You’re three months into your nonprofit job in the city, and you’re getting through a book a week on BART. This week, you read the philosopher Peter Singer’s book on effective altruism, The Most Good You Can Do. His book tells you to make a lot of money and then think really carefully about how to donate that money to optimize for doing good.
You can’t do the “make a lot of money” part, but you are so taken by his thought experiment “Would you visit this new wing of a museum if you had to kill a small child to do it?” that you decisively close the SFMOMA membership tab you left open on Chrome for three weeks. That $100 could save a child. You could buy 10 bed nets and stave off malaria (the most effective altruists are bed-net superfans)!
You learn the art of the “light touch” email, of sending gift baskets at the right time, of ordering handwritten thank-you cards online for $5 that are scrawled out by a robotic arm—or by small slave children, you guess.
Instead, you wander down Valencia and spend $50 on a shirt from Everlane. You read that their Chinese factories are ethical Chinese factories. This means your shapeless clothing will not be made by suffering children — just suffering adults. While admiring yourself in the mirror, you consider actually becoming an effective altruist and donating all your money to charities that make bed nets. Or something.
The nonprofit you work for does not make bed nets. Your job is entering information about potential donors into soulless Salesforce columns. This rich white woman published a book about giving and—based on her Stanford-studded bio—never left Palo Alto. This rich white man runs a foundation, and maybe we could get their money. You learn the art of the “light touch” email, of sending gift baskets at the right time, of ordering handwritten thank-you cards online for $5 that are scrawled out by a robotic arm—or by small slave children, you guess. You don’t really know which, but probably the first, because rent for the small slave children in San Francisco would cost more than the profit from the cards. You pat yourself on the back for having dodged small-child slave labor yet again.
You send the robot-hand thank-you card to an address somewhere on the water in Marin and stalk the recipient online, pretending to look for information you can add to Salesforce. You find their wedding from decades before you were born in the society pages of the New York Times. The wife is described as a “philanthropist.” Her description has always been just “philanthropist.” This is code for I Have Never Worked for Money. You are deeply curious about how to attain this station in life. It seems to be as simple as the following: Step 1) make money, maybe from defense-contracting or manufacturing carcinogenic products or underpaying your workers; step 2) donate; step 3) receive public adulation for giving back.
Apparently, the decision on where to give depends—a little—on who sends philanthropists pretty cards.
If he buys enough bed nets, will it cancel out the imprisoned political dissidents?
Politely begging for money from the scions of industry in 2018 makes you feel regressive, powerless and small. You wonder if you’re just a cog in a machine that enables the rich to exert disproportionate—and undemocratic—influence in society through arbitrary philanthropic giving. You went to all those protests in college for this? But you’ve already sat in your chair past 5:00 p.m., lost in this thought, so you decide to hit happy hour.
Time to drown your feelings about accidentally becoming a neoliberal shill in a pink cocktail that your corporate techie friend pays for! You ask him what he does at work, exactly. He says he makes surveillance technology for authoritarian regimes. You laugh. He’s not joking. You know without asking that he makes twice as much as you per year. You wonder how much of that he donates to charity. If he buys enough bed nets, will it cancel out the imprisoned political dissidents?
You think you should probably spend time outside the SFMOMA hanging out with underserved communities. Instead, you read white papers about them.
Two drinks later, another thought: if he gives enough, will he be a better person than you?
You go to an event where you meet some young start-up types vaguely interested in doing good. Everyone eats Soylent and has really good skin. You mention you’ve been thinking about Peter Singer’s thought experiment. Only when you look it up, you realize you misremembered. It wasn’t about children at all, just an evil demon (yes, really) striking down one out of every one hundred museum visitors with 15 years of blindness. You want to justify spending so much money on that Everlane shirt, so you tell yourself you can wear it when meeting with a potential funder. Maybe you will take them to the SFMOMA.
Trying to Do the Most Good means you are now weighing everyone’s impact on a scale in your head that is weighted against you.
You think you should probably spend time outside the SFMOMA, hanging out with underserved communities. Instead, you read white papers about them. Once you rode Caltrain and saw a homeless guy standing on the platform. A police officer approached him from behind. He paused for a second, and you craned your neck back to watch him as the train moved away. The officer had stopped to put on a pair of latex gloves. There was something about this moment of distancing that seemed unspeakably cruel.
You wonder if you do the same thing every day.
You take BART back to Berkeley, where your CS-grad-student friend is not impressed by your diligent efforts to avoid wearing threads woven together by the hands of small enslaved children. He calls this “virtue signaling.” He calls a lot of things “virtue signaling.” You have a sneaking suspicion that any moral choice he deems too burdensome is virtue signaling. You want to assign him to the Basket of Deplorables and leave it at that. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, because he’s nice. Also, he worked on a famous open-source cluster-computing framework. You don’t understand exactly what that is, but you know that a lot of people use it — probably more people than have read your thinkpieces. Trying to Do the Most Good means you are now weighing everyone’s impact on a scale in your head that is weighted against you. When you get to the pearly gates and St. Peter (Singer) counts you up, what if your friend bounds ahead?
You feel insecure enough after comparing yourself to him that you donate on Facebook to the campaign all your friends are donating to right now. You uncheck the Public setting, because you don’t want anyone to think your goodwill is superficial. After all, you really do care about the organization you just gave $10 to. At least, you’re satisfied that it’s doing good things, given how many other people just gave money.
You wonder if somewhere in a small nonprofit office in another state, someone who looks like you is putting your name in Salesforce.
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Alexia Tsotsis, former co-editor of TechCrunch. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
Aarti Shahani (Technology reporter at NPR):
