Effective Assholeism: Philanthropy for Tech Bro Psychos.
A look at effective altruism: pseudo-intellectual philanthropy in the age of tech bro plutocrats. Meanwhile, in the UK, Labour’s charity honeymoon ends.
I’m off to the Land of the Ice and Snow for the next few days. The other one.
Self indulgent plug: Do you ever wonder if I have a day job? Well, yes I do. I’m looking for my next consultancy projects from April. I’m something of a nonprofit Swiss Army Knife. You can find out more about my work on my website. Meanwhile, I’ll be mostly in the ABBA Museum in Stockholm.
Philanthropy, plutocracy, and autocracy
At a certain point, as charities and non-profits, we have to ask ourselves: does this practice get us closer to the world we want? Or does this take us further away? I’m tired of people thinking that the answer to this problem is simply to refuse to ask what kind of world they want - and to try to silence anyone who asks.
The thing about charity is whether it is a step along the way to a fairer society, or something else. This is why I get very very worried, especially at the moment, about the philanthropy of wealthy individuals. You see, I’m not a philanthropy abolitionist. I’m a philanthropist abolitionist.
As I’ve said before, oligarchies/ plutocracies and philanthropy are perfect bedfellows. ‘Philanthropy’, particularly in an industrial and oligarchal age, is an awesome ideological tool to justify the power of the wealthy elite. It’s always been the perfect public relations strategy for plutocrats, allowing them to launder their wealth and power into something seen as benevolent - while reinforcing the very systems that keep them on top.
As I also mentioned last week, we appear to be diving back into a new Gilded Age, a time when when democracy atrophied, robber barons pillaged the planet and its populations, and philanthropy - the ‘love of humanity’ - played a substantial role in justifying its worst excesses. It glorified the wealthy, enhanced their status, and provided a moral justification for their wealth.
It’s more and more presented as a more sophisticated version of charity - and constrasted with charity’s, ahem, poverty as a concept. More and more, ‘charity’ gets replaced with the ego trip title of ‘philanthropy’ in certain situations. You can see this on linkedin and in the nonprofit press, day in, day out. I tend to find that:
The very word ‘charity’ is always replaced with the word ‘philanthropy’ whenever the wealthy are involved.
‘Philanthropy’ is supply side, ‘charity’ is demand side.
Call yourself a philanthropy consultant and your day rates double.
Charity is denigrated as being temporary and undignified, where ‘philanthropy’ is somehow permanent, and coincidentally doesn’t involve giving money directly to poor people.
By which I mean, mention ‘charity’, and give it 30 seconds: an American philanthropy consultant will start mansplaining about philanthropy being about teaching a ‘man’ to fish, rather than, you know… letting him have one of yours. From your fish farm.
The thing is, ‘Philanthropy’ as an ideological deployment of capitalism, presents itself as above the petty concerns of mere mortals. It doesn’t have all those horrible associations with grubby poor people, or, god forbid, welfare programmes or taxation. Philanthropy is ‘strategic’ and long term, and of course, it is focused on a true love of humanity as some kind of transhistorical abstract - as opposed to, you know, humans. Charity pootles around with the paintfully mundane everyday people, but as a ‘philanthropist’, you’ve got your eyes on a greater prize: HUMANITY. Philanthropists believe they have bought themselves the right to a longer lens. Or a bigger rocket.
The robber barons of the past justified their power through industrial empires and strategic philanthropy. But today’s tech bros add a veneer of ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ thought to the mix. The result is the same—unaccountable elites deciding the fates of others. Tech bros see themselves as geniuses uniquely poised to solve the world’s problems. As Rory Stewart1 puts it, their belief is that money connotes intelligence, and indeed some kind of scientific superiority:
“Musk is part of a movement that believes the richer you are, it proves how clever you are, and that people who aren't wealthy aren't clever.”
- Rory Stewart
It goes both ways. Money shows you are clever. And being clever shows you deserve the money. The fact that you are so financially, intellectually, scientifically, and morally superior helps to reinforce that you have the perfect right to that wealth. After all, why would you be wealthy if you weren’t in some sense fundamentally elite?
