CPS Grants & Substack Philanthropy
Substack titan Scott Alexander recently organized a global microgrant competition through his blog, Astral Codex Ten. What if we copied him, but limited the competition to Cool Philly Shit?
ACX Grants, localist edition. On November 11, 2021, blogger Scott Alexander announced that applications were open for his ACX Grants program. In the announcement, he discussed what he hoped to accomplish with the program, his criteria for reviewing grants, and where the grant money was coming from (a mixture of reader-generated Substack revenue and private donations). People interested in submitting project ideas had two weeks to fill out a brief application on Google Forms.
Alexander received over 650 applications. The projects came from biomedical researchers, computer scientists, social scientists, statisticians, public health experts, politicians, activists, journal editors, agricultural engineers, animal welfare groups, and more. They came from Germany, Kenya, the UK, and all over the United States. By December 28th, Alexander had chosen the winners: 38 projects receiving awards ranging from $1,000 to $150,000. In all, he distributed over $1.5 million. He then released, here and here, brief descriptions of 125 project proposals that didn’t make the cut, followed by a long blog post describing what it was like administering a grant program.
I wish this was only the first iteration of ACX Grants, but it sounds like it’ll be the last:
…if you’re wondering whether or not to start a grants program, the most honest answer I can give is “I tried this once, and now I’m hoping to invent an entirely new type of philanthropic institution just to avoid doing it again.
I’m excited to see what new institution Alexander is scheming up, but honestly, there’s so much that I love about his ACX Grants program that I’d almost rather just see him go for round two. The transparency, the efficiency, the flexibility… it puts established funding institutions, which are all too often opaque, slow-moving, and rigid/formalistic, to shame. Plus, paying subscribers see their money being put to good use while getting more of what they’re paying for in the first place: interesting written content.
Here’s Alexander’s description of one of the winning projects:
Siddhartha Roy, $25,000, for citizen surveillance of pathogens in drinking water. Some pathogens, notably legionella, grow in water pipes. There's not a lot of scientific or legal structure for monitoring them, and this team wants to solve this by sending kits to volunteer citizens who will use them to test their tap water. This is useful for avoiding legionella outbreaks, but my reviewers were most impressed by its ability to scale to other things and raise citizen awareness of pathogen detection. Dr. Roy is a Virginia Tech research scientist who helped uncover the Flint water crisis.
Whereas Alexander’s reviewers were impressed by this project’s ability to scale to other things, I see this project as proof of the fact that a similar grant program could be administered with a narrower focus on the needs of a particular place — like, oh, I don’t know, Philadelphia. Our residents are constantly bemoaning the failure of local institutions to solve an array of solvable problems. Whether it’s keeping streets free of garbage, or keeping street lights on, or keeping lead and asbestos out of public schools… the City just can’t seem to live up to residents’ expectations when it comes to the provision of basic municipal services.
In the absence of effective governance from elected officials, Philadelphia sure could use things like citizen-led initiatives for monitoring pathogens in drinking water. The ACX Grants program offers us a hint in the direction of how such initiatives could be funded. Then again, Scott Alexander has a massive online following, comprised of readers from every country on Earth (probably), cultivated over the course of nine years of prolific content creation. The obvious limitation of trying to emulate his model at the local level is that you limit your potential audience and thereby limit your supply of potential funders. That said, your smaller audience has a greater incentive to provide funding: they reap the benefits of the change they’re fueling, or, at least, can see the change unfolding right in their own community.
And, sure, the model could be used to fund things like Terrill Haigler/Ya Fav Trashman’s nonprofit/contracting company, Morgan Berman’s Glitter App, or an upscaling of Todd Kelley’s graffiti removal company. But the model could also be used to fund things other than municipal service gap-fillers. Let’s say comedian Na’im Ali wants to take a few months off from work to focus on honing his craft full-time — alright, we can fund that. Or, suppose rapper ZekeUltra needs some money to produce a big new music project — we can fund that too. Maybe a local visual arts collective wants funding to paint a new public mural, or an entrepreneur needs some startup money for a funky business idea, or a seasoned journalist is tired of bending to the will of her editors and wants to launch an independent newsroom. A localized microgrant program could help fund any of these projects.
