SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Roger Davis, and this week uh it's just me again, uh doing a deep dive, and I want to talk about the platformization of philanthropy. Not necessarily a particularly comfortable neologism that, but uh I tried platformification and that felt even worse. So I thought we'd stick with platformization. But essentially what we're trying to get at here is uh a really interesting trend that I think is very apparent at the moment, and one that I've been thinking about and kind of doing work on for a few years now from various different angles, as you will be able to tell during the course of this podcast when I refer to uh my own work uh endlessly. But where philanthropy is increasingly something that is being done less through kind of traditional intermediary organizations, the kind of registered charities and non-profits, and more and more being done online via platforms of one kind or another. So I mean I guess to set the scene, I think it's worth saying, you know, there's obviously been a growth in online giving over the last decade and more. I think some of the predictions about the extent to which online giving would become the norm and take over from traditional cash giving uh need to be taken with something of a pinch of of salt, because I think you know some of the more uh outlandish and and tech optimistic of those predictions have yet to come true. But I think it is also the case that during the pandemic, particularly, the sort of enforced shift to digital that so many organizations had to make and the the reality that people who wanted to give to charity found um certainly during that initial period of lockdown um when in-person events and fundraising were extremely restricted, if not entirely absent, people did shift their behaviour to giving online. So it was a huge spike in online donations. And then as society opened back up again, um, there's been something of a rebalancing with kind of a decline again in online donations, so that they're not necessarily outstripping cash donations enormously anymore, but that but the the behaviour is kind of levelled off at a much higher rate than it was before, so actually the kind of prevalence of online donations has stayed much higher. So I think it's kind of embedded that behaviour in many people. And lots of people have sort of seen this as a trend. So I remember seeing um a couple of years ago now Bill Gates talking about what he saw as kind of big trends coming up in philanthropy, and one that he identified was was that he thought post-pandemic there would be a kind of growth and democratization of charitable giving and philanthropy um as a result of people using these new kind of platform-based approaches. And in this episode, I want to kind of explore a few things about what that means. I mean, as ever, I think with a a lot of things to do with the impacts of technology on philanthropy, there are both opportunities um to do new things and to do, you know, existing things better, but also some new challenges um as well in terms of kind of unintended consequences that they throw up or sort of old challenges that we will end up rediscovering. So I think, you know, in terms of some of the big questions that we want to be asking, um, you know, there's a lot of discussion more broadly in society at the moment about platforms and the role that they play, and we'll come onto that in a moment as to sort of see why. But I think the questions that we're seeing out there in kind of mainstream debate in many ways are the ones that are relevant to philanthropy too. So, you know, who controls these platforms and what motivates or drives them? What are what are their incentives? Uh, are there risks to our growing dependence on these platforms? You know, have we fallen into the trap of assuming that they're actually shared public digital infrastructure when they're not? They are kind of commercially owned enterprises that that have their own kind of drivers and motivations. I think it's a really interesting set of questions that I want to focus on on how giving via platforms might come to shape the choices that we're presenting with when it comes to philanthropy. I think also on the other side, that's kind of about giving and the transactions of giving and sort of uh the transfer of financial resources. But also, will some of these platforms uh have a huge impact on the ways in which we're able to organize as well? So the sort of governance and organizational structures. And this ties into sort of two linked trends, I think, that we see um in terms of platformization. One is around disintermediation, so the sort of removal of traditional middlemen or kind of intermediaries between the donor and the end recipient, and decentralization, so the kind of removal of centralized or hierarchical organizational structures and allowing people to work in kind of looser, more networked, less hierarchical or kind of horizontally organized ways. And I think both of these are really important and there are some overlaps, but they also they kind of will take us in different directions potentially, so they're they're worth looking at um each uh in their own right. Um, and then I guess just want to think about how this platformization of philanthropy might develop into the future as well, because I think it's always worth trying to take some of the existing trends uh and extrapolate them that bit further. So I think a good place to start is just to think about platforms in the wider context of um the economy. And you know, lots of people would argue that we now exist in a platform economy. And the real uh sort of change here I always think of is one where we're shifting from a model of kind of owner-operators, so companies that own particular assets and control them and sell or or rent them out to to people who need them, to a model in which the the companies themselves are platforms. So they they don't own the assets themselves necessarily, but they act as a focal point that allows people who have need of a product or service to find other people or companies or organizations that are able to provide them with that. So the platform sort of sits in the middle and acts as a broker or or as a kind of um intermediary that provides the information and allows people to find those products and services. So, you know, I've heard people say before that as a result of this sort of platformization of the economy, actually, you know, when you think about some of the biggest companies in the world now, for instance, you know, the biggest transport company in the world, arguably, is Uber. Now, Uber doesn't really own any cars, you know, it kind of controls a huge network of drivers, each who own their own cars. Similarly, if you think about something like YouTube, you know, actually, I mean, okay, yes, increasingly YouTube does own uh some of its own content and produces it, but actually historically, you know, it didn't produce any content. It was just somewhere where content creators and content consumers could kind of find one another and the platform allowed them to do that. Um and the same thing is true, you know, property, say for Airbnb. Again, Airbnb doesn't own any of its own property, but it allows people who have property that they want to rent out to do so, and people who are looking for that property to find it. I think you know this this is kind of the the big shift. Um I think it is worth at this point saying that's one of the points where we are we're starting to see some skepticism, because actually I think there's this there's an extent to which platforms have found it convenient to uh represent themselves as such, or the companies that claim to be platforms have found it uh useful to do so. Because in some ways you get to have your cake and eat it, in that you get to uh reap all the benefits of providing those products and services, but actually you can craft a narrative where you avoid any of the accountability or responsibility that comes with it, and that's certainly something that we're seeing at the moment with various different kinds of controversies about uh about whether platforms are actually just platforms or whether they in some senses are kind of um you know broadcasters or should be seen as responsible for the the content that they host. The most notable example of that, obviously, at the moment, is the ongoing controversy with Spotify um and its hosting of the Joe Rogan podcast. Now, the for anybody who's somehow been you know living under a rock or in a cave or both and missed this story, essentially Joe Rogan is an American podcaster who is inexplicably to me, but uh has the most uh popular podcast in the