My daughter Sukie watched the whole video last night (she’s 9) and then she had a bad dream. But when Leslie questioned whether it was OK for her to be watching, Sukie piped up, “Gaby already watched it and she’s only 6!” The video is so well done, it’s very impressive.

Trying to pinpoint why it makes me ambivalent is hard, but I think I know what is going on. And these remarks have to be prefaced by saying that making Kony a household name I think is a good thing. In other words, there may be unintended consequences, but overall I think they are small, and I think the success of the campaign makes it more likely rather than less likely that Kony will be arrested and tried and found guilty.  There is a clear consensus that Kony is responsible for horrible crimes, and a fair and partial judicial process (the ICC) has issued an arrest warrant. So there is no moral ambiguity (except quibbling) about a campaign to splash his poster everywhere in the world and make his name and face well-known everywhere. All persons who commit crimes against humanity should fear that.

So where is the moral ambivalence?
1. Should someone with the power to mobilize tens of millions of people advocate that they deluge “celebrities” with a message, making it difficult for those “celebrities” to disagree or simply be indifferent? Maybe the celebrities have other, laudable or reprehensible, goals in life. What does Rhianna (whoever she is) have to do with Joesph Kony and justice?
2. Should someone use their child, knowingly, in a campaign intended to reach millions of persons, so that their child becomes a “celebrity”. This is an obvious troubling moral issue in the era of “viral” video: How do we retain privacy if we are always one click away from intended or unintended 15 minutes of fame? The key word there is that Gavin is being “used” as an instrumentality. Of course children have always been used in that sense (Shirley Temple), but shouldn’t part of “development as freedom” imply the freedom of children to not be used that way? It’s a tough moral tradeoff, to constrain one child’s life with the intent to improve opportunities for thousands of other children.
3. Does the very high production quality of the video not have a “medium is the message” effect? I worry a little that by taking an attitude that only a Hollywood style production can generate the intended outcome, means that at some complex level one is accomplishing the same thing as the very Hollywood/Corporate manipulation criticized in the last third of the video. Shouldn’t we be careful about holding on to a deliberate anti-slickness as a mechanism to signal credibility?
4. Related to this, the video appears to celebrate Facebook in a somewhat strange way, as if Facebook were a global commons, rather than a private corporation.

Those are my thoughts, but of course as I noted earlier, contextualized in the very earnest desire to see the campaign indeed achieve the intended goal of redoubling effective efforts to have Kony captured.