I finished reading Sharon Bala's new novel, Good Guys this week. It's about the rise and fall of a fictional global aid charity based out of Toronto called Children of the World; but more than that, it's about what it means to do charity under capitalism. The story is very familiar—in that it feels pulled right out of real life. And as someone who works in the charitable sector, I found it stirring a lot of unsettling questions within me.

At the core of novel is the question, can we do good in a broken system? And I appreciate that Bala seems to not be trying to offer any clean answers to that question. She explores it from several different angles, people with the best intentions coming to the realization that their efforts may just be making things worse. As one of the characters in the novel, a journalist and writer asks, "It feels like the harder I try to do the right thing, the more I fail. Is it even possible to do good when the system is rigged for so much bad?"

In an interview with Mattea Roach on the CBC Bookends podcast, Bala was asked directly whether or not she thinks its possible to do this sort of work ethically and her answer really stuck out to me:

“I think it is, but I also think it's really easy to unintentionally do harm. And this is something that I also grapple with. I mean, I think one thing is just to actually not assume that you know what's best for other people, but to listen to what they say they need.”

There's an interesting thread around religion in this book and a lot of it is extremely cynical. The founder of the charity is a former Christian rock star and there are other characters with Christianity in their past. However, one thing that I noted was that one of the few characters who doesn't seem to be implicated in Bala's critique is a missionary priest. He's just working in the country running a simple church, trying to care for the people as best as he can. In fact, when the journalist character (who feels like a bit of an avatar for Bala herself) asks the question about whether or not its possible to do good, she asks it to this priest. Who responds, "no, but we have to try." And then when she jokes about what Jesus would do in this situation, he answers, "overturn the tables."

Rick Tobias once told me that a lot of big philanthropy gifts would often come with a reluctance or a policy around giving to faith-based organizations. He said that he would tell them that this is mistake, ignoring that spirituality is often a real part of life for people living in poverty. You're not listening if you're dismissing their faith as naive or somehow less important than other needs. And while that's not meant to exonerate the harm that many faith-based orgs have done (and still do), it is to say that it can be equally presumptuous to claim that religion has no place in meeting the needs of people experiencing poverty.

This is where I appreciate Bala's no easy answers approach and her focus that the only real way out of this mess is untangling it all from capitalism's deep hooks.

"When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.”

Earlier this year I picked up Steward Brand's, The Maintenance of Everything Part 1 and am finally setting some time aside to read it. For the longest time, maintenance was something that felt very unappealing to me. I've never felt like my interest held up for the long haul. But I've been thinking quite a bit over the last few years about craft and the generational loss of skills. As I get older, I am increasingly frustrated by my lack of ability to do things that previous generations could. I am trying, in small ways, to reclaim these skills where I can.

What I am paying attention to, however, is that the loss of these skills isn't entirely our fault. It is the slow and steady result of many coalescing factors. Yes, some of these of our own making—like our declining attention spans in the age of digital distraction—but others are foisted on us, such as the manufactured obsolescence in many of the products we buy.

I appreciate that there seems to be a growing movement of tackling both sides of this. The right to repair fight is helping push for systemic change while things like repair cafes and other pop ups are aimed at helping people reclaim the skills to care for the things they own.

In an opinion piece in the Guardian today, Maggie Zhou asks an important question: are we normalizing tech surveillance?

In the article, she's predominantly addressing wearable surveillance tech—such as Meta's AI Glasses—but its a question with wider implications. It's something I think about every time I hear of people sharing doorbell cam footage on social media, alerting others to the presence of suspicious individuals or wayward youths up to no good on their street. Doorbells cams have become prolific in most neighbourhoods around me. Many homes are even outfitted with little signs gleefully declaring, smile, you're on camera. Never mind that I'm on the sidewalk and I did not consent to this.

All of this is done in the name of security. But rarely do we pause and ask security for who? Whose security are we prioritizing and whose are we putting at risk? Zhou does indeed raise this by pointing out that wearable surveillance tech puts women and girls at a disproportionate risk for indecent filming. Meanwhile, doorbell cams and other home surveillance often further stigmatize already marginalized people. And sharing images of people online, especially youth, for the purpose of stoking anxiety, fear, or rage can have serious consequences.

These products are marketed as a preventative measure, "stopping crime before it happens." However, maybe the only thing they are preventing is a sense community trust and hospitality.

"Because of the repeated situations involved in most organized processes, individuals can use contingent strategies in which cooperation will have a greater chance of evolving and surviving. Individuals frequently are willing to forgo immediate returns in order to gain larger joint benefits when they observe many others following the same strategy." (Ostrom)

Despite the myth of self-sufficiency, humans are social creatures. We follow social norms because we a) have faith in a reward, and b) want to avoid social shame. The other day I was reflecting on how to get people to sacrifice their immediate gratification in exchange for a bigger, future reward. Social norms and behaviours—especially public ones—play a role here.

Every kid understands the social power of waiting in a line. And every kid knows the social shame that comes from cutting (or, 'butting' as we used to call it). Even when there is a risk of the reward at the end of the line running out, a free-for-all would be chaos and set a precedent that would erode trust for future lines. Without shared trust in the line system, those who were the strongest or pushiest would always get there first.

Now, its very worth noting that the strongest and the pushiest do usually get there first in life. They bully or buy their way to the front and manipulate things so they get more than their fair share, leaving next to nothing for those at the end. I guess my point is that we've let trust in the system erode and we might need to figure out how to re-normalize the social shaming of "no cutsies" at a macro level.

"The key fact of life for coappropriators is that they are tied together in a lattice of interdependence so long as they continue to share a single common pool resource." (Ostrom)

Its hard not to see the trajectory of modern Euro-Atlantic society as an attempt to loosen our dependence. Dependence on each other and even, perhaps, the natural world itself. Self-sufficiency is a myth upon which our culture has been built. Though we believe this to our own peril.

Our lives our inextricably bound to the systems and participants of those systems that we are situated in. Trying to act independently from that truth wreaks havoc on the systems—something that we are seeing more and more as the natural world struggles under the unchecked demand we have put on it for the past century+.

Ostrom rightly suggests that when people act independently of these shared resources, especially when they are scarce, the total benefit is less than if they worked together. If not reigned in they risk depleting the resource entirely. Cooperation is essential.