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.
I guess the focus then needs to turn to how we can create these communities, especially when oppression and poverty lead to isolation in many ways. I’m someone for who crowdfunding and selling things online has failed, and I’ve been lucky enough to have a small community, mostly made up of queer and radical friends from high school. I’d imagine that lgbt and leftist groups are good places to start, but those are not accessible to everyone, especially in small conservative towns. I’m kind of just typing as I think here to try to work this out. Maybe local newsletters could help? Creating monthly pamphlets or a bulletin board for people to post avaliable resources? Ive found that creating that kind of community is very difficult, and I don’t know where to really start.
It’s definitely hard, yeah. The tendency to trust each other and invest time in each other has been trained out of most of us since birth and we’re left with the notion that the only people worth investing time in are ‘the One’ romantic partner and maybe a best friend. It’s difficult to overcome that mentality. I think mutual aid starts most often from relationships that already exist, like friends, neighbours, political groups, sports teams, etc. While it is often being done most explicitly from-theory-to-practice in leftist communities it can be done anywhere and from any community.
Sometimes it starts as simple as a poor community saying “hey what if all of us on this street put all our tools in Bill’s shed and everyone gets the keys? That way we’ll all have to buy less tools.” Or a sports team where half a dozen players visit food banks and decide to travel together and share goods from their box. Or a group of trans people holding clothing swaps. From a first good experience with sharing grows another, and another, and another, until it becomes normal and acceptable to help each other out in any crisis, regardless of whether it fits existing sharing plans.
Of course this doesn’t answer the question of how to organize mutual aid between people who are currently entirely isolated. to be honest I have no idea how to effectively organize that. I haven’t seen a single project to fight loneliness that I found effective. Most projects seem to have a far too simplistic approach of ‘just put lonely people in a room together and they’ll be fine’, which ignores the structural reasons of why people are isolated and why they haven’t been able to build connections to others.
I am not very farmiliar with the theory behind the word Mutual Aid and how its practice in envisioned by left-wing theorists, by the way. I’m just babbling from my own experiences.
This is something that religions have historically been very good at. And I explicitly mean more than just Christianity. Having that shared facet of identity, coupled with regular socialization, helps reinforce a sense of community. And having the community hub also be a hub for mutual aid (food banks, clothing drives, fund-raising bake-sales, etc.) helps streamline the process and provide a centralized way to organize things. The trick is to duplicate that sense of shared, organized identity in less religious contexts, and also keep the impetus to help your fellows in need.
In a more secular example, my town has a transgender resource center which provides, among other services, a food bank, clothing swap, legal and medical directories, support groups, employment workshops, and social space. There ends up being a strong sense of comradery and shared struggle, especially among the regulars, and therefore an expectation of mutual aid. And because resources can be donated to one central location, it simplifies organization of aid distribution. We all know that if we need help, we can check there and chances are we’ll find it; and if we are able to help, we can let them know and they’ll put our resources into the hands of people that need them.
Community hub organizations like this make a huge impact on how mutual aid is carried out.
Disclaimer: this is entirely my own experience. Also, it’s 4am where I am and so my thoughts are comparatively incoherent.
That centre sounds super super awesome. I’d agree that having a stable easy to reach location where people can enjoy mutual aid and meet each others face to face is an important amplifier of community building.
QueerAnarchism 