Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding in the Digital Age of Desperation

Donate to the cause. Help a single mother pay her rent. Fund someone's life-saving surgery. Bail out a stranger’s dog from the emergency vet. The list scrolls endlessly, like a modern-day Book of Lamentations written in GoFundMe bios and Venmo captions.

I sip my four-dollar coffee and scroll, torn between the pit in my stomach and the guilt in my chest. I wish I had endless money, a bottomless digital wallet to answer every desperate dream with a Venmo transfer. But instead, I count coins like prayers, tithing twenty dollars to a friend-of-a-friend’s rent fund.

This is the age of crowdsourcing. A digital cry for help echoing through platforms, asking not just for money, but for ideas, time, voices, labor. In the realm of missing Indigenous women, for example, families and activists crowdsource data on Facebook, Reddit threads, and Google Sheets because law enforcement won’t do it. Volunteers become detectives. Grandmothers become archivists. The state shrugs, and the crowd steps in. It’s beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. It shouldn’t be necessary. But it is.

And then there’s crowdfunding. A modern philanthropy in the form of shared suffering. We’re all just a few paychecks, a few missed calls, a few unlucky breaks away from being the one with the link in our bio. The incentive isn’t tax breaks, it’s empathy. Or desperation. Or karma. Sometimes it’s all we can do to feel useful in a world that keeps deleting us.

We’re mostly the poor helping the poor. We pass around the same hundred dollar bill like it’s a sacred object. The crowd gives, and gives, and gives until it feels like we’re pouring from an empty cup.

Maybe it’s time we stop pretending this is sustainable. Until then, we crowdsource. We crowdfund. We survive together, barely. And I click “donate,” again.