Shut Up and Take My Money

Kickstarter’s transformed the landscape for funding creative projects, but it's also launched a new movement of fans as producers — people commissioning work from artists directly instead of waiting for artists to come to them. This is the story of XOXO, an arts & technology festival that became the most-funded event on Kickstarter, and the future of fans replacing traditional labels, publishers, and studios.

Andy Baio is a writer and coder who loves making things. His latest projects include XOXO, a four-day conference and festival in Portland, and Playfic, a community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games. He's an advisor and the former CTO of Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding site in the world, produced Kind of Bloop, the first and only chiptune jazz album, and created Upcoming, the collaborative events calendar acquired by Yahoo in 2005. He writes a weekly column for Wired.com, and original reporting on his blog Waxy.org has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, NPR, Newsweek, and MSNBC.