Whereas Alexander’s ACX Grants were awarded to “projects that could make the world a better place,” ours would be awarded only to projects that would help make Philadelphia a cooler city to live in — CPS Grants, for Cool Philly Shit.
Might as well call it what it is: Substack Philanthropy. In high school English, I was taught to address counterarguments head-on whenever making an argument of my own. I’d now like to propose an update to high school curricula nationwide: we need to teach our students to anticipate counter-memes. In a world of social media, anytime you resolve to do anything constructive, you should always spend some time trying to predict how your work will be meme-ified by critics.
Such an education would have been useful to the Biden administration last week when it rolled out its plan to address the nation’s addiction crisis. The plan was to make funding available to local organizations, who, at least initially, were to have the option of using the money to purchase and distribute clean pipes to addicts. The idea behind the clean pipes was to (1) accept the fact that addicts are going to find a way to smoke their drugs of choice and (2) try to at least prevent them from getting infections from dirty pipes. Now, had the Biden administration paid attention during their classes on anticipating counter-memes, they would’ve been able to foresee getting absolutely annihilated on social media as follows:
Put aside the impact that the clean pipe initiative would’ve actually made on the world — no one on Twitter cares about such silliness. What people on Twitter care about is clout, and you get Twitter clout by dunking on your opponents, or even by dunking on people who aren’t your opponents, but who just happened to do or say something that was too dunk-able to resist. The idea of the United States government supplying pipes to crack addicts was precisely that — too dunk-able to resist. So many Twitter trolls dunked on the Biden Administration so mercilessly that public health officials began denying that they ever intended to distribute pipes in the first place. Wherever the truth lies, the whole ordeal offers us a lesson in the power of the counter-meme.
When it comes to ACX Grants — and any future attempts at emulation — I fully expect to start hearing the phrase “Substack philanthropy” used as a slur. Substack is already kind of a meme. People associate it with accomplished journalists who, in a desperate attempt to salvage dying careers, resorted to offering stale anti-woke takes in newsletter form. A lot of the people who love to hate on Substackers also love to hate on philanthropy, which is considered a means for the rich to act like they’re meaningfully improving the world when in fact they’re obstructing true progress by upholding the unjust systems through which they accrued wealth and power in the first place.
If you believe that the status quo is rotten to its core, that American liberal hegemony is irredeemably evil, and that true world-improvement requires a radical restructuring of society, including the massive redistribution of wealth and power, then, yeah, philanthropy would seem like a meme. If you see the very existence of billionaires as a symbol of injustice, then it doesn’t really matter what the billionaires do with their unjustly acquired fortunes; their fortunes are illegitimate, so they shouldn’t get to decide what happens with the money. And if you believe a just world would be one in which basic survival is a right and not a privilege — i.e., that people shouldn’t need to work for a living because the government should provide UBI, universal housing, and healthcare for all — then the haphazard efforts of wealthy individuals to fill in those structural holes will appear, at best, futile, and, at worst, a threat to the realization of justice, insofar as philanthropy deludes people into believing we can eradicate poverty from within the current system.
If, on the other hand, you believe that our current systems are not rotten to their core, or that they are but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon no matter how much we might wish otherwise, then philanthropy isn’t such a meme to you. Or, at least, not inherently — specific philanthropic efforts might be cringey, but the idea of philanthropy itself isn’t a meme, meaning that philanthropy, done well, is a worthwhile use of resources. At present, that’s how I feel about philanthropy — done well, it can be worthwhile.
So, in the event that Scott Alexander, or anyone who follows his lead, is slurred as a Substack philanthropist, we should be ready to meet the counter-meme head on. Yes, he is a Substack philanthropist, and I don’t care what you say, that’s pretty damn cool. Y’all go ahead and carry on with your efforts to restructure civilization. I’m gonna stick to improvement from within. And I think a localist application of the ACX Grants program would be a great place to start.
For now, CPS Grants is nothing more than a pleasant thought. But I’ll keep on keeping my eye out for Cool Philly People doing Cool Philly Shit. Who knows…