Microphilanthropy is to traditional charity what dual core processors are to single-core processors
An interesting comment popped up after my “manifesto for microphilanthropy” post. In it, it was suggested that micropayment was important for microphilanthropy. I disagree, and here’s why (this is a reblog of my reply:)
Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can’t be bothered to do it - it’s too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this transaction barrier).
Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it’s about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)
There’s no reason why average donations can’t stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it’s based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, very niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (and because it’s highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.
