Just noticed this Guardian piece from yesterday arguing that crowfunding carries the risk of reintroducing "Victorian" notions of the deserving versus undeserving poor (a point I& #39;ve been arguing about the disintermediation of giving for a while) : https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/02/crowdfunding-welfare-state-pandemic">https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp...

If you want some more relevant historical whatnots on this topic, here& #39;s a thread I did about the history of Victorian "voting charities" and what they can tell us about the risks of putting unmediated human bias back at the core of giving: https://twitter.com/Philliteracy/status/1144585568090775552?s=19">https://twitter.com/Philliter...

And also this thread about the history of the role empathy has played in philanthropy, which contains a bunch more stuff on quite how obsessed the Victorians were with concerns about "indiscriminate giving" to "undeserving" cases: https://twitter.com/Philliteracy/status/1138421127779377152?s=19">https://twitter.com/Philliter...