Surveillance Philanthropy

= “when they can spend it, these tokens are programmed so they can only be spent on things the donor wants it to be spent”. [1]

Discussion

Pete Howson,interviewed by Evgeny Morozov:

“EM: Blockchain technologies have now also been widely used in the development context and also in philanthropy. Having studied their deployment in multiple projects, you have warned about the rise of “surveillance philanthropy,” much of it enabled by the blockchain. Could you explain what this is and how it’s transforming power relations between donors and aid recipients? What are some of the main tradeoffs and downsides of relying on crypto-infrastructures in this field?

PH: Charities are in a pickle right now. Because of Covid, in the UK, the US, and elsewhere charities are going bust because they can’t bring in money. Sporting events and charity shops have been closed. People and corporations aren’t donating like they were, because they’re scared an economic downturn’s coming. And this is all happening when crypto is going to the moon, so to speak. A lot of bitcoin early adopters for example, who accrued hundreds or even thousands of bitcoin with very little effort back in 2010, 10 years later they’re now billionaires. So charities are looking to this new group of crypto rich as cash cows. And these are young people, who traditionally have never given money to charity regularly, like older people do. Charities are also in a pickle because people don’t trust them. High-profile abuse scandals in Haiti and DRC, massive salaries and annual bonuses for charity bosses, charities like WWF accused of being complicit in torture, rape, murder, in their conservation areas. So a lot of charities now are turning to blockchain as a way of improving their image, making themselves more transparent and trustworthy. But in using this tech they open themselves up to a massive power shift in the sector. With traditional project funding, donors usually just have to trust charities to send the funds to wherever it’s promised. The charity has the power. But with these ‘smart contract’ blockchains, donors can encode conditions into the giving platform. It works like this. Your everyday crypto enthusiast is rarely an expert in the complex realities of disaster relief and humanitarian aid projects. But with crypto giving, donors are able to remove flexibility from the experts while exerting maximum control over the charities’ actions.

AidChain, for example, perhaps the starkest example of “surveillance philanthropy,” has developed an AidCoin token, which they hope will be the preferred global method of charitable giving. Using a smart contract, donors can track and manage how funds are spent. AidChain incentivizes charities to pay their service providers in aidcoin in order to improve transparency in the tracking process. For a similar project called Promise Giving, the funds are pulled back to the donor automatically if the recipient charity doesn’t do exactly as they said they would. There’s blockchain projects that only issue funds to poor people with suitably high saliva cortisol levels – proving they’re sufficiently stressed. There’s projects that demand refugees have a crypto wallet linked to their biometric data and they have to have iris scans if they want to buy things at their local market. Not anything mind, only things the charity says they can have. So this is all giving maximum oversight and control to the donors, who are all probably crypto-bros in their parent’s basement with no idea. Meanwhile, the charities facing bankruptcy are having to roll with this new setup. Or go bust. In the paper I discuss many more examples of this sort of thing.”

(https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/pete-howson-on-cryptocarbon/ )