Okay, harsh fact: the fact that so many of us are crowd funding our survival is putting a significant strain on solidarity in our online communities.
The main reason being that we mostly crowdsource in our own circles where most people do not have a lot of money. And with so many people who need to crowd fund expensive things like health care bills, rent and legal fees, there simply isn’t enough readily available money to go around within these mostly marganilized communities. So inevitably a lot of people aren’t going to get what they need this way.
This creates tension in our communities where the Tumblr famous, the white, the skinny, the young, the pretty, inevitably are more succesful at surviving their crowd funding than those who are not. Counter responses often call on individual responsibility, focusing on supporting POC people, not conventionally beautiful people etc, but calling for individual responsibility doesn’t work when systematic privilege defines who has enough audience to make a succesful crowdfunding post. Result: anger, pain, bitterness, in-fighting.
When people are literally dying from poverty (and people are), a failed crowd funding campaign can feel like the community allowed someone to die. Even though what killed them is the state and what stopped the community from helping them is the fact that they were overwhelmed by millions of similar emergencies.
And crowd-funding isn’t like offline mutual aid. You can’t share your last sandwich through crowd funding, or let someone use your shower. You can’t build the interpersonal physical connections that result in the kind of long term systematic support that helps people survive. Instead of having a few friends that support you and that you will support no matter what, with crowd funding you have a crowd of thousands that you feel should help you survive but that will inevitably consistently let you down because they do not have money either and because algorithms of what gets views and what doesn’t are unpredictable.
Then there’s the fact that crowd funding campaigns are easy to fake, the fact that crowd funding forces people to put on displays of their suffering,the fact that when being liked means surviving, our communities become coercive.
crowd funding also exposes people to groups that want to harm them, etc. I could go on. Crowd funding our survival poses great challenge to community building.
This isn’t the fault of people who feel the need to crowdfund their survival but it is still a fact we have to deal with as a community.
And if Trump, the Tories and all the other fuckers that are ruining our countries right now are getting their way, the number of us that feel forced to crowd fund our survival will get much much bigger while the means we have to help them will get less. People are dying because governments deny them to means to live, that is only going to get worse. We need an answer to this fast because it could potentially destroy what online communities we have.
What if someone built like an app or something so people living near each other could help each other out? Like the sandwich or shower mentioned. It could also have other resources that point people in need to organizations that will help
Hey, I love brainstorming like this & thank you for writing it.
There are some potential problems with apps like this, such as the fact that there is a huge tendency for apps like this to put some kind of compensation in place of the help offered, which quickly turns it into liberal trash like airbnb and uber. Only coachsurfing created something that functioned as a free exchange that could not be commercialized all that easily. And of course safety is an issue, especially when dealing with aid shared between vulnerable people.
Another more fundamental issue is that sharing things for free in systems of mutual aid really isn’t done out of selflessness all that much. Mutual aid in a community is done out of a sense of trusting/knowing that your community will help you when you need it. You don’t need to count how many sandwishes you give away when you KNOW that when you’re hungry and out of sandwishes someone will make you pizza. Mutual aid is a safety net that can catch you when you need it and that feels good every day, which is why you invest in building and maintaining it.
That sort of trust and consistency comes from long term community building, and those can be communities so big that not everyone knows everyone as long as they are consistent in their practice of mutual aid. So far no app or online platform has proved capable of creating that level of trust and consistency between its users. I think that puts serious limits on how much mutual aid can be organized through apps.
I do think apps can be a great organizing tool. I know of a CPR emergency app where the nearest people with medical training were told to go to an emergency and they managed an average response time of less than 2 minutes while emergency services in that region had a 12 minute response time. They saved toooooooons of lives. Like, it was amazing.
So yeah, apps can be fantastic! But when we build apps we need to be very honest about how and why we share, and we need to resist the temptation of needlessly putting everything online and consider that some things are organized better face to face.
Like, I would much rather have 1 friend or neighbour that I can always count if to share their shower when my water gets cut off, than a thousand online strangers who might maybe share their shower if my reviews are good and my profile has a photo.
