Fraud for Good

 

                                                Palm trees on campus*. Photo by Lucy Bernholz

I've always doubted the effective altruism (EA) approach. Making as much money as you can so you can give it away is 1) an individual approach to societal problems, 2) a fancy way of alleviating rich people's guilty consciences, and 3) the focus on self-made metrics contributes to the distancing of donors from communities. In my snarky moments I've been known to point out that the most ardent adherents of EA seemed to be quant jocks and philosophers - two groups that tend to complicate things rather than simplify them. The self-referential and self-aggrandizing nature of many EA adherents is a big put-off. Longtermism seems to me to result in a lot of vanity projects. I could go on and on. And in fact, I do, go on and on a bit in the forthcoming Blueprint 2023. 

All that being said, some of the EA's most influential thinkers did the right thing by immediately resigning from the FTX Future Fund (Sam Bankman-Fried's EA-committed philanthropic fund) immediately upon hearing of the financial shenanigans and bankruptcy of FTX and for calling out their concerns about fraud. In their words:

"We are now unable to perform our work or process grants, and we have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund. As a result, we resigned earlier today.

We don’t yet have a full picture of what went wrong, and we are following the news online as it unfolds. But to the extent that the leadership of FTX may have engaged in deception or dishonesty, we condemn that behavior in the strongest possible terms. We believe that being a good actor in the world means striving to act with honesty and integrity."

So, fraudulent behavior in the name of good acts is not OK. That oughta be obvious and the individuals involved above commended on their actions. 

But fraud in the name of good is not only an individual problem. We've built a larger system of giving and philanthropic adoration that repeatedly and reliably sets up philanthropic acts as a cover up for bad corporate and billionaire behavior. Bad behavior is not the same as fraud, but the former might be a gateway drug to the latter. 

• Time after time we get stories such as Bezos gives $100 million to Dolly Parton and promises to give away his fortune sitting one column away from stories about layoffs, union busting, safety concerns, surveillance-expanding devices, etc. at Amazon. 
• The Sackler family philanthropy and oxycontin profits. 

The two stories above are probably better thought of as "philanthropy-washing" then fraud.  If the concerns about FTX turn out to be true, then it will go down as a massive scam which conned itself out of public, regulatory, and investor oversight, at least partly through its philanthropic claims.

As a long time critic of "[Blank] for good" initiatives from tech companies and others, the idea of committing fraud for good is more than just a bit of schadenfreude. It's a warning to all of us. The entanglement of profit-making and good-doing is problematic in so many ways that labeling it all "fraud for good" is just too tempting. 

What will come of all this? Charitable donations may be clawed back to repay investors. That alone says much about the priorities of this dynamic and the way things are regulated.

I suspect we'll see more organizations establishing donation policies regarding crypto-wealth generated donations. The rise of research into tech's social harms has already led many such groups to declare tech wealth off limits; just as the ACLU has long shunned government funding and Consumer Reports doesn't take corporate money from product companies. Tobacco and fossil fuel company donations led the way in being seen as "toxic;" we're likely to see ever more domains of industry put into those categories. 

Bibliography - other links on FTX and philanthropy

Chronicle of Philanthropy (may be paywalled) 

Forbes 

The Atlantic

The Washington Post

Financial Times

Critiques of effective altruism (publishing sites listed below; opinions are those of the authors)

Radical Philosophy

Wharton

SSIR

New Statesman

*I took this picture on the Stanford campus in November, 2022. I've often joked to people that "even the palm trees on campus have donor plaques on them." This is not true, but if it were, I'd guess the tree on the right front side of the picture (the one without a top) is the "FTX palm."

 

Digital civil society rises amid commercial turmoil

NOTE About this post: I'm trying to make sense of something happening around me rapidly. Will be back to revise my thinking and (I hope) improve the text.

The following post is about the chaos that is now Twitter, the growth in the #fediverse, the damage being done in real time to disbursed communities of people and activists, the possibilities of digital civil society coming through to shine, and the need to think carefully and collectively. There is some terminology that may be new to readers. See below.*

Half the staff of Twitter was laid off on Friday, November 4 including members of the human rights, accessibility, and election integrity teams. The local news (here in San Francisco) is that layoffs are coming to Meta (Facebook), Uber, Lyft, Stripe, etc. See this layoff tracker. These are a big deal in my region - lots of jobs lost. This also means lots of people with (potentially) a vested interest in and relevant skills for digital civil society. Some non-tech companies wasted no time in reaching out to the newly unemployed. This isn't only a Bay Area phenomenon - the companies, their workforces, and digital civil society are all global.

