This year’s buzzwords reflect a changing and increasingly unpredictable world. The news has tilted away from the pandemic to an unknown future shaped by other major events such as climate change and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Two tech stories reared up at the end of the year and continue to make headlines — Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter and the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a vocal proponent of effective altruism.
All of this has implications for philanthropy, which seeks to address the world’s most challenging problems but is entangled with the tech and finance sectors in increasingly murky ways. These entanglements include debates over the source of philanthropic wealth, how technology is used by and for philanthropy, and donors’ blending of politics and giving. As always, some of the latest buzzy lingo and the trends those words represent will be lasting and meaningful while others will be little more than passing fads. But for the present, they are part of the zeitgeist that is shaping philanthropy.
Here are the words to watch, drawn from my report “Blueprint 2023: Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society,” which was released today.
Algorithmic destruction. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation — the tough data-privacy and security law that went into effect in 2018 — introduced many people to the idea of having their online data destroyed. Building on that law, activists are calling for the destruction of algorithms that collect data in ways that invade privacy or are discriminatory — and the Federal Trade Commission has recently supported such action. As with all things digital, this has implications for nonprofits and donors who use and rely on data in multiple ways.
Attack philanthropy. The phrase was coined by Barre Seid, the electronics billionaire who donated all the stock in his $1.6 billion company to the Marble Freedom Trust and put an archconservative kingmaker, Leonard Leo, in charge of it. A ProPublica article credits Seid with the term, which he defined as “looking for ways to place financial bets that had the potential to make epochal change.” Seid set a new bar for using the tax code and disclosure laws to advance his political interests while protecting his privacy. Absent significant regulatory changes regarding philanthropy and political activity, this kind of tax-avoidant, dark-money giving will only grow.
Family office. Move over donor-advised funds and limited-liability corporations. It’s time to make way for the new philanthropy innovation on the block — family offices. These are private wealth-management firms that serve a range of purposes for ultrawealthy families. Billionaires use their family offices for everything from investments and household budgets to hiring butlers and airplane captains. Philanthropic advisers — along with political and investment advisers — are folded into these offices. They add yet another layer of obscurity to how the wealthy manage their money and give it away.
Fediverse. This is the interconnected web of independent servers that host websites and digital files, allowing people to communicate, share photos and videos, make new connections, and interact online. Fediverse, which combines the words “federated” and “universe,” is meant to be a decentralized, noncommercial alternative to more popular social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The buzziest recent example is the open-source social-media platform Mastodon. While it has existed since 2008, its user numbers almost doubled in the week following Musk’s purchase of Twitter as people fled that platform in search of an acceptable alternative.
Generative AI. These are artificial-intelligence systems that take existing information and create something new from it, such as images, videos, text, or anything that can be digitized. Examples include DALL-E 2, which creates images and art based on text entered by users; text-to-text applications such as ChatGPT, which can write text and answer questions; and Meta’s Make-a-Video, which produces videos from text or static images.
Longtermism. Meant to encourage people today to give priority to people in the far future, longtermism is part of the effective-altruism movement — a giving philosophy that aims to achieve the greatest good, typically in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. In 2022, well-funded proponents of effective altruism, including Sam Bankman-Fried and Open Philanthropy, used grants and connections to place themselves on podcasts, launch news platforms, invest in existing online sites, and attach themselves to social media–made personalities. The collapse of FTX and the arrest on fraud charges of Bankman-Fried, one of longtermism’s loudest advocates, could lead to a reckoning for proponents of this giving approach. Longtermism may well end up being a short-term buzzword.
Pandemicene. A name for this era in human history, based on the idea that the world will be shaped by multiple, ongoing, and overlapping health pandemics. These pandemics are believed to be driven in part by damage to the global climate and shifts in animal habitats that are leading to increased virus transmission among species.
Predatory inclusion. The phrase is inherently oxymoronic, yet crypto enthusiasts use it sincerely to tout promises of a whole new financial system. But they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. The inclusion part is meant to position the potential for crypto to aid communities that have been harmed by the deep inequity of existing financial systems. The predatory part speaks to the reality that crypto has made a few people ridiculously rich while leaving others worse off than they were before. The idea can be generalized to other systems that concentrate power behind the scenes while promising accessibility and democratization.
Protestware. The term took off after Russia invaded Ukraine. Recognizing how pervasive open-source software code is, activist coders deliberately altered parts of open-source libraries to cause systems to fail or to display activist messages to express their objections to Russia’s actions. Despite the good intentions behind it, this case illustrates why the promise of open-source software requires attention to the rules that govern software, not just the code itself.
Regenerative [fill in the blank]. Regenerative agriculture is known as a type of farming designed to rejuvenate the health of the soil and everything it produces. Now, the adjective “regenerative” is being applied to technology, finance, and medicine — losing much of its original intent and meaning.