world, I believe. Um, and he often gets on people with sort of fairly reprehensible views, uh, sort of people with far right and racist views, um, but also increasingly kind of people with anti-vax views, um, and you know, as a result disseminates large amounts of misinformation uh through his you know extremely wide reach to an audience around the world. And people, you know, a growing number of people sort of criticized Spotify for this, particularly I think because they shifted from not just sort of passively hosting the podcast as they do with all the others, but they invested millions of dollars into Joe Rogan's podcast to support it and kind of develop it. So they almost kind of took a slightly uh you know more of an ownership role in relation to it. And as a result, various other artists who have their uh content on the podcast, so Neil Young, uh Joni Mitchell, the comedian Stuart Lee, and and various others have said that they want their own content removed from Spotify as a platform because they're not happy, you know, basically in protest to say until they're trying to take Joe Rogan off the air. And Spotify, it's interesting, I guess, unlike some other platforms that have very heavily kind of push back against any suggestion that they should take responsibility for the content that's on on their platform, have accepted some measure of responsibility, although to be honest, in a fairly kind of tepid way, and they've put sort of w not even warnings, but a you know, a little bit of inform of um uh kind of guidance on the Joe Rogan podcast saying here are some other places that you can go maybe to find some uh information uh about COVID uh and vaccines. Um so you know it's it's it's hardly uh kind of a clear-cut win for the for the protesters, but it's sort of interesting to see that that's what they're they're doing. I think you know the the other uh controversy that we have, apart from the question of what the responsibilities of the platforms themselves are, which again we will come back to very much uh in a moment in the specific context of Philanthby, is just around the the arguments about whether actually um the sort of platformization of the economy has led to any kind of disintermediation or decentralization. It's often presented as a kind of empowering narrative of disruptive platforms coming into the economy and getting rid of the incumbents and sort of stripping out layers of inefficiency and this kind of thing. Um and to some extent, I suppose that's true in that they do uh sometimes remove a number of links from particular chains between consumers and producers or people who kind of want a service and the people providing them. But equally, what we're actually doing in a way is kind of concentrating more and more power in a smaller number of hands, because we're all very now we're now very reliant on a sort of small number of platforms as gatekeepers, um, and actually the level of power that we have given those platforms to dict dictate the choices that we're presented with and how those choices are given to us is actually quite frightening when you think about it. Um and that's certainly true for the the world of civil society and philanthropy, um, particularly as we'll see, because you know, increasingly I think there we're talking about the use of commercial platforms rather than platforms that are non-profit specific and maybe have a kind of embedded social purpose. So moving on to that specific question around kind of platform philanthropy, what is the current state of the platformization of philanthropy? Um, well, obviously, as we've said, there's been a huge growth in online giving, and that's been kind of accelerated by the pandemic. And that's true in in lots of places in the UK and the US and and elsewhere. And I think also there are some sort of specific other contexts that it's really interesting to look at. So um, there's been a few things that I've seen about the enormous growth of digital giving in China, where again, maybe there's a kind of leapfrogging effect to some extent, because due to the sort of uh the approach of the communist government over many years, obviously the space arguably for civil society and private philanthropy was uh was somewhat crowded out. And in recent years they've made efforts to liberalise this and to kind of encourage private giving. And the form that has largely taken has been digital giving. So there's an enormous uh growth of online giving, and platforms like um WeChat Pay and Alipay, which are the sort of payment arms of big commercial companies, um, you know, Alibaba and WeChat, um, have seen you know hu huge rises in people using them for fundraising and giving to charity. I think also, you know, there's kind of new markets opening up. So there's been a few interesting things about tapping into the kind of gaming community and the enormous rise of esports around the world, um, and seeing those as kind of new donor pools, and and obviously it naturally lends itself to a sort of platform uh approach to philanthropy because you're unlikely to be tapping into a gaming community and then going offline and trying to do a sort of uh in-person passing a hat round. So actually, the more that you're kind of looking to these communities that are themselves in in some sense digital first, um, the more that you're going to be thinking about uh platform approaches to philanthropy. Um and I think there's a few kind of trends at the moment, big trends within the marketplace that are worth paying attention to. Um, one is I think what we're seeing at the moment is quite a lot of sort of consolidation and merger within the world of platform philanthropy. I think a few years ago or a decade ago, what we would have been talking about really is kind of quite a lot of different platforms that were specifically aimed at enabling giving, uh and there was quite a sort of proliferation of them. You know, whether that was a good thing because it allowed more choice, or whether it was a bad thing because it uh introduced inefficiency into the market, I don't know. But for various reasons, I think there have been some notable exits from that marketplace. So in the UK, um, over the last few years, we've seen big platforms, particularly those that were associated with or underwritten by uh large companies almost as a part of their CSR um disappear. So BT My Donate closed down quite a few years ago now, and Virgin Money Giving has similarly done so more recently. And we've also seen consolidation. So, you know, one of the biggest platforms in the UK was it was and is um just giving, and that was taken over by the even bigger uh uh non-profit software company uh Blackboard um a few years back. Um and I think you know, from talking to people who work um in this context in the US and Canada, saying that you know they're seeing sort of similar consolidation and a merger there. Um I think the other thing um that's really interesting is that we're no longer, I think, necessarily talking just or even primarily about specific non-profit platforms or sort of charity-specific platforms that enable giving. I think increasingly what we are talking about or or thinking about is commercial platforms adding giving functionality to what they do. So, you know, you've got kind of Facebook or Instagram adding functionality for giving to what they do, and other social media platforms kind of thinking about how they can do the same, and also payment apps, so you know, Google Pay and Apple Pay, but also sort of you know direct uh cash giving apps, so things like Venmo and Cash App, these have become sort of places where a huge amount of giving is happening. And we'll we'll think in a in a moment, we'll come on to the question of you know what this means for the overall landscape of philanthropy and charitable giving. You know, are people giving to significantly different things uh when they give through these sorts of platforms, you know, what are the what are the good sides of that and what are the potential risks of that? I think also linked to that, it's you know, traditional giving is it the platforms that we're using are sort of changing in nature, but also the nature of what you're able to do through those platforms is expanding in different directions as well. So, as I've said, you know, if you're thinking about people giving via kind of cash-giving apps like Venmo and Cash App, the lines between traditional um charity and philanthropy that's aimed at sort of non-profit organizations or registered charities and giving to individuals gets very blurry. Then also you have um the addition that some of these platforms focus more on ideas of crowdfunding rather than traditional