****

Let's get some speculation out of the way:

What if we take him at his word? The new owner of a certain social media site favored by journalists has said his goal is to turn the site into something else. Specifically, X - an all in one app such as WeChat. Communication, payment, retail, transport, etc. 

So, there's that. He's not trying to save the site, he's trying to destroy it. And chaos is his tactic.

Now, building something new may be his goal. But destroying things that he (and many others) don't like is also happening. Perhaps it's a consequence, perhaps it's intentional. Certainly the chaos is intentional. For those in the U.S.A. we've seen this before: 2017-2021 this was the primary communication tactic coming from the former president. Make headlines, deal with fallout by making more headlines, don't like that, try this. "Hey, look, squirrel." 

There's no doubt that Twitter is falling apart and that a single person is wielding the sledgehammer.

The purchase, the lawsuit and backtracking, the firings, the chaos, the timing are almost fictional in their sly but public, obvious but "conspiracy theory?-esque", could be deliberate, could be just beneficial fallout kind-of way.A good writer could build a whole narrative around the backroom cabals of pleading millionaires (whose whining was outed as part of a headfake lawsuit), the entanglement with politicians and political groups quite proudly and publicly intent on voter suppression, one-party rule, the end of free and fair elections, and the new owner's apparently primary source of pleasure, trolling. 

Speculate away. 

****

There's no doubt that the collapse of Twitter (intentional, deliberate, self-inflicted, self-protective) is causing chaos for on the ground organizers and carefully-built communities. People with disabilities. Communities of color. Queer communities. Critics of power - technological, financial, and political. Some are finding their accounts suddenly closed.

The chaos is destructive to public protest, community organizing, and distributed networks of grassroots power,

Many people fleeing Twitter are headed over to the #fediverse,* trying to learn the customs and protocols, being schooled in community practice, and desperately seeking their previous connections. You can watch in real time as people leave Twitter and come rushing in the doors of Mastodon or other parts of the #fediverse. In less than a week, the vibe in the new place has started to shade from "Hey, I'm new here, how do I participate?" to "Let me continue to act like I did over there, bring some self-promotion with me, criticize the norms over here and see how quickly we can change the #fediverse to be familiar, rather than change our behavior to fit in." (slightly overblown, but you can see it now, around the edges)

From the perspective of digital civil society (dcs) - this is our moment. People hosting #fediverse servers have long been part of digital civil society. Volunteers making spaces for online communities - one of the oldest behaviors in a networked world. People who have only ever used commercial services like Twitter and Facebook and who have either 1) developed every trick in the book to outmaneuver the algorithms and data extraction or 2) made peace with the cost of using those services for their greater need of community finding/building instead have a chance to participate in and help expand/deepen digital systems that are as fragmented, diverse, and pluralistic as the best of physical world civil society. We can build alliances, norms, and call out bad behavior. We can find our own people and interact with potential allies. We can build apps and practices on top of what is already there - being careful not to destroy this digital world by demanding it look like, act like, feel like the rotted systems of Twitter and Facebook that seem comfortingly familiar. The familiar is poisonous in this case. The analogy of climate change is sitting right there. Don't build more of destructive ways, try different ones.

This is an amazing moment to experience community-led, less-extractive, less corporatized digital life. It's not perfect (privacy is...complicated), and it's open for you to help improve it. It takes learning and time - just like moving to a new community should. People there need help, and they are asking for it. Communities that were connected via the commercial platforms are seeking ways and places to rebuild and reconnect. They're wise to watch and learn. First mover advantage is a corporate mindset. Careful community building might be yours, instead. 

Having your online community blasted apart is painful. For many, the effort to rebuild is enormous. People with chronic illnesses and disabilities and other communities BY DEFINITION can't jump up and move, not physically and not digitally. While healthy people with the time to do so are moving on  to find new digital homes they're not organizing or getting out the vote, they're still busy understanding what differentiates a toot from a tweet.* While journalism and even site users are pre-occupied with the finances of a billionaire, the election misinformation and manipulation runs amok.

Let it be noted - online communities for marginalized people, coordinated GOTV efforts, election protection, and disinformation removal were blasted apart five days before an election. We will look back at this period through the lens of election outcomes first. Right now, I'm urging you to experience the period while understanding the harm that's been inflicted. We will rebuild our online communities, and in doing so, I hope we keep the confusion and pain of this period alive in our memories, for whatever we join into or build anew should be designed to prevent this from ever again happening.

I do want to note that parts of digital civil society are ready for this. There are institutions ready to Reboot Social Media. Scholars and builders redesigning digital public infrastructure. New_Public has been hosting discussions on better digital media and now there's Project Mushroom. (I"m sure there are many more of these efforts - send them along to me, please) 

Some of these examples are coming from big, wealthy institutions. The people doing the community building and organizing, they may still be reflecting, reconsidering, and resting. Both are important parts of digital civil society. 

