Charity Through Technology

Chris McCandless decided to essentially abandon his family. Sean Penn's film glorifies this because he sympathizes with what Chris was trying to escape. Partly, it was to escape the lies his family had told him, and partly the constraints that society placed on him. He gave up career, family, children, and ultimately, though not intentionally, his life.

I was thinking how this sympathetic perception might be seen otherwise. Despite the idealized life McCandless was trying to live, Penn does give some time to the hurt he was inflicting on his parents. How many people would watch the film that way, wondering how his parents must have suffered, even if they were the cause of his suffering?

But that's not what I really wanted to talk about, though I'm using McCandless's goals as a counterpoint to the point I want to make.

I remember reading a blog entry from a former student. Full disclosure: I didn't really know this student that well at the time he was a student. Indeed, were you to have placed him in front of me a year or two later, I don't know I could say he had taken a class from me. Having said that, he did help arrange an interview.

Anyway, this guy had felt some desire to leave Microsoft to do something more charitable, perhaps even more "Christian". He stayed around, and when Katrina happened, several colleagues and he took laptops and headed to New Orleans to help in whatever way he could. Microsoft has made some additional steps to allow its employees to take advantage of their altruistic nature.

That made me realize that, unlike McCandless, techie types that want to be charitable aren't planning to give up everything, and certainly not what they love most, which is the computer, and by extension, the Internet. Instead, they see that they can do something using what they love. There's the 100 dollar laptop, which suggests that computers are needed everywhere (is this mistaken like democracy is needed everywhere--presumably, beyond information, this would lead to access to porn).

There's efforts to obtain stories from parents or grandparents and store them somewhere, in written form, in the Web.

The Web itself has lead to social networks that interconnect us like never before. People find causes to support that they would never have otherwise. We help, but we help through technology. And that's a brave new world, not a return to simplicity, not a return to nature, not a return to isolation.