recomMONDAYtions #1
happy monday! it's august 15 and i have some things to share.
Dear friend—
Sometimes I read stuff and I have Thoughts that are not yet solid enough to incorporate into a proper essay—but I don’t want them to melt into air.
I also want to share them! So I am going to try and do a little series each week on what I'm reading (or watching, or listening to, etc.). Maybe I will throw in some little slice of life thoughts. Some photos of Hazel (my dog).
"New Kid on the Block: New York's First Gen-Z Politician Has Fights Ahead," by Calder McHugh for POLITICO.
A really rad profile of New York City’s youngest Councilmember, Chi Ossé. He announced his run on Juneteenth, 2020, at 22 years old. Bonkers. This article was a very exciting look into the possibilities of young politicians who actually represent the people in their districts. His campaign and staff were totally grassroots and totally newcomers.
The profile also explores Ossé's experiences going from organizer to politician—"How do you bend the ear of the rich and the powerful while also staying true to your roots and advocating for your community?" The takeaway: pragmatism is important, but so is sticking to your most important principles. A wonderfully hopefully piece.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/08/chi-osse-new-york-genz-politician-00048183
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"How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force," by Dylan Matthew for Vox.
New fear: white billionaires with philosophy degrees.
This longform piece by Dylan Matthew dives into the effective altruism movement, which lives by the idea that it’s a moral imperative to give as much of our income away as we can, and that we can and should try to find what will save as many lives as possible—the most bang for our buck. For instance, public health is a popular domain of the movement, as the research more clearly shows how much a dollar can go to save lives. A few years ago, they were big on bed nets.
I agree with the moral imperative toward generosity, but am less hip to the idea of "bang for buck." I think it is too atomizing; it quantifies the unquantifiable, like life and quality of life.
And in practice, it misses some key points about the way the world works. Yes, giving out bed nets is one of the best ways to save lives. But what are they underlying causes for the need for bed nets? How can we improve society to ensure that people have access to whatever they need from their neighbors and government, not random Americans with doctorates?
The bed nets thing is certainly easier, but I think it's a cop out to approaching the more complex problems and conditions that will ultimately have a much greater impact if improved. And sometimes we, as Westerners on the other side of the world, go into aid without the local knowledge and relationships to make lasting change. The article doesn’t discuss the wealth of development literature on this, and I wonder if most effective altruists have done their research on that front, either.
I don't think the answer is to not help, or that bed nets are a bad choice especially when compared to doing nothing at all, but I think the way the EA movement talks about itself (or at least how the pieces I've read about it portrays it) is too cut and dry.
But then the article talks about how the movement has come to prioritize longtermism, which advocates that the trillions of future possible lives that have not yet come to be should have the same moral consideration as the millions we see today. That has given the AE movement cause to invest in things like ethical AI, to mitigate the oncoming singularity crisis or employment crisis or whatever you think AI will do—rather than the basic needs stuff like bed nets that dominated the movement just a few years ago.
The article details how the movement has grown from just a bunch of intellectuals with a few million dollars between them to multi-billionaires sending money not just to basic needs programs, hunger and public health, but political campaigns. In the lens of bang for buck, Matthew points out it's definitely wiser to invest $5 million in education lobbying that will change education across the country compared to $5 million building a few schools.
According to Matthew, two AE donors spent $20 million to beat Donald Trump in 2016. In 2020, they gave nearly $50 million to superPAC Future Forward. This little factoid was dropped with little critical discussion. It makes me wonder about the role of money in politics altogether, and how a system that lets $50 million from a single couple flow into a single party maybe isn't truly little d democratic.
I wish the author dug more into these thorny problems—with such big donors, how can we think about democracy and accountability? There are so many dangers when someone has this much money and has the power to drop it on whatever causes they deem worthy. And we've already seen how nonprofits and organizers change when they have foundation pockets to pull from (i.e., mission drift).
All this to say, this has further cemented my conviction that money is power and having billions of it is perhaps too much power in a country that claims to be ~democratic~. All the more cause to eat the rich.
Effective altruism went from underfunded idea to philanthropic force | Vox
Effective altruism has gone mainstream. Where does that leave it?
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"New to activism? Here's where to start," by Julia Furlan for Vox.
I came into this article not expecting much, thinking it would be a cute little listicle—boy was I wrong!! This interview with Brea Baker was exactly what I needed to read right now, and I'm still chewing it over and thinking about how to live intentionally with these ideas in mind.
I'd recently read bell hooks' All About Love for book club, and the consenus our little meeting ended on was that we had had expectations about this book that it didn't quite follow.
hooks, a prolific writer and activist, writes about the meaning of love, why our society and culture lacks it, and how to cultivate it in our own lives. All of us went into it thinking she would apply it more to social justice and organizing, when really it was much more about personal relationships and the internal work of love.
In this interview, Brea Baker takes the next step and applies a lot of what hooks wrote to politics and organizing. She says,
"I think for me, radical love gives me something to fight for versus being constantly in opposition to, or in defense against, something. I think that sometimes in being defensive, we have no vision for what we are trying to build … [bell hooks] really grounds us in the fact that if we lived our lives not in the way that the world and our society looks now, but in the way we want our society and our world to look in the future, then we would have to be more loving."
Love, according to hooks and Baker, is the foundation of social change for the better. We cannot have equity, equality, reparations, justice, abolition, universal basic needs and basic rights, if we don't first approach the world with love.
Baker also turns the notion of "gatekeeping" on its head, in a way that resonated with me. "… Sometimes we need to have prerequisites for the spaces that we're coming into, and we need to have a standard of what it means to be in this movement," she says.
And that's not to say that we have to know everything and be morally perfect to be an activist—but rather, we have to be willing to put the work in, to check out privilege, to learn, to listen to others.
We can't just show up and expect that that's the end of it, that we've done our job—Brea says that some folks "come in with all their baggage, with all their preconceived notions. And they're actually hurting hurting people in the spaces they're supposed to be in." She says,
We're willing to let you come as you are, but you can't leave in the same way that you came, you have to be transformed.
Wowowow. What a sentence.
This interview is chock-full of beautiful notes on being an organizer and politically active in these times. I cannot recommend it enough.
https://www.vox.com/even-better/23290581/vox-conversations-brea-baker-even-better
Thanks for reading, catch you soon,
—mia xx