And that elite viewpoint is also what justifies you spending it on philanthropic projects you happen to like (and which benefit you), rather than paying any tax. Amndrew Carnegie set this out in 1889 in ‘The Gospel of Wealth’. He believed that the ultra-rich had a responsibility to give their money away - but also the moral responsibility, and greater sense - to decide how it was spent. As a wealthy genius, he could better spend that money than could pettifogging pencil-pushers like governments and democracies, or indeed, the people who may benefit (or not) from what you decide.
Effective Assholeism, sorry, Altruism
Another thing that Rory Stewart said that struck me:
“Many of [the ultra-rich] have signed up to this giving pledge which Bill Gates [has set up]. And the weirdness is that they've all signed up to it, but they're just not handing over the money. And initially they said, well, it's just that we can't find projects good enough to absorb our money. So we're just thinking more… and they can be thinking for ten, 12 years, trying to find the right kind of project to get that money to.
So then you come with real evidence. So, you know, obviously, we've talked in the past about very good evidence that direct cash transfer makes difference to very poor people in, you know, Sub-Saharan Africa. And then they say, ‘Oh, well, you know, we're just waiting just in case there's a new tech innovation.”
- Rory Stewart
What is happening here?
This is where modern ‘rational’ philanthropy comes in. It’s not just about justifying wealth—it’s about ensuring that the wealthy maintain sole control over its distribution. More and more, the concept of philanthropy has been used to reinforce an ideology that puts social ‘usefulness’ and ‘efficiency’ at the heart of human care. Enter Effective Altruism, a movement that repackages old plutocratic instincts in the language of logic, numbers, and efficiency.
In the modern age of the oligarch tech bro, reheated intellectual excuses for total power of the wealthy elite now abound, and these are often promulgated through cod-intellectual ideas about modern ‘philanthropy’. After all, the robber barons of today see themselves as master scientists and an intellectual elite. Drawn from the dangerous product of Peter ‘disabled people’s lives are worth less’ Singer and Nick ‘blacks are more stupid than whites’ Bostrom, and beloved of Sam ‘convicted fraudster and thief’ Bankman-Fried, ‘effective altruism’ has become a touchstone for those who even bother to justify their supposedly ‘rational’ approach to ‘philanthropy’.
The idea that all altruism should be ‘effective’ (read: efficient, as determined by the goals of a load of straight white Western male billionaires) has given rise not only to a lot of justification of inequality, but also of self-enrichment (and lack of taxation). It’s said that their plunder creates wealth that can be used to ‘solve humanity’s problems’. It’s also led to the rise of various gamified digital platforms which are oddly similar to crypto investment apps (cor, surely not). Banks hungry for tech bro dollars have been pushing investment platforms that focus on ‘doing good better’. But would you want your bank to decide how to do good?
“Effective altruism, for all the hype about being a novel, game-changing approach, is at heart a conservative movement, which attempts to present billionaires as a solution to global poverty rather than its cause. The effective altruism movement has parasitically latched onto the back of the billionaire class, providing the ultrarich with a moral justification of their position.”
- Linsey McGoey, ‘Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century’, The Jacobin, 2023
So for ethical altruists and their ilk, morality is just a numbers game - which smart cookie John Duncan notes is an incredibly intellectually impoverished utilitarianist viewpoint. The greatest efficiency and ‘utility’ here are designed exclusively for the benefit of the rich and their own normative definitions of social good and ‘happiness’. No matter what the numbers say, the real decider is what you decide to ascribe the numbers to. EA has, unsurpisingly, latched on to the broader idea of ‘QALYs’ (quality-adjusted life years), which it finds particularly attractive since that technique provides a standard denominator across the board and makes all moral questions seem equal.
And, yet, it can make lives somewhat unequal. If I adjust your year of life for what I deem to be ‘quality’, then I get to make a decision as to how long it’s worth keeping you alive. Quality might, for example, be greater if you don’t have a learning disability. You might say, as Peter Singer does, that disabled people’s lives are not worth saving if their survival makes ahem normal people’s lives less happy. Similar numerical decisions were made about the lives of black people in the US constitution, where it’s specificed that slaves’ lives are worth 60% of the value of a ‘free’ person. And indeed, we’re all fairly aware of how ‘scientific’ methods have been used to decide the fate of people (about six million of them at one point) in the last 90 years or so. Whatever, numbers are never value-free.
So in essence, effective altruism serves to justify the wealthy having direct, undemocratic power over life and death. Michael Foucault called this kind of power ‘biopower’.
