The Observer's Blog

M-O-N-E-Y

There is a group on Facebook dedicated to helping Darfur, a region of Sudan. The idea is that for every 1,000 people who join the group the guy who started it will donate $1 to some organization working in Darfur. On Facebook, it's easy to get hundreds of thousands of people to join a group electronically, as recently evidenced by a group on Facebook claiming that this guy named "Ruckus Brody" would be allowed to have a threesome with his girlfriend if the group reached 300,000. Later an internet porn scheme was somehow implicated in the creation of this Facebook group, and it turned out that there never was going to be a threesome. The point is that people on Facebook love to be in huge groups, and they will join groups at the rate of 1-2 per second if there is some new huge group forming.

So Darfur will get a few hundred dollars for the effort of 833 man-hours (35 days straight) of mouse-clicking (assuming it takes 10 seconds to join a group). Somehow I find the whole situation fascinating. The willingness of people to expend minimal effort on what sounds like a good cause, especially the willingness to donate money or cause money to be donated. Imagine if everyone who joined the group actually read the linked article about Darfur; that would be amazing. I actually bet some large fraction of them did, because if you're on Facebook you're just trying to kill a little time and an article on genocide is just as good as updating your profile to include "Coldplay" under your favorite music.

I haven't joined the group because to me it somehow seems demeaning: my response to caring about something should be a little more than joining a group where 0.1 cents of someone else's money gets donated to an unnamed organization. And I don't have the time to read that article on the Darfur genocide anyway. In group members' defense, the "it can't hurt" attitude seems equally reasonable, at first. But then I thought about the first debriefing meeting our mission team had upon returning from Swaziland this summer. Apparently one of the cardinal rules of mission work is not to give anyone money while in country. Money, according to the mission expert, always leads to more pain or suffering. If you give it to someone in need, they become a target of evil, or else they themselves are tempted to use it in an unhealthy way. For example, if you want to pay a child's school fees, you send money directly to the school and not to the child or their family (if they have one). It's a hard principle to believe, especially since it's much easier for most people to give money than to invest time into a cause, but it's easy to see how it would be true.