Worthy deeds are performed for a vast digital audience. Philanthropy, or charity porn?
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.You can see through the cracks in the fences, Nathan Stafford tells me. We’re driving through the public housing properties of Glebe, a frayed pocket of Sydney’s inner city, weaving through alleyways and peering into backyards. Stafford comes here about once a week to tidy up gardens – to mow ankle-length grass, to pull overgrown weeds and to clear away rubbish that’s spilled onto the lawn. Every job he does here is for free.
After a while spent cruising the streets of Glebe, Stafford settles on a small, art deco unit with weeds sprouting over the edges of concrete paving – a quick, easy job on a damp, grey day. He knocks on the front door while I hang awkwardly a couple of metres back. Eventually, an elderly woman emerges. She tells us she is blind. Stafford offers to tidy her lawn, with the caveat he may film himself working, and she gratefully agrees, staying inside as Stafford revs up the power tools.
Stafford himself says he was inspired to start making his own lawn-mowing videos after seeing the number of views they attract. One night, as he sat scrolling in bed, a clip of a guy mowing a lawn auto-played after the pimple-popper video he’d been watching – and he couldn’t help but notice the seven-figure view count it boasted. “I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go,’ ” Stafford says. “And then I just kept going.
‘There’s a lot of people who are out there pumping themselves up. I guess you could call it performative charity.’Stylistically, Parker’s videos are a little different from Stafford’s, with a greater focus on the garden itself than the resident behind it. While he also films himself doorknocking, it’s usually from a great distance, making the subject hard to recognise – he often blurs out their faces altogether. He also avoids public housing.
“If you’re in the 1 per cent in any niche on social media, you’ve got a matter of months before that just becomes incredibly saturated,” says Taylor Reilly, Pawluk’s young, blonde and peppy talent agent, also on our call. “And that’s what happened with the kindness stuff, which is once Harrison started getting tens of millions of views on videos, there were so many creators that saw the easy win and then it started being done not for the right reasons.
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