Kickstarter of Doom: Hoax Site ‘Funds’ Torture Bus, Death Drones

Among the offerings: an all-seeing drone armed with “a new kind of explosive” promising to cut down on civilian casualties, or a bus packed with a rolling “enhanced interrogation” center.

Just one thing, and it’s a spoiler alert: The site, Kickstriker, is an obvious hoax — one meant to get you thinking about how a world of crowdfunded warfare might not be so far away.

“Polemically, that’s really interesting,” says Clay Shirky, the NYU professor and internet theorist, out of whose communications tech class the idea was born, “but that’s actually a thing that could happen, given that there are these guns for hire. What would it take to create a crowdsourced hire of [mercenaries]?”

Kickstriker, a site only a few days old, bills itself as a way for average citizens “who care” to support the resolution of intractable wars. “Following the massive success of Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012′ campaign, we found ourselves excited about the potential that crowdsourcing held for addressing global conflicts,” reads its About page. “Disappointed” by the backlash to Kony 2012′s messianism, comfort with U.S. military intervention and disquieting racial undertones, the crew of three Shirky students sought to “cut out the middleman in online activism.”