I think Change.org is generally a worthwhile project, but the interview does not mention — and the company is coy about this, too — that Change.org is a for-profit corporation. So it is not exactly the case that Rattray abandoned a lucrative career in investment banking for the poverty of social justice, as the interview implies.

At one point in the interview, Rattray says Change.org was founded to “empower people to say what they want around the issues they care about”. My own experience was that some people are empowered more than others. The specific person I have in mind is Fran Drescher, who started her own YACC*, Cancer Schmancer. She apparently paid money to put a post on Change.org’s health policy blog about her organization, which included a solicitation for donations. Drescher’s organization isn’t exactly the vanguard of progressive change; it’s focused on early detection, prevention, etc. — basically the approaches to cancer that every cancer organization. Drescher herself has come out in favor of health care reform, but that side of her did not show in her Change.org posts, which focused instead on the limited scope of her organization.

After Drescher’s post was published on Change.org, I wrote a post suggesting that donating money to cancer organizations is not the best way to drive change in our health care system. The editor initially accepted the post, then spiked it. I then asked him, in a reply-to-all email that went to the rest of the writing staff, why he spiked my post. At that point my association with Change.org ended: I was, it turned out, not in fact empowered to say what I wanted around the issues I cared about, at least in an official capacity.

The point here is not that Change.org is some dark sinister organization that says one thing and does another. The point is that it is subject to the same commercial dynamics that most corporations face. That means among other things that they have to talk up online petitions as a tool for change. Why? Because their revenue stream depends on their ability to sell names to organizations. And the fact is that no online petition is going to matter until it has consequences in the offline world. That’s also true of blogs, I am well aware.

Change.org has been reorganized since I left, with less emphasis on the blog side of things. My posts there are a little hard to find, but you can read them all here.

*Yet Another Cancer Club