giving, and you've got kind of embedded notions of reciprocity, and you know, does this count as an investment rather than a gift? And how do people view that and what's the impact on their traditional giving and how much they're likely to give, and questions like this. So I think there are all sorts of um interesting things to think about. And then uh the other thing that I just before we go to a break and sort of move on to one of the big questions I want to focus on, and just want to think about for a moment, is a question that I raised before, but I think it's just worth digging into a little bit more, which is this idea of platform dependency. So I think this is something that is not specific to philanthropy or to civil society, but the idea that we are increasingly reliant on this small handful of uh platforms, whether they're sort of social media platforms or payment platforms, uh, that increasingly kind of control our exp our digital experience and our access to the internet and to various services, um, and the naive assumption that we might make that those platforms are kind of digital public space or infrastructure, and they really aren't. Um and I guess from the point of view of um philanthropy and charity, what does this mean and what are the challenges it presents? I think that one of the big challenges, and and this is what I want to come on to talk uh in a bit more detail about in the next section, is that we don't at this point, I think, understand how the those platforms will be able to shape the choices that we make when it comes to giving. And I think either by design or by accident, they will start to shape those choices uh in in lots of different ways, and it's gonna have a really kind of determinate effect on the overall landscape for philanthropy. But I think also there are more sort of immediate practical concerns. So, for instance, if you are become entirely reliant on a particular platform, say Facebook, say you are a non-profit and you decide that your primary tool for fundraising is going to be using Facebook and you know, Facebook pages for events and fundraising and that kind of thing, in doing so, do you make yourself extremely susceptible to future changes of terms of service by Facebook? And you know, the same thing would go for any other platform. Well, yes, you do. And actually, what measure of control do you have over those changes to future terms of service and what accountability is there if those terms of service are changed? So if you know the price structure changes and suddenly it costs a fortune to do that, or what the um the platform decides to do with your data changes, um, which you know might very well be uh a case in point because obviously a lot of these platforms uh rely on the you know the harvesting of data as their main sort of model uh for uh making money because they obviously sort of sell that onto third-party advertising and and use it to kind of target that advertising ever more effectively. I think also you know, not even just terms of service, I think in specific cases there should be concerns about uh the decisions that those platforms take that essentially look like censorship. Um so you know, we've seen quite a few examples of uh organizations on Facebook um finding that suddenly their pages and their fundraising pages have been removed without any warning. And it's very I think the problem is that that would be you know a challenge in any context, but in the context of a lot of these digital platforms, it's virtually impossible to find out why that has happened or to find any means of recourse or to sort of talk to a human being to explain that and try and get the the situation reversed. And I think that will only become more of a problem as a lot of these decisions are taken algorithmically as well, which is something else that we'll we'll come on to in a bit. Um but if the decisions around you know what is or isn't acceptable on the platform are increasingly sort of outsourced to algorithms and and kind of artificial intelligence, and that then makes determinations and automatically removes certain things from the platform. If non-profits, for instance, working on subjects that are deemed to be contentious, find that overnight they have their pages removed, um, is it even going to be possible for them to find out why that happened or to challenge it in any way? And then I guess there could also, you know, there'd be more uh overt sort of specific instances of censorship. So certainly over the pandemic, because everybody was piling on to Zoom. There were a few stories about you know quite worrying examples where Zoom had sort of without warning cancelled um meetings where people were non-profit groups and civil society organizations talking about sort of contentious issues to do with human rights or to do with the situation in Israel and Palestine, and then actually subsequently cancelled other meetings where people had called meetings to discuss the censorship of the original meeting. So I think you know we need to be aware that that if we kind of cede power to the platforms by becoming hugely reliant on them, these are the kinds of risks that we might face. Okay, so uh in the next section, yeah, I want to come on to think a little bit about how uh platforms might shape some of our choices when it comes to to giving and the kind of various ways in which uh they might do that. So stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yesterday is not far distant when the men who die. Leaving behind him millions of unvailable wealth, which was me for him to administer during life to pass away on with me.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Okay, so we're back. And in this section, as I said, I want to just talk about how platforms shape our choices when it comes to philanthropy. And I think there's a few different ways in which they do. So the first one, and probably the most important one, is they shape our choices simply by the by the selection of organizations or causes or individuals that we're able to see and to access and to give to via the platform. Because I think then the question is how is that choice made by the platform itself? If they present themselves as an entirely neutral intermediary that simply kind of allows people to access information or to give donations and thus sort of absolve themselves of any responsibility, that's that's fine. But in order to do so, you have to be able to come up with a convincing rationale for how the information that's available via your platform and the options that are available are determined. Now it might be that you simply say, right, we're going to allow giving to any accept you know legally acceptable entity, and you know, but again, do you have to make a determination up front about whether you then restrict that to organizations that currently fit the bill in terms of being registered charities or non-profits if it's in the US? You know, do you say, right, it's 501 C3s or 501c4s? Uh and since those are tax designations or legal designations, are you actually kind of artificially leaving out lots of other types of organizations, informal organizations and other things that people might also want to give to? I think also you know it seems simple in a context like, say, the UK or the US, where you feel relatively confident that even if it's you know the definition of of what constitutes a sort of you know legal entity or registered charity or something is is narrower than might be ideal? It's it's still sort of broadly fine and it's a relatively safe bet to allow giving to those entities. But what about in other contexts where you are less convinced that the government is well disposed towards civil society? Does a platform in those cases simply kind of accede to the wishes of that government and say, oh, well, they're kind of constraining civil society in all of these different ways? But we'll just go along with that and the choices that you're given through the platform will be limited in a way that reflects it. So say if you have a government that is repressing certain types of rights organizations or sort of social justice organizations, should a platform therefore make it impossible for people to give to those organizations because the government has deemed that it's not acceptable? And if they shouldn't, which you know it feels to me very much like they shouldn't, on what basis is the platform itself making that decision? You know, who is it, whose ethics are they employing in the end to kind of make that determination about what is or isn't acceptable to be on the platform? And I think this is a really interesting question that has some, you know, we're seeing