The Tap Project
Nobody is a bigger fan of helping children in third world
countries get access to clean drinking water than I am. Well, except for Matt Damon, or the tens of thousands of international NGO employees working to bring
potable water to impoverished communities, or the millions of people who have
donated any sum of money to the cause. I guess what I’m really trying to say is
that even though I totally support people in third world countries getting
clean water, I’m not going to play that UNICEF “don’t touch your phone” game everyone is posting on Facebook.
Back in college I ate a fair amount of Yoplait Light, both
because it was extremely cheap and because it was one of the few dairy products
I could trust to not give me digestive shenanigans in class. I soon noticed
that around Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, Yoplait would put pink
foil tops on their yogurt containers instead of the ordinary silver ones. The
text on the packaging encouraged customers to mail the pink foil lids back to
Yoplait, because for every lid they received they would donate 10 cents to
Susan G. Komen.
My grandmother was a breast cancer survivor, and for a
little while I gave some thought to hoarding my yogurt lids and mailing them to
Yoplait to cure cancer, even if it sounded kind of like the sort of thing
Howard Hughes would do in his later years. I
assumed that General Mills would donate 10 cents per lid to breast cancer
research until the charity drive ended, the only limit to their altruism being
how many people sent in lids. If they got two lids in the mail, they’d donate
20 cents – if they got 300 million lids in the mail, then they'd have to donate $30 million, right? This seemed like a good way to contribute money to a
good cause without, y’know, contributing money.
What stopped me was the fine print on one of the lids:
"General Mills will donate 10 cents to Susan G. Komen, up to $1.5 million."
General Mills had decided ahead of time that $1.5 million
was all the money they wanted to donate to breast cancer research in a given
year. And that’s great – good for them for wanting to use some of their money
to help people! But here’s why I spitefully threw out all of my lids:
If you’ve already decided that you’re willing to donate $1.5
million, why don’t you just donate the
fucking money up front and forget about the whole pink lid thing? Why is
your charity incumbent upon my willingness to mail you garbage!?
That brings me to the UNICEF Tap Project – a
slick social media program where UNICEF donates money for clean water projects
in impoverished countries based on how long participants can go without
touching their phones. 10 phoneless minutes, for example, is enough to provide
a one-day supply of clean water to a child in need. In theory, the longer we
fortunate first world people go without our electronic luxury goods, the more
humanitarian aid gets delivered to less fortunate third world people.
The statements made on
this app are for illustrative purposes only. For every minute a user refrains
from touching his or her phone, she/he will unlock a small portion of a
sponsor’s donation.
And then, at the bottom of the legal page:
Subject to the pledged
limits from our generous donors and sponsors.
The project’s two sponsors have pledged a combined total of
$175,000. If you and me and everybody we’ve ever met locked all of our phones
in Fort Knox for a year, theoretically racking up hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of pure water, the communities in need would still get $175,000.
And while I don’t have any evidence to back this up, between
you and me, I feel as though that $175,000 is going to get donated whether
people touch their phones or not.* I mean, I find it kind of hard to picture a
UN employee yanking a bottle of water out of a Pakistani child’s hands just
because a systems administrator in Wichita started playing Angry Birds before
his ten minutes was up.
*One of the sponsors, Giorgio Armani Fragrances, is already
going to donate $500,000 no matter what.
I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to write this update
for a couple of weeks now, because what the hell am I really trying to
accomplish here? Blow the lid off UNICEF’s insidious plan to give children
water? Shame my friends for being compassionate? Suggest that $175,000 somehow
isn’t going to help a whole lot of people in need?
What UNICEF is really trying to do here is raise awareness
about water insecurity – a noble goal which they seem to be succeeding at,
based on the number of Facebook and Twitter posts I’ve seen about this project
over the past month or so. If you’ve taken part in the Tap Project, you’ve
contributed to a good cause. I guess I just want to temper some of the stronger
enthusiasm I’ve seen from people gearing up to save the world by going
phoneless for extended periods of time.
When all is said and done, the only person who really
benefits from you not touching your phone is you. If you feel so strongly about
this issue that you want to abandon your phone for a week, that’s your choice –
but you should know going in that what you’re really doing is controlling
the distribution of a pre-pledged donation, two and half tenths of a cent at a
time. If you want to help that badly, you could do more, faster by making a
direct donation through UNICEF’s site.
Much respect to UNICEF and everybody involved for raising awareness for a worthy cause - I just want to raise awareness about how they're raising awareness.
Truman Capps is waiting for the UNICEF program where
every time a person in a third world country drinks a glass of clean water, a
person in America gets a new phone.