Meanwhile the notion of ‘longtermism’ has been popularised by EA figurehead William McAskill. ‘Longtermism’ argues that all potential future people on the planet are just as important as those who inhabit the planet right now. There’s a problem here: if that is the case, you can do pretty much anything you want to any human being now because in theory (you can do the maths) there are so many people in the future, that their needs outweigh yours. All you need to do, then, is come up with some hypothetical reason that the future would be better (eg. having fewer poor people around now saves money for later) and you can justify pretty much anything by sheer weight of numbers.
Underpinning these intellectual charades is always the idea that inequality is simply a temporary problem not worth solving; that the little people are not worth saving; and that instead, putting philanthropic money into a far future, with little care for the petty present of ‘charity’, or of real, living ‘humans’ rather than ‘humanity’, is a matter of superior understanding. Indeed, it is a higher, more developed form of morality for a higher level of consciousness. Of course, for tech bros in particular, it also confirms their own idea of themselves as owning the future itself. They are its makers, its custodians, and indeed, overlords. And they get to decide who gets there. (In a rocket.)2
But most of all, as Rory Stewart’s observations suggest, the issue is not really evidence at all. The point is that they just don’t want to give. The power that money gives them is the point. Effective altruism, as much as anything, is about setting up unattainable goals, and weaponising epistemology against equality and economic justice. They just don’t want to give you the money. I’ve found this so many times in my dealing with all kinds of charitable funders: they claim to want evidence. But that’s just their way of telling you to leave them alone.
It’s not new
These intellectual justifications for philanthropy as an elite-controlled moral project aren’t new. Just as today’s EA disciples claim ‘rational’ authority over who they think deserves help, the industrial philanthropists of the first Gilded Age covered their own goals in the language of scientific progress and industrial efficiency. The robber barons too claimed that their ‘philanthropy’ was more ‘scientific’ than old fashioned ‘charity.’ Was it? It was calculating and strategic certainly - but the goals toward which their philanthropy was directed had much to do with their own personal objectives and worldviews.
Taylorism and ‘efficiency’ became absolutist dogmas at the same time as industrial capitalism and the rise of billionaire oligarchies. And we should note how close the idea of controlling workers, and indeed, all citizens, was to most billionaire philanthropy. Alongside the development of that autocratic philanthropy justified by ‘science’ - masking ideology and exploitation - was the notion that most human beings needed an intellectual, financial, and indeed, moral elite to tell them how to live as a condition of their wage slavery, in order to unlock the voluntaristic ameliorations of flashy donations to great public works (and less and less to ‘welfare’).
You’ll see in this how much the idea was that managers were the only ones with the scientific intelligence to understand how to do things. This master slave dynamic continues to this day, both in day to day capitalism, and in the approaches we take to ‘charity’ and philanthropy. We see it at its extreme in effective altruism, but we see enabling and extensions of this instrumental rationality in the constant fetishisation of ‘efficiency’ in charities - which can only be enforced and developed by a managing class (often based externally in consultancy and finance) who focus on finance, governance, and technical matters to the exclusion of all else.
As we are seeing in the US (and constantly here in the UK), philanthropy of all types, as well as taxation for welfare programmes, is ever more tied to the notion of efficiency and ‘effectiveness’. There is nothing wrong with effectiveness or efficiency - the problem is how we define that, and who gets to define it. As Elon Musk (who clearly can’t even be arsed with philanthropy) takes the public purse strings, he alone now gets to decide who lives and who dies. In many ways, this is simply the mirror image of philanthropy of the wealthy which gets to use its own goals and values to decide who gets help, and who is deserving. Applying a scientific methodology, in the age of the tech bro, only makes it more chilling, and indeed, more easily applied given the vast power that these people now have over our lives through data and technologies easily harnessed for social control.
Philanthropy and oligarchy, and technology/ technocracy are a horrible combination. They can only reproduce and worsen inequality - and allow the powerful to crush the powerless beneath them. Philanthropy flourishes when democracy weakens, because it thrives on the idea that the rich should decide what happens, not the public. And people will flatter them - because when they’ve emptied the public bank accounts (possibly literally in Musk’s case now), what else is left?
