So my Facebook feed has been an actual waterfall for like ten days now, and I'll admit I was fully prepared to keep scrolling past every single ice bucket video until I hit the one Bill Gates posted a few days back. Now I've watched it probably six times.
If you haven't seen it: Gates didn't just have someone chuck a cooler over his head like a normal billionaire. He built (or had built, more likely, though I want to believe he was in the garage with a hex wrench) an actual contraption, a bucket rigged above a wooden frame, a rope, a lever, the whole Rube Goldberg setup, so that pulling one string dumps the water on him with zero human assistance. It's got a plywood base and everything. It looks like something out of a high school physics fair, except the guy operating it is worth around 80 billion dollars and started a company that's currently trying to figure out what Windows 9 even is.
I don't really care about the discourse around whether the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is "slacktivism" or whatever the thinkpiece word of the week is. People are donating money to ALS research that wasn't getting donated two weeks ago, and Lou Gehrig's disease is genuinely awful and underfunded, so I'm not going to be the guy complaining about a bucket of ice water on the internet. What I do care about is that this is maybe the most "tech person" way anyone has done this challenge. Zuckerberg's video was fine, he nominated Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, and Netflix's Reed Hastings, all pretty predictable picks for a guy who runs Facebook, but it was just a bucket. A normal bucket. Poured by hand, like some kind of savage.
Satya Nadella did his too, since apparently once you're a public tech CEO in mid-August 2014 you don't really get a choice anymore. It's been kind of fascinating watching this thing propagate through Silicon Valley specifically, actually, there's something almost too on-brand about a bunch of engineers responding to a viral social challenge by immediately trying to optimize it. Somebody, somewhere, is going to 3D print an ice bucket rig by the end of the month. I'd put actual money on it.
Small tangent, not really related, but Robin Williams died last week and it's been strange watching the internet run two enormous emotional currents at once, genuine grief and tributes on one side, buckets of ice water on the other, sometimes in the same feed within thirty seconds of each other. I don't have a tidy point to make about that. It just felt weird to scroll through and I wanted to write it down somewhere before I forgot the feeling.
Anyway. I did my own challenge on Saturday, in my backyard, using a regular bucket like a peasant, and my dog lost her entire mind and has been suspicious of the hose ever since. No engineering involved. I nominated my brother and two guys from my old job, one of whom still hasn't done it, which is honestly the most predictable outcome of nominating that particular person.
If you want to actually see the Gates video and haven't yet, it's worth the ninety seconds just for the moment where the mechanism releases, there's a real "well, no going back now" look on his face right before it hits him. Whoever built the rig deserves a raise, or at minimum doesn't have to worry about their next performance review for a while.
I keep thinking about how a challenge like this couldn't really have existed the same way even three or four years ago, it needed Facebook and Twitter both saturated the way they are now, needed everyone already carrying a camera in their pocket, needed the nomination structure that makes it spread like a chain letter but somehow doesn't feel like spam. It's a weirdly perfect use of the exact social media infrastructure that gets complained about every other week for being shallow. Funny how that works out sometimes.
Going to go towel off my dog now. She's still mad at me.