Suck

for 28 May 1996. Updated every TUESDAY.



	The Salvation Army meets Newt's laptop
	...on the Web!

	Your home page away from home...
	bridging the class gap with the new
	mother tongue of humanity - HTML!

	The net is an ivory sea of middle-class
	liberals. In with the tide comes the
	guilt, and where there's guilt, there's
	commerce. As Nation articles expose
	the miseries of undercompensated janitors
	in Silicon Valley, the tension of the
	techno-elite escalates. Release is afforded
	via a tiered Web-based appeal for charity
	that complements one's consumerist
	tendencies as much as one's munificence.
	To that end, charity.com acts as the
	humanitarian surfer's tool, while
	disadvantaged.org is an aggressive
	education and individual-action resource
	custom-tailored for the less fortunate.



	Akin to the Working Assets Visa or the
	Ben & Jerry's Peace Pop, charity.com
	operates on the piggyback philanthropy
	principle - through an individualized
	charity.com account, all Internet purchases
	are rounded up to the nearest dollar and
	divided amongst the net.consumer's wards.
	The process by which the altruistic surfer
	finds candidates to sponsor turns the
	classic panhandling paradigm on its head:
	disadvantaged.org clients receive a
	generous supply of charity.com/
	disadvantaged.org (C/D) badges stamped
	with their account ID, which they can offer
	to potential Samaritans. As the altruistic
	sponsor shops, the ward's fortune tops
	when rounded pennies accumulate into
	valuable credit applied toward access time
	for the disadvantaged.org client at local
	surfstations.

	Purchase of charity.com domain name and
	registration of disadvantaged.org. Pilot
	studies in Palo Alto, Redmond, and
	Cambridge will suggest corporate partners
	amenable to high-profile PR therapy, and
	identify local shelters, public libraries,
	and Internet cafes with which to make
	cooperative arrangements. Staffing needs
	will include charity.com strategic
	partnership associates and
	disadvantaged.org e-counselors, although
	positions can be filled by independent
	contractors working on a percentage-fee
	basis. The geographic diversity of
	disadvantaged.org clientele will
	necessitate hub offices in most major
	metropolitan areas, although the relative
	mobility of those being served and the
	virtual nature of the service should make
	one office per broad geographic region
	more than sufficient. Day-to-day
	coordination between central and satellite
	offices suggests the need for a private
	charity.com jet.

courtesy of The Duke of URL