Slacktivism and how to do it effectively

Slacktivism is probably the worst byproduct of our constantly connected internet obsessed culture (that I participate in with fervor). People post things like a picture of a youth with prosthetics running across a finish line, and think that they’ve done the world a mound of good for “raising awareness”. People tweet and facebook their messages against rape, and homophobia, posting hashtags like #PrayforBoston when things like today’s explosions during the boston marathon happen. Slacktivism is the laziest form of activism, and I'm including waterobics.

Now obviously in our fast paced business culture (whatever that means) people can’t be expected to be out marching on the streets every night for a cause, and so they look for ways to help from the comfort of their own home. People who want to can still do tangible good without leaving their house by donating money to causes they support. And really, considering the times, there's nothing wrong with that.

But are there solutions for those of us who maybe don’t have enough money to donate to our favorite causes? Is there recourse for we that don’t have the time to volunteer, or perhaps for those of us that (ever being socially conscious) want to avoid being that person posting incessantly and uselessly about feline irritable bowel syndrome on facebook, but still genuinely want to make a difference?

Of course there is you ninny. It’s 2013.

Enter “The world community grid”, one effort out of many similar efforts to use ‘grid computing’ to solve some of the world’s biggest issues: cancer, predicting protein structure and folding, global warming, malaria, leishmaniasis, and a slew of other research endeavors that require high amounts of computing time and power.

Grid computing (a form of distributed computing) is defined rather aptly by the WCG website:

Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months. The technology is also more cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.

In other words the WCG is a technology developed by IBM that uses the spare system resources of your idling computer to perform computational tasks given to it by researchers with the WCG. You simply install a small applet on your desktop, and leave it running in the background. When your computer isn’t doing anything CPU or GPU intensive, it will start allocating its extra resources to aiding in the furtherance of science!

Now, if you’re like me and you have an active and fulfilling social life (hear that mom?), then you'll often find that your computer sits at home all day feeling neglected. Why not put it to work and help find solutions to a very deadly bacterial disease?

As for those of you shut ins who actually USE your computers (I’m looking at you, the mirror) you can set the program to quietly run in the background, and use a minimal amount of system resources so that you can still aid science and browse tumblr and facebook effectively you recluse ಠ_ಠ.

Find a full explanation of how the world community grid works here