Creator survival under 4opens: an unresolved design question #17
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Reference: Open-Media-Network/4opens#17
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I want to raise a design question that I believe is foundational to 4opens, but not yet explicitly addressed.
4opens correctly rejects hidden power, enclosure, opaque governance, and capture. However, most common survival mechanisms for creators, including wage labor, employment contracts, venture funding, and closed commercialization, themselves introduce opaque authority, dependency, or control.
In practice, this creates a tension:
Wage labor is often energy-extractive and incompatible with sustained infrastructure or research work.
Employment and funding arrangements tend to introduce invisible decision power.
“Work on it in spare time” implicitly selects for people with surplus energy, wealth, or institutional backing.
This raises a core question:
How are creators expected to sustain themselves while producing 4opens-aligned work, without reintroducing hidden power or relying on self-sacrifice?
I am not arguing against 4opens principles. I am arguing that survival is a design constraint that shapes governance, licensing, and organizational choices, and should be addressed explicitly rather than treated as an externality.
I am intentionally starting with this question alone. Depending on responses, I expect to open follow-up discussions on governance structure, licensing choices, and transition rules, but those discussions are incomplete without an explicit survival model.
I am interested in hearing what models are considered compatible with 4opens, what trade-offs are accepted, and where the framework currently has open gaps.
You are right, the is not one, as it's based on social change... the path is one that used to exist... lets me give you some examples:
For 20 years in the UK, there were meany subcultures: road protest, summit hopping, squatting, back to the land, free parties. All of these allowed a generation of people to live for "free". And yes this "free" was in part subsidised, as this was a time when there was a (remains) of a social safely net, that help play a part in making this life possible. https://hamishcampbell.com/not-domination-the-cultivation-of-many-efforts-collectively-lead-to-significant-change/
In Oxford, where I am now, there was a strong squatting movement fed by skipping, free parties, and shared resources. Crucially, this culture crossed the town–gown divide, linking students, locals, activists, and outsiders. It lasted for roughly 20 years, leaving behind social memory and infrastructure https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk
A longer-running example is the Rainbow Gathering, which has continued for over 55 years. It exists almost entirely outside formal institutions, sustained through shared norms, trust, and collective care rather than money or hierarchy https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=rainbow
Then there is #Indymedia. For about a decade, the network ran largely on donations and volunteer labour. From that base, it grew to over a hundred sites, with tens of thousands of people contributing. It shows what can emerge from these “free cultures” when they intersect with the right tools and shared purpose.
There are undoubtedly many more examples. The key point is this: these cultures existed, and in quieter, more marginal ways, they can still exist today, off the beaten track.
The #OMN (Open Media Network) project is about growing these cultures back into spaces where they can once again influence the mainstream, without being captured or hollowed out by it. The #Fediverse is a living example of this process already underway - messy, imperfect, but real.
Yes, there are serious problems and contradictions. NGO capture, the #geekproblem, and the constant pull toward centralisation are threats. I’ve written extensively about these issues here: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO+geekproblem
But none of this negates the core task. Our job is not to finish the work, our job is to plant the seeds. If we do this well enough - with care, openness, and trust - it becomes possible for younger generations to tend them, adapt them, and grow them into forms we cannot predict.
That, realistically, is our only hope.
Back in the day, sustained activist projects were actually paid for, and people were paid wages.
Take Undercurrents, the video collective. It survived through a mix of VHS tape sales for screenings, small grants, and selling footage to traditional mainstream news outlets, often to shape or disrupt their agenda from the inside. This funding model didn’t just produce content; it sustained a community of activists, with time, skills, and continuity.
Many campaigns and protest camps were also supported by public donations, but there was something else that often went unspoken: a strong, informal culture of mainstream #NGO quietly back-handing resources to more radical activism. Money, equipment, office space, legal help - this cross-subsidy helped keep grassroots movements alive without forcing them to fully professionalize or dilute their politics.
That ecosystem mattered. It created a layered movement, where radical and institutional actors existed in tension but also in mutual dependence. The fluffy spiky debate.
What Does This Look Like Today?
In today’s terms, these models translate into:
Crowdfunding for specific campaigns or moments
Patron-style subscriptions to provide ongoing support
Direct donations to people and collectives doing the work
Some grants, used carefully, to seed infrastructure rather than control it
This kind of funding isn’t about scale or growth. It’s about seeding change, giving projects enough stability to exist, experiment, and build trust.
Once that change has taken root, then we can start talking seriously about sustained social funding: shared infrastructure, commons-based support systems, and long-term collective resourcing that isn’t dependent on constant crisis fundraising or NGO capture.
This is the space that projects like #OMN are trying to reopen: a commons where resources circulate inside movements, not upward into platforms or outward into professionalized NGO silos.
We’ve done this before.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this in detail. I want to check that I understand you correctly and then clarify where my remaining uncertainty is.
What I take from your examples is that survivability historically came from low-cost living cultures, informal mutual aid, donations, and cross-subsidy between institutional and more radical actors. Survival existed, but it was often implicit, uneven, and heavily dependent on broader social conditions that made living cheaply or collectively possible.
That history makes sense to me, and I do not doubt that it worked for many people at the time. Where I am still struggling is that today those conditions feel much weaker, more fragmented, and harder to rely on as a baseline assumption. When survivability is left implicit or deferred to social change, the practical effect seems to be that only people with exceptional resilience, safety nets, or tolerance for precarity can stay involved for long.
I am not arguing that OMN should solve this or that there is a single correct model. I am trying to understand whether making survivability more explicit is considered part of the work at all, or whether it is intentionally left to emerge only through wider cultural change.
Concretely, I am curious whether forms of community or collective funding have been discussed. By that I mean small, distributed, time-limited support that is explicitly non-scaling and not about professionalization. Not as a final solution, but as a survivability bridge that reduces early attrition and does not rely on self-sacrifice.
If the answer is that this remains outside the intended scope, that is a valid choice. I am mainly trying to understand where the boundary is drawn, so I can reason clearly about what these ideas are meant to support in practice and where individuals are expected to carry the risk themselves.
It's a #DIY culture, so your answer is in the name. And yes you are right this is in antagonism to the current safety first culture.
I can give you an example of a grassroots funding project that I was involved with in the start https://www.edgefund.org.uk/ started from activism formal consensus thus were rapidly captured by #fashionista wank and NGO "thinking". Maybe they do some good, I have no idea, likely not in #OMN terms.
I have tried just about every form of funding and non really work, but grassroots #DIY dose, thought as you rightly say it's difficult to sustain.
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-rise-of-stupidindividualism-as-a-mainstream-path/
On your last point the is no boundary but the #4opens and #PGA hallmarks test. So come up with something native to this and it could be a #OMN project.
Have you written up a more complete analysis of those attempts anywhere, or would you consider doing so?
By that I mean something concrete and historical rather than abstract principles: what was tried, under what conditions, how it evolved over time, what worked briefly, what failed, why it failed, what was attempted to mitigate those failures, and what you would do differently now.
I think having that kind of shared, public analysis would be extremely valuable. Not as a set of prescriptions, but as collective memory for people trying to orient themselves and avoid repeating the same dead ends.