kind of hard practical examples of it at the moment. Um, so you know, as I record this, we're still in the middle of a story um that's happening over in Canada where um the the there's this whole freedom convoy of people may have read about where a group of truckers who are wanting to protest against the imposition of vaccine mandates um have banded together uh in order to organise protests in various cities, including Ottawa and Toronto. Um and the reason this is kind of pertinent to to our discussion of platform philanthropy is there there was uh a GoFundMe page set up to allow people to give to support um this freedom convoy. And this subsequently turned out that GoFundMe initially allowed this and there was sort of $10 million was collected. Um but as the as it became apparent that that was m shifting from a sort of largely peaceful demonstration towards one where it was likely to be you know more problematic and and to involve tactics that might include sort of you know violence and direct action and that sort of thing, I think GoFundMe got cold feet and have subsequently said, actually, no, we're not going to to allow this. And interestingly, they have they've essentially seized that money. So some of it's already gone through about a million dollars from what I understand. And they've GoFundMe has sort of claimed that this is only going to you know the bits of of the the whole kind of freedom convoy uh activity that is that has been deemed acceptable, and the rest of that money, they are saying at the moment that they're planning to distribute that to other charities, kind of charities that they have approved in consultation with the original donors, but they're refusing to give that money to um to the Freedom Convoy. Um and I think this is fascinating because it's kind of again on what basis had they made that determination? You know, was it just about the tactics that it became apparent that the Freedom Convoy organizers were going to be using in their protests? Or, you know, was there any element of it being, you know, actually kind of objecting to the fundamental idea of you know anti-vaccination protests and kind of propaganda and misinformation? Um and if it was, you know, again on what basis was uh GoFundMe making that decision, you know, even if I personally agree that they shouldn't really be allowing donations to that, uh, you know, on what basis is is a platform that that enables donations, um, saying that it that it won't now allow donations to uh to this particular cause. And I think also you need to add additional complexity to this. Um in the story as it became apparent that GoFundMe wouldn't distribute that money to the Freedom Convoy, another platform, at least one other platform called GiveSend Go, has has piped up and said it will accept donations to the Freedom Convoy. So actually, within the economy of platforms themselves, this idea of neutrality of the platform or you know the fact that certain platforms are kind of prioritizing individual liberty over what can be presented as kind of censorious decisions about not giving to particular causes becomes a way to try and get a competitive advantage. Um so I think you know it's a it's a fascinating story, and I think one that we will see many uh more iterations of over the coming years. I think another way in which uh the sort of platformization of philanthropy is going to change uh the the nature of the choices we make is by changing the nature of the interaction between the donor and the recipient. So obviously, one of the arguments for the sort of power of these platforms often is that they do disintermediate what had become quite a highly intermediated uh relationship between uh someone giving uh for a good cause and the kind of end recipient of of that gift. And actually, I mean this I tend to think of this in in historical terms as almost the question of whether technology actually, you know, an increasing amount of technology is bringing us full circle back around to what are really very old models of giving. So actually, you know, are essentially coming back to a model of the the kind of the individual alms giving at a parish level and the and gifts being about people giving to other people and and enabled by technology, we're no longer kind of um constrained to one geographic area or our own locality, so it's happening at a global scale. And I think thinking about it in those terms raises some interesting questions. I mean, on the positive side, I suppose the argument is actually it may be reintroducing more of an emphasis on human connection in giving, and to some extent I think that's a good thing. I think you know there is a danger perhaps that too much charity and philanthropy that had gone through the kind of traditional mechanisms of the the non-profit world had become too passive and transactional and largely about people sort of you know giving to organisations on the basis that those organizations then kind of take take their money and you know that's the limit of that person's involvement, and then they never quite know where their money has gone, except possibly through some sort of impact reporting or story that they are kind of told about uh about the the value of their donation. And actually, you know, for for somebody who wants to have a sense of of the good their their giving is uh is having in the world, actually giving directly to another individual via a platform and getting a much more tangible uh sense of the impact uh might be much more compelling. But I think there are plenty of risks here as well. Um I mean, one in sort of practical terms is that actually if you allow uh people to give directly to you know other individuals or even organizations on the basis of kind of uh appeals and direct emotional appeals, the danger you might have is you almost become a victim of your own success if suddenly everybody kind of latches on to one specific cause or sort of fundraising effort. Uh and sometimes this can be sort of you know a positive thing. We see you know the power of things like um Captain Tom Moore's fundraising efforts uh in in the UK during the lockdown, where everybody kind of just just latched on to this amazing story about this uh uh veteran who was sort of closing in on 100 at the time and deciding to kind of walk around his garden and raised you know huge amounts of money for for charities that were um sort of associated with the NHS. And that money, you know, I think there were some issues around kind of the scale of the money and the need to distribute it, but at least the kind of infrastructure was already there. But I think in other cases where we're talking about either kind of smaller organizations that don't have that infrastructure or individuals or organizations that are sort of decentralized and have little or no infrastructure at all, if they suddenly find themselves the beneficiaries of huge amounts of fundraised income because they managed to kind of tap into something in the collective psyche that people want to give to, that can be a problem. Um, this is something we saw in the wake of some of the um police shootings like um in the US, uh things like the murder of George Floyd and others, and the kind of the upsurge of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Some smaller organizations, for instance, um like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, suddenly found that they were getting huge amounts of donations because people really wanted to respond to this, and one of the things they wanted to do was give, and you know, this the these organizations found themselves sort of suggested as places that you could give to. And, you know, that's wonderful in lots of ways. They were doing great work already, but suddenly an organization that's used to maybe getting kind of half a million or a million dollars a year finds itself getting a hundred million dollars that creates its own challenges in terms of what they do with that money, uh, particularly if it's difficult to spend that amount of money on the sort of existing work that the organization does, and then in order to spend it, it has to sort of uh diversify into other activities, even and even if they're justifiable, do the people who gave that money in the first place start to feel aggrieved that actually they were kind of misled in some way? Uh and that does happen. People get sort of annoyed that they gave to an organization because they're they were motivated by one story and they want their donation to reflect, you know, uh that original motivation, and then they find out that actually it's been used for all sorts of other things that they are less happy about. Um, and I think this is