Meanwhile, it’s of course extremely important to note that most of the current bunch of plutocrats aren’t even pretending to give. At a certain point, they are so powerful they just don’t need to bother. And that’s when the rockets come in.
Wes Streeting wants to fight you, outside, now.
Meanwhile in the UK, Labour Government Health Secretary Wes Streeting wants to you to know he is really hard. (Did you look at his bird? Did you? DID YOU?). After talking about breaking the NHS on the wheel for the last few years he’s on to ‘breaking the culture’ of the voluntary sector.
Wes always reminds me of one of those little guys who always seem to want to fight you outside a flat-roofed pub. They’ll find a reason, but, in essencep, they just seem to like fights. They’ll start attacking your kneecaps with a comical ferocity. You just kind of look down at them, shake them off your leg with a bemused smile, wipe off the frothing spittle, and head to the bar, trying not to make eye contact.
Now usually this type just garble their way through whatever it is they’re trying to say and swing their fists around. Things always go from bad to worse, though. I suspect Wes would start trying to chat up a Sky Sports advertising standee of a footballer near the bar, thinking it’s Tony Blair. Later he’d get barred for smashing up the pub toilet and on your way home you’d see him crying and throwing up in front of the Spar, as his boyfriend gets into a taxi. ‘I’m gonna break your f*cking culture!’, he’d scream at passers by. The window above the shop opens and someone throws a tin can at his head.
So Wes particularly singled out Queen ‘Camilla’s’ Royal Osteoporosis Society for their tendency to be, as he sees it, rather strident and self-interested. But he then broadened out that ahem critique and started on the lobbying of charities in general - ironic since he started in the NUS and Stonewall…. Anyway, to save you going to the Hate Mail’s website I transcribed some of what he said, but honestly, most of it is word salad.
“But the reason we made that investment, it was the right thing to do, is because it's the right thing to do. We share people's objectives they have [they are] stakeholders not partners - that's the thing, [with] partnerships you do recognize the challenges and the pressures on the other side of the partnership [..] I'm trying to break the culture of the voluntary sector and [its response to] NHS documents. So that's really hard and I have to accept that I can't change everything everywhere all at once, but we will give it a good go..”
Now, saying you want to ‘break someone’s culture’ is a bit much isn’t it. And this reminds me of what Paul Streets said about how the love-in with charities at the start of Government always very quickly turns to distrust and name calling the minute you disagree with them. And here we go.
I know it is frustrating having all these charities lobbying for their own things. I remember it from funder roles myself - 1000 health charities all claiming that colon cancer is more important than face cancer/ is more important than rickets/ is more important than septicaemia is really not terribly helpful. But the battle for resources is precisely the thing that civil society is sort of meant to do.
And trying to break them isn’t going to work. I mean, just once, could you try not creating another enemy on your ever-increasing list?
Whatever, all this is certainly a sign that the Civil Society covenant is needed. The idea that we are ‘stakeholders, not partners’ is exactly the problem it is trying to solve. Anyway, since Wes doesn’t want us as partners, perhaps we need to form more of our own partnerships. Meanwhile I strongly suggest everyone avoids making eye contact in case it sets him off again and we have to call security.
BONUS: While I was on the Mail website, trying not to barf, I did see this and decided I really like Angela Rayner. ‘Angela Rayner launched astonishing tirade against ‘that nonce’ Prince Andrew to get him removed from official list of deputies to Charles, authors claim in new book (Brendan Carlin, Daily Mail, 1st Feb 2025)
And finally….
Adam Something is one of my favourite YouTubers. He gives an excellent sketch here of the death of the Enlightenment and democracy and how we ended up here. He also hates Elon Musk so much, and skewers him with a pithy eloquence I wish I could muster. (He’s also expert in some of the areas Musk claims as his own). Check out this latest video and then do yourself a favour and watch his other videos on Musk (and the rest). As funny as you can make this stuff.
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Have a great week and if you’re lucky I’ll bring you one of these back from Sweden.
You might think an approach like longtermism would work for ecological concerns, but many have used it as a way to argue that developing new technologies to solve climate change, or indeed, to escape the planet altogether, are much better uses of resources. Some see the idea of burning away all of the world’s resources as necessary step, for all the future benefits that will produce. And after all, the planet will regenerate, right? But what does it matter, when those of you with a few billions can ride with Elon in a rocket to the stars. I’d much rather die.