would no longer be needed in his role.

In a September 12 email obtained by Motherboard, Aziz Hasan, the CEO of Kickstarter, wrote to employees, "There have been allegations that we are retaliating against union organizing. Those allegations are not true. No Kickstarter employee has been or ever will be fired for union organizing." Redwine says the company complained to her in recent months that she was not satisfactorily working with her managers. She claims that she was not given specific guidance on how she could improve. "Suddenly, after becoming a public union organizer, I started to get very strong negative feedback," Redwine told Motherboard. "After my best quarter at the company, I was told I was being put on a Performance Improvement Plan for slippery reasons like not building trust with my managers. I asked how progress would be tracked over and over and only received answers akin to 'just trust us.' I assume they never crafted the Performance Improvement Plan because they couldn't come up with anything concrete for me to improve." Redwine and Moore are asking for back pay and to be reinstated to their positions. In response to the complaint, Kickstarter said: "We'll be providing the NLRB with information about these firings and supporting documentation."

Kickstarter told Motherboard that it "recently terminated two employees for performance reasons. A third was working on a service we shut down, so his role was eliminated, and there were no other positions here that would be a strong fit. That staff member will be transitioning out of the company. All three of these employees were members of the organizing committee, but this has nothing to do with their departures. (We have fired three other people who were not organizers since March.)"

"We expect all employees -- including union organizers -- to be able to perform in their role and set up their teams and colleagues for success. We use a range of approaches -- twice-a-year performance reviews, peer feedback, manager feedback, one-on-one coaching and, in some cases, mediation -- to ensure that employees have the support they need to meet those expectations. When someone has been through this process and we have sufficient evidence that they are not meeting expectations, we must unfortunately part ways with them," the company continued.