a problem that we will increasingly see as we get these sort of you know viral fundraising efforts and people kind of responding to stories in the media and and making uh very kind of large uh donations that sort of collectively focus on one particular entity. Um, I think another problem that that really sort of you know I'm concerned about is as we think about uh platforms reintroducing some of that human connection that we talked about between the donor and and the recipient. I think particularly where we're talking about platforms that allow people to give uh directly to other people. So I think here kind of crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, where a lot of the fundraising is for things like sort of individual medical care, or entirely non-charitable platforms, things like Cash App and Venmo, where people might be making direct appeals on social media and then asking people to sort of give them money directly via uh these these sorts of um tools. The the challenge here is yes, in a way, that is bringing us full circle back around to very old models of giving, and there's the you know the positive side of the kind of human connection. But also the the important question is why is it that we moved away from some of those models in the first place and introduced various layers of intermediation? And to me, one of the answers is well, we developed um kind of charities and non-profit entities in the middle. I mean, partly for reasons of efficiency and others, I'll talk about in a moment. But also one function, very important function that they perform is they allow some intermediation of the kind of choices that we make as individuals and some of the biases that we bring to the table, uh, and you know, an effective distribution of money to where it is most needed. Because actually, if you're talking about people uh giving to other people directly, you know, the the challenge is that actually people tend to do things like give preference to people who look most like them. So actually, you know, there's quite a lot of research already that there are things like sort of biases uh in racial terms towards people who are within the same racial group as yourself, um, or perceived class or demographic groups, people similarly will give to other people who seem most like them. Also, I think there are, you know, in terms of the the ways in which people present their stories when directly asking uh for money for the for themselves or for their family, it it puts an emphasis on your ability as a storyteller to tell a kind of compelling sob story. So actually, are we just prioritizing the people who are best at utilising the tools of social media rather than the ones who have the most pressing need? And actually, does that bring us back to the idea that you know one of the good things about giving via a charity or a non-profit is that they can actually sort of harness that motivation to give, but then make sure that it's distributed a bit more effectively to where the need is. And also I think there is evidence that you know the people who do best through uh kind of crowdfunding or or direct appeals for sort of put peer-to-peer funding through social media are ones that are already able to sort of tap into existing strong networks of connections. So again, are we kind of just sort of prioritizing people who are actually less in need of the help and is more money going towards you know, kind of relatively middle class people making appeals rather than perhaps those who genuinely are, you know, struggling most from issues of poverty or or ill health. Um and I think there's a really interesting kind of uh comparator or sort of comparison from history here that's not especially well known, but I think it's fascinating. So in the Victorian era, certainly in the UK, the best known model of uh the sort of charity was what was called the subscriber democracy. So this was where people gave money to a charity or a subscription. But at that point, the the idea of subscription was slightly more active than maybe some of our ideas of donation today. So you essentially got kind of voting rights within the organization. So you give to that organization as a subscriber and you sort of have membership rights, and you in a subscriber democracy you would sort of vote for the the officers or the people running that organization in a way that people would do in lots of membership organizations today. But there's another model that existed at the same time that I think is more relevant to these kind of platform approaches and to crowdfunding. And this is something that was called the the voting charity. And in these people would be allowed to vote, not for the the offices of the organization or the sort of the charitable entity itself, but they would be able to vote directly for who the beneficiaries of donations would be. Um and so they would have these, I mean, it's incredible really, they would have these big events where people would sort of parade around their favoured candidates, whether those were sort of you know single mothers with children out of wedlock or people who had been consigned to lunatic asylums, and try and drum up support from other potential supporters who were kind of also um involved in the the voting charity. And apparently they sort of took on you know the air of a gambling den or horse racing track, and it was a highly kind of competitive pursuit. And you saw the worst of humanity in a way, and again, you're kind of actively people trying to game the system, but also all of the sort of biases that that one would would expect um were there on show. So the people who tended to do well out of the system um were those ones who already had kind of uh existing connections to patrons who could who could help them, or the ones who were kind of able to tell a compelling story, in much the same way, I think, as we're now seeing play out on social media and through sort of platform approaches to giving. Um, and in terms of just finishing on this, you know, some of the criticism of Victorian voting charities at the time, of which there was a lot, I think sounds really pertinent to some of the concerns about crowdfunding. So um the philanthropist uh Frederick McCata, for instance, who was sort of a big um opponent of voting charities, said, you know, this wicked system ensures the benefits sought for those who have most influence and friends instead of those who are the most forlorn and friendless. Um and actually Florence Nightingale, who was also a big critic of these things, and she described voting charities as the best system for electing the least eligible, or at any rate preventing the discovery of the least eligible. Um so actually, you know, as you sort of say again, you know, the whole system as it was designed ends up with the least deserving cases doing the best out of it. And again, the question is, is that what we're inadvertently doing by kind of reintroducing some of these models through uh come over our platform approaches? Another way, I think, in which uh platforms shape our choices that's worth uh thinking about is is in terms of the incentives that deem what gets seen. So I think you know the incentives of platforms have been controversial uh for quite a long time. I think if we're talking about some of those more traditional uh charity sector platforms, there have long been concerns over how they make their money and whether they're sort of charging a percentage on donations, and it quite often blows up into a sort of political uh issue uh over here in the UK, certainly, with politicians kind of latching onto it. This particularly happens where there are sort of fundraising appeals that are linked to quite sort of emotive or tragic events. So the last time um that I saw this happen uh in a big way was sort of in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing um over here a few years ago in the UK, and then there was sort of huge fundraising effort for the victims of that, and this ended up going via just giving. Um and then what inevitably happens is that you know, newspaper, in this case The Sun, and then some politicians latch onto the idea that actually, you know, just giving itself is making money out of this because it charges a percentage on um on the donations that are made through it because it has to you know pay the costs of running a platform, obviously. People get very annoyed about this because they feel as though you know their money should be going directly to the perceived front line to address the issue that that prompted them to give in the first place. And so they get extremely annoyed about it. I mean, as a result, just giving and other platforms