See Through Network Founder and professional gift horse distributor Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern reveals the origin story of a global network that measurably reduces carbon, zero-budget.

The last of three articles by See Through Network’s founder on the creation of a climate action collaboration for ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. Its tone demonstrates See Through’s ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology’s flexibility, and its purpose. Just as ‘businesslike’ CVs dehumanise us, prioritising money before all else is making us drown, burn and shrivel.

By Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern

Part 1: Zig-Zagger describes the Founder’s pre-Network career and what it taught him

Part 2: Smuggler identifies the storytelling secrets the Founder applied to the Network

Part 3: Activist reveals how these experiences lead to the Network’s unique zero-budget model

‘Money Question’ v1

Just as the coins used to pay Shakespeare weren’t stamped ‘Elizabeth the First’, we didn’t know at the time there would be a Second Money Question. 

When developing what was to become the See Through Network in 2021, our founding team just called it ‘The Money Question’, which was:

Where will we get money from?

Everyone involved was, in different ways, painfully familiar with the challenges of funding any mission:

• Fundraising is tortuously time-sucking and debilitatingly energy-sapping
• ‘Free’ money always comes with strings attached
• Ticking funding boxes means compromising your vision

Our core group, which included tech start-up entrepreneurs, management consultants, NGO veterans and indie filmmakers, wasn’t short of ideas. 

But none of us questioned the notion that however our vision to measurably reduce carbon turned out, it couldn’t be achieved without money.

Free lunches

Before launching See Through News in 2021, the founding team spent months building the foundation blocks underpinning the See Through Network:

1. Mission: we honed the See Through Goal to ten words: Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active
2. Methodology: we tested various projects based on what became our ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ Methodology
3. Name: we found a brand that reflected our Goal and Methodology, and was unclaimed on major social media platforms.
4. Money: we parked the question of where we were going to find the money to pay for it all, pending working out what we’d need it for, and how much.

From the start, the Network benefited from the diversity of its members. Founding contributors came from a broad range of professional backgrounds; corporate, consultancy, finance, tech, NGO, law, media, music. 

On top of our professional careers, we’d all done various kinds of volunteer/charity/NGO/pro bono work. 

Our collective money-raising experiences meant we were clear-eyed about our options.

Crowdfunding

Favoured by digital creatives.  

This was my own area of expertise, having been an early adopter. My initial success had led international documentary festivals to invite me to deliver ‘crowdfunding masterclasses’. 

London media law firms, seeking to extend the ‘perk-based’ model into ‘equity’ crowdfunding – i.e. a formal investment tool -had taken me out to a very nice Japanese restaurant to pick my brains.

But all this was based on only two successes. By the time my third campaign bombed, it was clear that we were all overoptimistic about crowdfunding being anything more than a marketing drive that might top up a bit of budget, while greatly enriching the platforms who not only feasted on the data we provided, but took a percentage for the privilege.

My bitter experience of how much effort crowdfunding took for so little return did not leave me with any desire to buff this particular begging bowl again.

Philanthropic/government funding

Favoured by NGO and charity veterans.

My direct experience of this was limited, but I was pretty familiar with the realities of chasing ‘free’ money.

• Friends who worked for charities had told me how much time and effort went towards raising enough money to stand still, and how little ended up being used to move forward.
• I’d seen friends who’d built careers in overseas aid and development growing cynical and disillusioned about how much of the money ended up being spent on them, and how little on the projects they were paid to conceive, oversee, report on and audit.
• Among my own litany of failed projects was a documentary about James Parkinson, the Regency Period polymath now only known for his eponymous disease. I’d spent months failing to convince Parkinson’s UK, one of Britain’s richest charities, to seed-fund the project.

I eventually got to tell this last story – which had a personal angle as my father had founded the charity that became Parkinson’s UK when I was four years old – in the See Through Prodcast The Quiet Revolutionary.

But as we launched the Network in 2021, the prospect of joining the long queues bearing begging bowls, filling out enormous application forms, each with its own terms and conditions, was even less appealing than jostling with the crowds surrounding the increasingly toxic crowdfunding well.

I’d only just emerged from the black hole applying for ‘free’ money had plunged me into after my broadcast work dried up. I was enjoying the sunlight, and had no desire to return to that dark cave.

ESG & CSR

Favoured by impact investor types.

I knew about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). As a finance journalist at CNBC in the ‘90s, I’d trawled through innumerable company annual reports featuring their CSR activities.

Wholesome photos of sweating employees running marathons in fancy dress. Beaming colleagues spattered with paint after a long day decorating community youth clubs. Senior managers, usually only seen in suits, in tracksuits at school events. That kind of thing. 

This was evidence of their employers ‘doing good in the community’, which meant any activity that didn’t directly contribute to shareholder value. Such images were prominent, out of all proportion to the amount of time their employees were paid to do CSR work. if they were paid at all.

Companies presented CSR as pure altruism, but there were increasing regulatory requirements to compel businesses sometimes to do something for reasons other than profit. 

In my experience, people who worked in CSR departments also spent an awful lot of time citing research that proved CSR’s value for money in promoting recruitment and retention, to justify their jobs internally. They were always the first to be cut in a retrenchment.

