The Givingscape—and the Tech Bros Who Built It
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We are living through a quiet transfer of authority. It used to be that generosity flowed through neighbors, congregations, unions, and community halls—places where the gift moved hand to hand, grounded in relationship, remembered in story. Today, generosity moves through platforms. Giving hasn’t just gone digital; it’s been rerouted. The people shaping how we give now are software engineers, product designers, and venture-backed founders. They don’t see generosity as a shared moral practice; they see it as a market. They host the conferences, publish the books, and decide what’s next for giving.
Lately, I’ve been working on an essay shaped by Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America—his warning about what we lose when we trade care and relationship for efficiency and control. I see the same patterns unfolding in philanthropy. We’ve treated the gift the way industry treated farming: not as something to be tended, but as a system to be optimized. While writing, I found myself consulting Lucy Bernholz’s How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us. It surprised me. Like Berry, she names what’s being lost. And, unexpectedly, I found myself forging an alliance between two very different thinkers who may help us recover the gift. I suspect we’ll need more of those.
Bernholz names the stakes: the commodification of giving threatens “the racial, religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the United States [which] is rich with giving traditions built around reciprocity, mutual aid, interdependence, and obligation.” What she calls the givingscape—a kind of digital shopping mall for warm-glow generosity—props up the illusion of democratized giving. Click here, choose your cause, get your impact statement. The pitch is aimed squarely at working-class Americans who are told their generosity still matters even if their wages don’t. It’s also sold to nonprofits desperate for revenue and looking for hope. But, too often, what they’re offered is a system that excels at collecting fees, harvesting data, and quietly redefining what counts.
Making Products Out of Relationships
What’s changed isn’t just the technology; it’s the meaning. Where generosity once lived in story and memory, it’s now packaged to look a lot more like a product. A donation becomes a transaction. A donor becomes a user. And the platform becomes the middleman. Bernholz explains: “What’s really going on is a commodification process—making products out of relationships.” It’s a quiet shift, but a profound one. Relationships aren’t something you manage like inventory; but that’s what happens when generosity gets treated like logistics — trackable, measurable, and ready to optimize.
This doesn’t just change how giving happens; it reshapes what giving is. Bernholz describes how these platforms have pulled acts of passion and protest into a world defined by finance and marketing. It’s not that people no longer care. It’s that their agency is funneled through systems that strip away meaning and erase context. We used to give because we belonged somewhere—because someone needed us, and we knew their name, and they knew ours. Now we scroll, select, and click. The bond disappears. And, more often than not, the system gets smarter while the relationship gets weaker.
When Markets Win, Communities Lose
The biggest illusion is that the system works—that as long as money is moving, generosity must be thriving. But what we’re really participating in is one big, beautiful false economy. If the graphs go up and the clicks come in, it feels like progress. But Bernholz helps us see the trade-offs more clearly: “We underinvest in our shared public systems while we celebrate individual generosity.” That celebration feels good—especially when it’s polished, trackable, and tied to personal choice. But, behind the scenes, a quieter and more troubling shift is underway. Public institutions—schools, libraries, transit, healthcare—are being left to wither. Responsibility is passing from the state to private actors, and from collective obligation to individual donors.
In this setup, the market wins by turning the gift into a marketable commodity—what doesn’t sell doesn’t stay on the shelf. Government gets to retreat, relieved of its role in providing for the common good. And communities are left holding the bill on an economy that doesn’t balance. Bernholz puts it starkly: “Philanthropy and our democracy will both fail if the burden of public services is placed on voluntary actions.” But that’s exactly what’s happening. Local nonprofits and mutual aid networks are doing the work of care—without guarantees, without resources, and often without recognition—while tech platforms collect the fees, own the data, and take the applause. That’s not a new economy of giving. It’s just a more attractive version of abandonment.
Who Gets to Define What Counts
Once giving moves through platforms, something subtle but serious happens: a small group of people start deciding what counts. Tech bros are suddenly at the front of the room telling us how to give, what counts, and which forms of generosity are “effective.” As Bernholz puts it, “The legal systems for giving in the United States privilege products over community, individual choice over collective obligation, and top-down white-normed practices over reciprocal, culturally grounded ones.” In other words, giving that’s relational, local, or informal often gets erased, especially when it doesn’t fit the clean lines of a dashboard.
A casserole doesn’t count. An impromptu collection for a church member doesn’t count. A neighbor covering rent or giving someone a ride to chemo is not counted. These acts of care happen every day, especially in working-class, immigrant, and faith-rooted communities; but they remain invisible to the systems now shaping philanthropy. Bernholz puts it plainly: “Acts of care are being pulled into financial products, where someone else—usually not the giver or receiver—decides what matters.” And that decision matters. Because what doesn’t get counted often doesn’t get resourced, and what doesn’t get resourced eventually disappears — not because people stopped giving, but because the system stopped recognizing them.
More Tools, Fewer Givers
For all the new tools we’ve built—apps, platforms, dashboards—fewer people are actually giving. Bernholz calls attention to the uncomfortable truth: “We’ve built more systems for giving, but they’re serving fewer people.” Maybe it’s because the shopping mall doesn’t have a food court. The number of Americans making charitable donations has dropped sharply over the last two decades. And the people falling away aren’t the wealthy. They’re working- and middle-class donors—the ones who used to give through churches, bake sales, neighborhood drives, and union dues. Many haven’t stopped being generous. They’ve just stopped being counted.
This is what happens when generosity becomes a consumer experience. You don’t belong to it; you browse it. You don’t show up; you click. And, if the platform doesn’t recognize your way of giving, you disappear from the picture entirely. What we’ve gained in convenience, we’ve lost in connection. Membership became customization. Obligation became choice. But the result is a more shallow kind of participation—and a lonelier one. People are still showing up for each other; but it’s off the radar, off the platform, and unsupported. That’s not progress. That’s disconnection dressed up as design.
Reclaiming the Memory of the Gift
What troubles me most about the reality of the givingscape isn’t just that it’s built by profit-seeking companies; it’s that the people building it believe they understand generosity better than the people who actually practice it. They talk a lot about innovation and impact. They host sleek conferences and publish trendy reports. But they rarely talk about reciprocity, relationship, or memory. They don’t describe real conversations with a donor. And they show very little humility about what technology can’t do. It can match, sort, and segment. But it can’t remember. It can’t recognize who’s missing. And it can’t carry meaning across time.
What the tech bros behind platform philanthropy will never grasp is that the gift is never just about money. It always carries something of the giver. It matters how it’s given and how it’s received. As Bernholz reminds us, “giving is inherently a social act.” That’s why people still care deeply about being thanked. And why, in a bit of poetic justice, I once watched a longtime champion of direct response throw a fit when an organization failed to acknowledge his $1,000 gift. His family had helped pioneer the very system that now informs these digital platforms; but when it was his turn, he wanted to be seen. That moment tells us something: no matter how efficient the platforms become, the human desire to give and to be recognized won’t go away. And, if we care about the future of generosity—if we want to recover the authenticity of the gift relationship—we’ll need to rely less on the platform and more on ourselves.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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