I think have have actually changed the model for the way in which they charge fees on donations and made it opt in or give people the opp the option to kind of opt out and made it possible for them to sort of support the work of the platform separately, or at very least kind of significantly change the way in which they explain how they are charging money on that. So I think you know, kind of we've already seen those concerns. But I think in terms of where the platform platformization of giving is going, if we are increasingly talking, as as we were earlier, about moving away from some of those sort of traditional platforms that seek to serve only charities or kind of charitable giving and talking more about commercial platforms providing giving functionality, then I think the question is, you know, what is motivating those organizations and what are their incentive structures? It seems less likely that they will charge a direct fee on the transactions in the way that some of those other platforms might have done. Because actually how their you know their economic model operates in all other aspects is that you're provided services seemingly for free, but obviously the we now, you know, we know quite well that the price we pay is the uh the the information and the data that we are contributing on our own behaviour and at and then at aggregate level on you know the behaviour of large groups of people that the platform and third parties can then use to drive advertising technology. And I think the concern here is you know what we've seen as a result of that is the growth of what some people call the attention economy, which is where you know it used to be the case that there was not so much content and everybody had plenty of time to pay attention to it. And in recent years, with the with the growth of the internet and the sort of explosion of of digital content and photos and video and all this sorts of stuff, that has flipped on its head. And now there's more than enough content, in fact, more content than anybody could consume within their own lifetime. Um, and the thing that is now scarce as as a commodity is our attention or our ability to pay attention to it. And this has led to a situation in which the platforms are competing for this this scarce resource, i.e. our attention, by wanting to get us onto their platform platforms and to keep us there. And unfortunately, the the tools and techniques that they have developed to do this are precisely the ones that cause concern about. corrosive effect of of platforms. So it's kind of you know uh presenting things in the most extreme form possible, um getting rid of nuance, uh kind of you know conspiracy theories, uh clickbait, um, and uh kind of using tools that tap into addictive behaviour uh and and and that sort of thing. And I think thinking about this in the context of giving, if if adding giving functionality to your platform is part of an overall desire to kind of improve the user experience and keep and user retention, are they going to be applying the same thinking to the choice of options that they present people with when it comes to to philanthropy and what will that look like? So I think that's something that we need to to think about. And then the the final one in this section in terms of how platforms shape our choices is looking ahead to the future a little bit, I think. So I think what I'm thinking of here is I think there will be a shift from presentation to recommendation. So at the moment, you know we think about these choices in the context of how does the platform show us you know the information and allow us to sift through it and and make choices about where to give. And we've already said actually you know that's all that is still an active process because the decisions about what does or doesn't make it onto the platform and how we find them will shape how we make those choices and the behaviour we exhibit. But increasingly in lots of other areas you know lots of platforms are looking more at the idea of sort of recommendations. So actually you can search yes but lots of people are you know increasingly reliant on the platform to kind of tell them what to to watch or to listen to or to purchase and we see this you know on Spotify and on YouTube and you know on Amazon and other sort of purchasing platforms. So we have these recommender algorithms they're called which are kind of machine learning algorithms that take information on your past behaviour, your you know what you listened to before what you've watched what you've purchased and what other people in your networks or people who are similar to you have watched or listened to or purchased and then it kind of gives you tailored recommendations about what you should watch or purchase or listen to next. And you know we haven't seen this yet but I would be very surprised if we don't see something similar when it comes to philanthropy and charitable giving in the not too distant future. So I think we will see recommender algorithms for philanthropy that essentially try to offer you suggestions and tailored recommendations for causes or organizations that you might want to give to that are perceived to be you know ones that you will like or that you will find rewarding and that will keep you giving and keep you on the platform. And I think you know something we might talk about in a moment you know as we're shifting from talking about sort of platforms in their current sense as things that we access on you know our phones or computers to something like the the metaverse that Facebook or now Meta is promoting as the sort of next iteration of of the internet the platform itself becomes you know something that we almost kind of inhabit and actually then the the choices and the way in which those choices are kind of tailored via recommendations become even more a part of how we sort of navigate information. And I think what form these these kind of uh recommender algorithms will take still remains to be seen but the the obvious concern I think is that there's a version of it the obvious version of it which is essentially to take you know the models that already dictate how content is decided and and sort of uh tailored and and recommendations are given to us on other platforms and apply that to charitable giving and what you would probably see there I would I would uh imagine is that well known organisations and popular causes would do well at the expense of a huge long tail of less well known uh organizations and less popular causes. So you know if because people already give to say cancer research or to uh you know animal welfare charities the recommender algorithm thinks oh okay I think maybe they'd like to give to some more cancer research organizations or animal welfare charities and people respond to that and it becomes self-reinforcing and lots of other organizations that could potentially be put in front of people find it impossible to do so. So I think you know we'd need to be really careful about the way in which that information ecosystem was was managed in future. Okay that's uh probably enough for that section and the next section I just want to come on briefly to talk about the ways in which uh kind of platforms might change how we're able to organize rather than uh just uh kind of make transactions so stay tuned for that genius billionaire playboy philanthropist genius billionaire playboy philanthropist genius billionaire playboy philanthropist genius billionaire playboy genius genius genius okay so uh back to this final section and I'll try and keep this one brief because I could go on about it uh too much if I'm not careful. Um but we've talked up to this point mostly about um the sort of financial transaction side of philanthropy and the idea of people making donations and the the impact that platformization will have on that. But I think also the the sort of platformization of civil society is relevant to the question of how we organise as well. So you can see this through the sort of rise of um digital social movements in recent years so things like Black Lives Matter um Extinction Rebellion um the kind of Me Too movement and others and I think you know it's clearly not a new thing that you have sort of more decentralized and non-hierarchical forms of organising. There's always been parts of civil society particularly the kind of grassroots movements and sort of protest movements that have operated in this way. But it's something I think we're happening at a kind of scale that previously was was probably impossible. And I think it's worth thinking about you know what the the appeal of this idea of decentralization is and kind of particularly the the appeal