Part of my work as a historian is studying the ways social and cultural forces shape our daily lives and how we perceive

In this uncertain, unmediated space, scammers have proliferated. Any tweet mentioning Venmo or Cash App donations prompts a torrent of suspect direct messages. In one common hustle, a would-be donor promises his mark a huge amount of money, but first requests $50 or $100 to cover unspecified transfer costs. In October, the New York Times reported that reviews mentioning the words “fraud” or “scam” spiked for several payment apps this year, including Venmo, Cash App, and PayPal. (Representatives for the three companies did not respond to emails seeking comment.)

Direct givers often say urgency motivates them — rent payments and utility bills don’t wait, after all. But the choice to Venmo or Cash App aid is often also political, a commentary on the role and efficacy of conventional nonprofits. Critics of waste and redundancy in the field, including Pulte, the Detroit millionaire, frame direct giving as more efficient: “Think about how much ‘overhead’ goes into charity balls and dinners,” he told OneZero by email. Meanwhile, progressive and left-wing activists see mutual aid and direct giving as a means of subverting racist, classist, and ableist systems — philanthropy among them.

Like many of the thousands of people who embraced direct digital giving this year, Heubusch never really thought about Venmoing money to strangers until he saw dozens of people in his community lose restaurant and service jobs. With the help of the Buffalo Mutual Aid Network, an informal volunteer collective, Heubusch set up a system of Google Forms and spreadsheets in the spring that coordinated direct Venmo or Cash App donations between interested local donors and recipients.

Sure enough, tweet-length tales of need and desperation have become a hallmark of the 2020 internet, as emblematic of pandemic life as doom scrolling, Zoom, and sourdough bread. In Dallas, Nikkole Robinson, a 21-year-old Black trans woman and aspiring esthetician, publicizes hundreds of Black women’s Venmo handles, including her own, in viral donation threads. In Chicago, 23-year-old Claire Sundbye, a retail worker and recent college graduate, griped on Twitter that someone stole an Uber Eats order she already couldn’t afford; strangers offered to cover the cost of both her grocery bill and a replacement order.

Not counting an adjunct job that I had to turn down because it didn’t pay well enough, the best I could pull off was what was essentially a gig economy role writing for a for-profit education company. Eventually, I had to move in with family. It did not take long before I would start jokingly referring to my “typical millennial sob story” as a kind of preemptive apology. As someone who would be considered pretty far left in the United States (and left of center in a lot of other countries), I constantly read articles and tweets and watch videos soaked in statistics on how economically precarious life is as a millennial. If interrogated about my politics, it would quickly become clear that I completely reject the conservative and libertarian doctrine that anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps — an expression that was, as any good leftist on Twitter would tell you, actually meant to highlight its absurd impossibility. And yet I carry with me a palpable sense of failure.

As the pandemic began intensifying in March, for instance, K Agbebiyi, a 26-year-old social worker and community organizer in Brooklyn, launched a PayPal drive to benefit incarcerated people. “The nonprofit industrial complex,” Agbebiyi later told the New Inquiry, “has specific guidelines on who they can offer aid to that are incredibly ableist or tied to the carceral state.” Direct giving looked like one alternative.

Direct giving does come with drawbacks, however — including some of the very issues the Carnegies of the world set out to fight more than 100 years ago.“The trade-off,” said Michael Heubusch, an economist and community organizer in Buffalo, New York, “is that you’re demanding some level of trust and vulnerability from both parties that isn’t necessary if you give to an established organization.”

But the ethics of alleged cons and “fakers” become messier when they appear to exploit both potential donors and other disadvantaged communities. Robinson, the aspiring esthetician who curates aid requests on Twitter, said she became demoralized by the number of people who she believes masquerade as Black women in order to score Venmo donations.

“I was shocked, completely shocked, by how many people donated,” said Agbebiyi, who has since made their Twitter account private. “I think there are a lot of factors at play here. But people clearly felt empowered that they could do something immediately to help someone else.”

But the project faced challenges, Heubusch said. Donors frequently didn’t “get” it: Who were they sending money to? How were these people vetted? Prospective recipients, on the other hand, sometimes didn’t live in the Buffalo area or spammed the form with multiple, simultaneous requests. Organizers had hoped to keep donations peer-to-peer, in part to foster a sense of solidarity and egalitarianism. But after a few months, Heubusch stopped fighting the tide and opened a parallel GoFundMe account, which he redistributed to the individuals who had applied through the Google Form for help.

Across the country in Seattle, Jordan Roberts, a 26-year-old IT professional whose company cut hours at the start of the pandemic, tweeted in September that he feared he and his laid-off partner could no longer afford their rent. The couple made marginally too much money to qualify for food stamps or similar assistance, the state told them; a follower tweeted to Roberts to “drop his Venmo,” instead. They received a total of $1,800 from seven individuals and Seattle’s Mutual Aid Socialist Task Force, which also solicits its donations through Venmo, Paypal, Cash App, and Zelle.

“We were told our government would take care of us, that someone would be there to take care of us when we need it, but I asked for help and they told us no,” Roberts said. “It seems like the only thing we can do is help each other.”

But the full possibilities of that approach only became clear to Agbebiyi in September, when they joked to their 55,000 Twitter followers that if they each Venmo’d $1, it would pay off the majority of Agbebiyi’s student loans. The prompt came amidst several months of calls that urged white allies to provide more concrete support, including direct financial support, to Black organizers and individuals.

Direct-givers also widely understand — and accept — that some people seeking help misrepresent their circumstances, or use the funds for other purposes than they requested: “If someone wants to buy M