Digital civil society's moment is now. The wheels are coming off - or at least starting to wobble on - the big, commercial, data extractive sites of Twitter and Facebook. There's open space for communities, activists, technologists, civic leaders, and community organizers to build digital systems that they can influence, even control. All that "tech for good" project work? Time to try it out in a world without a dominant commercial social media site. This is a moment, it may not last. Twitter is reeling and Facebook's corporate owner is firing people and piling money into other products. Don't doubt for a minute that other commercial sites - IG, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr - they're busy trying to capture as many people as they can during this period of turmoil. We too, the makers and thinkers and builders of digital civil society, can do this also. We're the ones those companies want to lock in, so there's not better time to find our own way and make our own spaces.

*Some terminology

#Fediverse. This is the collective noun to describe thousands of independent servers connected via a shared protocol, that allow people to set up accounts and communicate with others, anywhere on any server. Most of the servers are run by individuals or community groups, paid for by the hosts or crowdfunded donations. Each host sets their own rules. Joining the #fediverse now is not unlike joining Twitter in 2008. You have to find the people you want to interact with, curate your own community. There is no master algorithm feeding things into your line of vision. The fediverse includes well-established but previously niche groups, marked by diversity of almost all kinds (right wing hate groups and sites cannot be connected to some servers), and focused on community-built communication and community building spaces.

Mastodon. Part of the #fediverse. Like Twitter, its mostly text sharing, with space for photos and videos. Also links to other parts of the fediverse that are dedicated to sharing photos, videos, etc. Mastodon is getting a LOT OF PRESS, but it's only one part. By end of this week it's fair to guess that every mainstream paper, magazine, news site in the US will have run or linked to a "How-to" guide to Mastodon. Likely true in other parts of the world also. 

Tweet: what one posts on Twitter. 

Toot: what one posts on Mastodon.

Digital dependencies in civil society, November 2022 edition

 

                                 [Photo by Lars Kienle on Unsplash. ALT - picture of red computer cables running                                     from a server].

We founded the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford in 2014 to examine and act on the ways digital dependencies effect civil society. How does a global exoskeleton of corporatized infrastructure and government/corporate data surveillance change how people take collective action? How are people taking collective action to influence that infrastructure and exoskeleton? What skills, expertise, and practices do nonprofits, foundations and other associations need access to in order to collect, use, store, and destroy data safely and effectively?

If you've been following me, you know I obsess about these issues. 

I fear for how these dependencies are playing out. For the first time since I started writing this blog in 2002, the technology companies that are responsible for much of this infrastructure are facing economic headwinds.  They did fine through 2008 and have so far flourished through the pandemic. Today, not so much.

I live in San Francisco, where the city as a whole (and the actual city government) await the fallout of Elon Musk's bravura. We have an election on Tuesday in the U.S. By Tuesday, Twitter will have half as many staff as it does today. The company's ability to prevent deliberate attacks on the truth was already minimal; it will fail as a source of reliable information by Tuesday. But will people, journalists, election officials, candidates, and political parties recognize it's frailty? Probably not. Much more likely is the deliberate exploitation of the corporate chaos to wreak election havoc.

The company's ability to protect it's data (your data, if you're on the platform) is already suspect. Musk needs to pay the debt he's loaded onto the company. Your data is not safe. All the threads, the DMs, the location information, the metadata on who interacts with whom. Not secure, not safe, probably for sale and easy to steal.

For those of us in the U.S., turning to Twitter for election information will need to be seen as an experiment in truth-finding. I don't know of measures of this, but I'll bet the ratio of deliberate deception to truth telling on the platform trips to more election lies even than cat photos no later than Monday. Tuesday night election reporting is going to be a fiasco. In addition to Twitter's problems, Tik Tok is setting new records for synthetic data, e.g. deepfakes. Jurisdictions across the country have implemented procedures that will slow vote counting, so that the "Tuesday night, just claim [you] won" tactic is normalized across the nation.  What should be denial of the reliability of social media will be presented as denial of the reliability of elections. 

Your nonprofit or foundation or association needs to reconsider it's use of social media. Organizers, protestors, community organizations, activists - they're not safe now. From Kviv to Tigray, people in distress have relied on Twitter to find and offer help. Going forward this won't be safe, and the data lives on from all our past uses. How is your organization, your communication team, your lawyers, evaluators, program and constituent services staff preparing to distinguish and tell truths from lies? How are you preparing to protect the data you have - and the relationships mapped out by your social media interactions (which is manifested in data that Twitter holds)? Are you moving off Twitter? Where are you going? What about the other platforms you use - what lessons will you learn from Twitter's public car wreck and apply to uses of other data collection services such as Facebook, Salesforce, or your payroll company?

