Visiting Speaker Series Presents Dr. Erik Schneiderhan: GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding

The gaping holes in the U.S. and Canadian social safety nets mean that many people live in a state of financial precarity that can instantly become untenable in the face of another big expense, such as a large medical bill or damaged property. Historically, people have turned to their communities, neighbors, families, and loved ones for help in these situations. Today, asking for money on the internet through crowdfunding is among the most popular ways of seeking and donating to charity, and for-profit enterprises have realized that tapping into this instinct for helping is extremely good business. This talk reveals how these sites, most notably GoFundMe, enjoy massive revenue, without providing the help they promise. They fail most of their users while putting them through an emotional rollercoaster and using sneaky tactics to obscure that reality. With unprecedented access to interviews, surveys, and hundreds of thousands of crowdfunding cases across North America, this talk, based on a book forthcoming this summer, tries to answer the following questions: Who succeeds and who fails in the digital crowd? Whom do these sites benefit? The answers are uncomfortable and suggest that the failure of GoFundMe and others is emblematic of the inability of the for-profit sector and Big Tech to engineer an end to social inequality.

Speaker: Erik Schneiderhan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with appointments at the University of Toronto at Mississauga and at St. George. A political sociologist and theorist interested in democracy and how we help others in communities, he is the author of The Size of Others' Burdens (SUP, 2015).

Talk Location TBA