I remember in junior high and high school, one of the options that our teachers often used to pacify students when we had finished our other work would be to give us a computer and have us go to freerice.com. Freerice is a website where students can answer questions about various general education topics, and for each correct answer, 10 grains of rice will be donated through the World Food Programme to fight hunger. Freerice generates the revenue to donate to WFP by showing banner ads on each question.
While fighting world hunger is certainly a cause worth pursuing, Freerice's structure seems to be problematic in its ideological functions. In a similar vein to the line in Sleep Dealer in which it is said that they want workers but not their bodies, Freerice promotes a utopian narrative of the digital age, in which we are fighting world hunger, but ignores the systematic injustices that have led to poverty and exploited labor in colonized regions. Allowing for this kind of simple action in our everyday lives further allows us to distance ourselves from the actual people that are affected by hunger. They become simply the number of questions that we got right, a number of grains of rice donated. While these people and injustices are being made invisible, we are fed the narrative that we as individuals are able to end world hunger through our altruistic actions.
The function of Freerice as an educational tool alongside the generation of revenue through marketing further enforce the utopian narrative while obscuring systemic issues that contribute to hunger. As an educational tool, Freerice pushes the narrative that through education, particularly the education of privileged peoples in wealthy countries, issues such as world hunger can come to be solved. Furthermore, the reason that these issues can be solved is because of the use of corporate marketing which is used to generate the revenue for Freerice's donations. Thus through the use of narratives constructed under contemporary capitalist conditions, digital technology comes to be seen as a utopian force, while allowing us to distance ourselves from the reality of people facing hunger and obscuring the historical injustices and labor exploitation that contribute to hunger which were produced by these same systems.
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