of it through technology. And to me one of the interesting questions is whether the form of decentralization that we're being shown now through these kind of platform approaches, whether it offers anything genuinely new and answers some of the sort of existing challenges that we've known with with taking a decentralized approach or whether actually we're just going to rediscover the same old problems in new forms in the future. So I think you know I did a paper on this a few years ago which I'll put links in the show notes to and I'm just kind of using some of the ideas from that but there's loads more in there if you want to kind of dig into it. But I think in terms of that question of the appeal of decentralization I I think there's a whole bunch of different things here. So I think you know the most obvious one is a sense that people want to kind of democratize participation in civil society and having sort of non-hierarchical or much more flat structures rather than kind of hierarchies seems like it makes uh makes for more kind of democratic participation and and allows people to engage on on a kind of uh equal footing. I think also you know it's tied into a lack of trust in existing institutions, again where the ability to do things in a more decentralized way and also to kind of disintermediate means that you can bypass some of the traditional institutions within the nonprofit world but also kind of other ones within society and in a context where trust in those institutions is you know is suffered and and you know according to many measures is sort of in long-term decline actually people want to do things in different ways and you know being able to organise in these sort of non-hierarchical decentralized ways is an important part of that. I think also you know for some types of civil society organisations part of it is about overcoming power imbalances. So one of the things that you see with the use of kind of decentralized approaches in you know rebel movements and and warfare situations is a kind of model of asymmetric warfare where you get you know cell-based structures and groups that are able with small numbers of of people to fight against much larger forces because they're more nimble and they're kind of you know difficult for the larger force to to identify the how to attack it and so they're able to kind of you know uh launch almost guerrilla attacks and then sort of disappear into the background. And I think within the context of civil society something similar is true where actually there's a sense in which some of these new kind of digitally enabled protest movements again by having that kind of flat structure and and being essentially sort of leaderless, there's no real point of attack for you know a government or anyone else that would would want to kind of combat them and so they're able to sort of wrong foot some of these larger centralized institutions. I think also part of that is the idea that that having a kind of non-hierarchical structure can make you less susceptible to attack. So this is the idea of what they call anti-fragility. So again I sort of touched on it there but because you don't have an obvious core and there aren't sort of a a group of people that if you took out in a military sense or you know in in a kind of uh civil society sense maybe you you know you kind of uh took to task in the media or tangled up in legal concerns it's actually difficult for you to know if you wanted to to sort of take on a decentralized organisation as as a um uh as an opponent exactly how you would go about doing that. And I think the other thing about you know an appeal to a decentralization is perhaps it allows us to appeal to different types of incentives or to offer sort of new forms of incentives. And this is uh I think something that you can see through examples like the open source movement that's you know uh resulted in large amounts of software and particularly a lot of the sort of infrastructure of of the internet being created and maintained it actually is able to kind of appeal not so much to the profit motive but to various other kind of motives that allow for kind of uh collaboration and and cooperation. And I think you know this is this is another thing that sort of drives interest in in decentralization. But then I think it's worth thinking about well that all sounds great doesn't it um what are the challenges then? Why don't we just do everything in a decentralized way? And there's an interesting sort of historical question here which I won't go into uh on this podcast but about why so much activity within philanthropy has become centralized over time and there are definitely you know uh threads that you can you can sort of determine in that history that reflect some of these points. But essentially I mean I think there's a few things here. So I think one is you know about inefficiency. I think um there's an argument that actually just doing things in sort of hierarchical or centralized ways allows for for more efficiency certainly in an economic term. An important set of ideas here is from the economist uh Ronald Coase who wrote a paper called Nature of the Firm that's often sort of cited when talking about decentralization. And his argument there essentially is that markets are efficient in some regards particularly around kind of keeping production costs low but the coordination costs within them tend to remain high. So it makes sense to organize into hierarchies and sort of centralized entities. I think there are some other um kind of inefficiencies that are important here around communication as well. So I think both internal and external communication if you think about um sort of decentralized groups there are challenges there. If you don't have a centre to a group actually at least historically the challenge was there was a limit to the number of people you could involve because the practicalities of keeping everyone in touch were became unmanageable. That's an interesting one I think because that's one where maybe technology has sort of overcome that because one of the things people often say about the internet is it's allowed us a new form of of um communication in that we used to be able to have um one-to-many communication so you could use a newspaper to get news out to lots of people and you could have many to one communication where you know through the voting system or whatever lots of people are able to convey information to one person or to a small number of people. But what we now have is many to many communication where large groups of people are able to communicate directly with other large groups of people without the need for centralized intermediation. I think it's also true um that one of the potential limits to decentralized approaches is around external communication as well. So this is just the problem that actually if you don't have a centre to your to your structure or to your group, if you need a spokesperson or somebody to kind of represent the views of the organisation externally, if nobody has been identified to take on that role, it can be very hard for people to know you know who to listen to or where to get that information. And here you get one of the challenges that you get kind of you know self-appointed spokespeople or you know the people who decide that they're able to speak on behalf of an organisation or a movement kind of you know aren't necessarily people you would always want to take on that job. I think there there are also you know I think we said before that one of the the positives about decentralization was around democratising participation. I think actually arguably the the f the converse can also be true, which I think is interesting in that by making the ability to participate through kind of donating or giving up your time and kind of getting actively involved the price of admission, do you sort of uh force some people out of the ability to be part of the movement? So there's some interesting things here. So Zainet um Tefecci uh who has written wrote a book called Twitter and Tear Gas that's really interesting on this about the kind of limitations of digital social movements says you know there are structural biases. People without jobs tend to be overrepresented and furthermore voluntary public speaking as a mode of decision making is another impediment to participation because people willing to speak up especially in a challenging way in public tend to be from privileged backgrounds people who already like to wield authority and power and mostly men. So actually you know do people from backgrounds where they don't have that confidence or people who don't have the time you know because they're working