[jpernst]

There's an interesting book on this topic of individualized philanthropy by the powerful and its effect of masking the deeper systemic problems. It's called "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas.

I'm only about halfway through, but the central thesis appears to be that the powerful, even if they truly want to make a good-faith effort to improve the world, will naturally gravitate towards forms of social change that don't challenge their power. He describes this kind of thinking as "win-win" in that only solutions that don't involve those in power sacrificing the conditions that made them powerful will be considered by the philanthropic class. These "win-win" solutions then displace more direct "win-lose" solutions that actually address the underlying power dynamic.

The arguments put forth ring pretty true to me, and this GoFundMe stuff fits the model perfectly.

[mjd22]

Google is a good example. They start with search. Become king of the search hill and then search goes into the background. Are the people running Search in charge of Google? Nope. The empire defense people get put in charge. Who then spend more time and resources on Chrome and Android. They don't create knowledge. Humanity does. But the empire defense folk, get it into their head they need to own the knowledge graph and rent it out to humanity. No questions or debate. Now imagine if StackOverflow or Wikipedia decided to pull the same bullshit.

[jdhzzz]

StackOverflow was created in response to Experts Exchange, for which I am thankful. It doesn't work forever where information is concerned. Information wants to be free.

[Shacklz]

For those interested, he held a Talk at Google about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM

I thought it rather interesting that he was able to hold this kind of talk at Google - after all, his audience there probably consists of people that are probably part of the "winners" he is talking about.

[PavlovsCat]

or as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi put it: "Charity is the drowning of rights in the shithole of mercy."