At a minimum: Request your twitter archive. Download it. Deactivate/Delete it. None of this protects your past, but it may limit your future harm.

Try something new. Like the fediverse - the open source, interconnected system on which you can set up an account and build a community of people and organizations and interests (and cats) without an algorithm doing the work for you. You can find me over there - @p2173@mastodon.social. 

And, please, "doubt, then verify," everything you see on social media.

Paths from systems failure

I'm pleased to say I'm working on the Blueprint 2023. This will be the 14th annual edition. I wasn't sure what would happen this year, given how sick I've been. Thanks to a small group of critical collaborators, there will be a Blueprint dropping in December. 

As always you can find past versions here and here. 

I'm thinking about it because I just read this article in Alliance Magazine, reflecting on Indy Johar's words to the PEX network in Europe.  First, you should check out Dark Matters Lab, where Indy works. They do very cool thinking. 

Here's the key point he made: 

            "We are on the path to systems failure, he says, and the timescale is three to five years."                                                                                 (Alliance article is paywalled)

In some cases, I think his timeline is too generous. He's clear in the article that he's talking about global systems - food crises, inflation, and displacement. I've been thinking about the systems I deal with directly, here in the U.S.:

• The healthcare system has failed and is failing. Children's hospitals across the country are overflowing, and many have been closed or converted to adult hospitals which make more money. So we're choosing for children to die. I have private insurance and access to best medical care - systems is barely able to meet my long Covid needs - can't be working for anyone.
  
• Public education systems are failing. Underinvestment, teacher burnout, and direct attacks, sometimes violent, on school boards as part of a larger effort to break democracy - all out in the open, all visible. Particularly tied to demographic change and racism. 
• Employment. We've seen the numbers of chronically ill and disabled people increase dramatically. How many of you work in a place that is actually proactively preparing for a workforce where 1 in 20 people need accommodations? It's easy to imagine a much better working life for everyone if all the systems were designed to help disabled people flourish, but the system doesn't and chances are your workplace doesn't either. 
• Higher education. Here the national trend seems to be to double down on a handful of elite, private universities, sell of our public universities for parts (or outsource teaching to online platforms), and then decry the inequitable system. Don't overlook the billionaires who used the student loan industry to rip-off hundreds of thousands of people now working back rooms to protect their own golden geese. 
• Electoral politics, campaign finance. If you have to ask....
• Nonprofits as service providers. Outsourced, unaccountable public services being delivered at below market rates surrounded by dark money flooded social welfare organizations designed to launder money into political power. 
• News and civic discourse. Seriously? Where - Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? Your local independent newspaper or the one that's a facade for one or the other political extremes?

In the Blueprint, I write about trying to write the future in the present tense. The best work in this regard was done by Octavia Butler. A good recent example is Bruce Holsinger's novel, The Displacements (highly recommend). Doing this for yourself is important - it's not if a natural disaster happens, it's what to do after it has happened. Not if a pandemic virus disables you, but afterward. Not if elections lead to violence, but after they've continued to do so for several cycles. Not if the population is being lead to radicalization and violence, but after this has taken leadership hold across several countries and being terrorized as a citizen is sanctioned state practice (again, familiar to many for centuries) within nominal democracies.

Basically, at the root of each of those failures above are deliberate, decades-long efforts to serve the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Private money speaks; public access, equitable service, equal rights before the law - nice concepts, not reality.  The future of systems failure is the present (and past, for many). 

The challenge, I think, is acknowledging this. It requires an inversion of time in which the worst case projection is marked down as status quo, and change begins from there.

It's a little like becoming chronically ill on a collective scale. As I've been sick for 10 months (the blink of an eye compared to many) I've noticed changes in my understanding of time. Am I sick now, trying to get better? Am I holding on, waiting for research, cures, or new treatment? Or do I live each day doing the most and best I can, because the future is only bleaker? Or can I do both, plus adapt to new abilities and pursue alternative dreams based on my new limits? Do I set my baseline to before I got sick, how I feel now, or how bad this might get? Am I recovering, waiting, or living?

I'll work the health part out for myself (with lots of community and professional support). But these questions apply to the systems noted above, about the world writ large, the people I care about and people I'll never meet. Our baselines were pretty bad and in many cases, the worst futures are very much the current present for so many people. It's not about future system collapse failure, but existing failures - and the hope and commitment to begin anew.