Bare Ass on a Mountain, $15,000

Somewhere along the way, Kickstarter became a place where a man named Chris could sincerely ask fifteen thousand dollars to stand on American mountains with his ass out. Not as performance art—or maybe as performance art, the line being irrelevant. Holly wanted eleven thousand to place her metal penis on tables. Eric wanted seventeen thousand to make a deliberately bad copy of Monopoly. All of this was real. All of this was funded, or attempted to be funded, by actual human beings with actual money.

A Tumblr called Your Kickstarter Sucks catalogued the worst of them, and it was one of those websites that made you feel two contradictory things at once: grateful the internet exists, and genuinely worried about what we’re doing with it. The projects weren’t just bad—they were a specific flavor of delusional that requires an audience to sustain itself. Crowdfunding turned out to be less about democratizing creativity and more about providing a stage for people who needed a friend to talk them out of it. Chris had no such friend. Neither did Holly. God bless them both.