parents things are they actually kind of uh are they sidelined by some of these more decentralized approaches um which I think is you know an interesting way of looking at it. And then the other thing that's a a problem with with decentralization I think it's a kind of you know a linked thing that quite a few people have written about which is essentially some would argue that any example that you care to choose of a decentralized organisation actually isn't really anything of the sort because you inevitably get sort of recentralization um happening because you get the emergence of sort of cliques or or groups within that sort of that decentralized structure. So the sociologist um Roberto Michaels um wrote a paper in 1915 I think called the Iron Law of Oligarchy and he his argument and he's looking at sort of political groups here is he says the democracy has an inherent preference for the authoritarian solution of important questions and as such the eternal struggles between aristocracy and democracy of which we read in history have never been anything more than struggles between an old minority defending its actual predominance and a new and ambitious minority intent upon the conquest of power, desiring either to fuse with the former or to dethrone and replace it. So his sort of depressing conclusion is you always get you know these oligarchies forming within these groups and there's a really interesting paper here um by Joe Freeman called The Tyranny of Structurelessness which I'd highly recommend reading and I'll put links in the show notes to it because you can you can find that in lots of places but she was looking she was part of the sort of women's um the feminist movement the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s and she wrote this fascinating paper really kind of critical of the idea of structureless organising which was very important to that movement at the time and she she kind of criticizes it for a variety of reasons but one of her core arguments is that actually you inevitably get the emergence of these sort of hidden cliques within them and actually the decentralization you get within these these apparently kind of decentralized groups is worse because the people that that end up controlling them haven't even been elected and it's not it's often not even clear who those people are and it's you know there's no sort of recourse or any sort of means of accountability. So she says the idea of structurelessness becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power and is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful. So you know I think this is a really uh important argument and something I think you know as we kind of see more decentralized organizing enabled through platforms we'll need to be strongly aware of and certainly in the work you know that I've done in the past around uh kind of blockchain where there's a lot of talk about decentralization, actually you know people are kind of rediscovering this challenge of the tyranny of structurelessness because there is inevitably the emergence of these sort of hidden cliques who actually have all of the power and and are in charge and you know and so this is something that we'll definitely need to guard against. I think I just finally want to think about you know having thought about all this and about some of the sort of challenges around the platformization of philanthropy and some of the potential opportunities, you know, where next for platform philanthropy and and again we've probably talked about most of this already in the episode so I won't dwell on it too much. But I think you know big questions here are you know are we going to see more of that shift towards commercial platforms allowing you know giving functionality or providing a place in which people can organize civil society groups? You know and we've talked about how that brings risks with it in terms of sort of platform dependency. But on the plus side will could the involvement of some of those commercial organizations drive more innovation? You know actually if they're motivated to make you know giving or organising something that they use to differentiate themselves, will they apply their expertise and resources to you know allowing new and exciting opportunities for for giving and organising? Or actually will it end up stifling innovation in the short term because they are not incentivized in the right way. I think we should definitely watch out for the development of kind of tailored recommendations and the use of algorithms to determine choices about giving and I think you know increasingly as more giving is done via platforms that is something that we will see emerge. I think there are interesting possibilities there about whether we get sort of context specific donations. So here I'm thinking about as as we stop talking about platforms in the sense of specific places that we have to go on the internet via a kind of you know a computer or a mobile phone and actually we're talking either about virtual worlds like the metaverse in which then you know we spend large amounts of time and that's how we interact with the internet and then you know the the experiences that we have within that virtual environment um or within the real world if we're talking about sort of augmented reality overlays are able then to sort of trigger giving behavior and and it's made easy for us to do that. Actually you know kind of context specific donations where we respond to a conversation we've just had or something we've just seen or heard or an experience we've just had you might become hugely important and and something that's kind of a big part of the fundraising landscape. So I think we you know see more of that. And then I guess around the question of of decentralization that we've we've talked about um in terms of group formation, a lot of that at the moment is we're still talking about using what is actually centralized infrastructure. So this is you know a small number of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and whatever to allow people to use those tools um but to uh organize themselves in decentralized ways. But actually one of the bigger trends within the world of technology at the moment in terms of where the internet is going is the the development of growth of what's called web 3. And so it's essentially the kind of apparent third iteration of the internet and and the fundamental idea behind it is is this one of decentralization. So it's the idea that actually we can you know improve and grow the internet but do so in a way where we get away from what we've ended up with now which is this sort of centralization of power in the hands of a small number of tech companies and platforms and instead we build things um using you know things like blockchain technology but also in the future you know other technologies that we may not even have have thought of yet to allow us to uh coordinate and to kind of work together in ways where we overcome some of the traditional challenges around communication or or the need for sort of trusted intermediaries and build all of this infrastructure but in a way where it's not owned and operated by by any sort of um centralized third parties. It's kind of owned and operated by all of the users of the system. And you know there's some scepticism about that at the moment and there are some people who are very sort of strong advocates of it but I think the you know the idea that that the infrastructure itself could become decentralized lends weight to the importance of thinking about using the technology to uh create opportunities to sort of organize within civil society in decentralized ways so that's a lot of talk about platforms and philanthropy and I'll leave it there. As ever I'll put links in the show notes to things that I've been talking about there's lots of things I mentioned there um that I shall uh remember and if you want to read more please do. If you want to check out any more thoughts on this kind of thing you can follow me on social media at Rodri underscore h underscore davis or at philiteracy if you want stuff more about sort of history of philanthropy. Do check out the website for the podcast philanthropisms.com where you can find all of the old episodes and also uh details of where you can email me if you've got ideas for things we could talk about in the future or people I could interview. Other than that just like subscribe tell all your friends about it if you think there's anyone out there who'll enjoy this podcast please do let them know and I will see you next time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:30

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