As we investigated See Through Network funding options in 2021, I discovered a new green-tinged variant of this kind of below-the-line corporate activity. It was called Environment, Sustainability & Governance (ESG). 

ESG had already been hijacked, and tainted, by investment funds using it as a badge to charge higher premiums on supposedly ‘green’ investments, including a billion-dollar fraud case against a major German bank.

In summary: hmm.

Sponsorship

Favoured by advertising, marketing & PR types.

My own exposure to sponsorship had been from the TV industry, from the perspective of a creative trying to get paid to be creative. 

Network colleagues from business backgrounds saw sponsorship from the other side, as businesses seeking good value ‘brand association’ and low-cost ‘reputational gain’.

After decades of pooling ad money into regulated commercial breaks, the TV industry was returning to its ‘soap opera’ roots, with direct sponsorship of programmes, product placement etc.

As a funding option for the See Through Network, sponsorship had its upsides and downsides:

• Pros: a more transparent form of reputation-buying than CSR/ESG. Also, unlike film funds, charities or broadcasters, businesses actually had loads of money.
• Con: carried the whiff of prostitution. I have every respect for sex workers, but their work requires them to compromise their ‘passion’. My broadcast consultancy work for entertainment formats had taught me sponsorship was the most string-ful money around.

Venture Capital

Favoured by tech bro types.

There was much about our Goal that appealed to the instincts of our Silicon Valley members. Pass the See Through Goal through the Venture Capital jargon-converter, and it turned out to have potential:

• Activist version: ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. 
• Tech bro version: ‘Disrupting a trillion-dollar industry by massively scaling data-intensive behavioural change’

I’d stayed in touch with many uni friends who’d studied AI in the 1980s and went on to spend decades on both sides of the VC pitching desk. They’d taught me the secrets to a good pitch were:

a) promise the moon on a stick

b) include a clear ‘exit strategy’ guaranteeing massive IPO ROI

The idea that the projects we were developing to ‘speed up carbon drawdown’ might also appeal to venture capitalists was intriguing.

Was it really possible to make a shit-ton of money by measurably reducing carbon without compromising our mission? 

This appealed to my entrepreneurial and subversive tendencies, but was tempered by the fact that by 2021 the tech bros’ ‘Do No Evil’ principles, always gossamer-thin, had long been shed to reveal our Silicon Valley Overlords to be rapacious uber-capitalists in ‘disruptor’ clothes, not democratic digital revolutionaries.

The cynical journalist in me grasped me firmly by the elbow, took me to a quiet corner, advised me to have a good talk with myself, and take a cold shower.

Unsurprisingly, no matter who you begged for it, there turned out to be no such thing as a free lunch.

Marble blocks, boiling frogs

In my begging years, I’d often feel like a sculptor asking for money to buy a block of marble.

This image was in my head writing proposals on paper or in meetings in person. I never mentioned my sculptor alter-ego during private negotiations or at public pitching events, but it was always there. 

It was triggered whenever I heard myself getting to the obligatory bit where I described my ‘passion’. 

Whatever passion I was pitching at the time, I’d imagine as a sculpture I could see inside the marble block I was asking them to pay for.

‘Imagine’, I’d say, ‘a small boy cradling a chicken, sheltering beneath a blanket held by an Aztec queen. Buy me a marble block, and I’ll carve that for you.’

The funders would say.

‘That’s perfect! We’d just like the boy to be a girl. No, make it a woman. An old woman. Holding an iguana. In her mouth. And replace the blanket with an umbrella. And lose the queen. And we can only pay for 10% of the marble’. 

Like a frog on a pan of water being slowly heated on a stove, I wondered at what point to bail out. 

Unlike real frogs (who turn out to escape as warming water approaches their critical thermal maximum, exactly like a human would) this dilemma was all too real.

And now we were applying it to the See Through Network frog.

To really mix metaphors, at this stage the Network was riding a bicycle while building it, while being a frog slowly heating in a begging bowl, which we were also fashioning at the time.

Whoever we begged, they’d need more than just a story to convince them to cough up. 

First we had to demonstrate proof of concept.

Proofs of Concept – The Money Question v2

As we tested various proof-of-concept projects ahead of soft-launching See Through News at COP 26 in Glasgow, the Network’s strategists started debating a new version of the ‘Money Question’.

This second iteration raised the tempting possibility of avoiding the compromises required by crowdfunding, philanthropic and government funds, ESG, CSE, sponsorship or venture capital.

The ‘cake and eat it’ Money Question Mark II was:

Can we fund ourselves from our own projects?

As we developed and tested projects, the Network’s entrepreneurs became increasingly confident we could monetise at least one, if not more..

It started when we developed the prototype for what became The Think Game ahead of COP 26. 

As we tested the interactive sixty-second challenge on friends and colleagues, tweaking it with their feedback before trying our new-and-improved version, word got out. 

Almost immediately, we started receiving unsolicited commercial interest, not just in the The Think Game, but in other project prototypes we’d developed solely with our carbon-busting goal in mind, according to our storytelling methodology.

• The marketing & PR team of a multi-billion dollar global brand asked for a demo, and offered £3K on the spot. It came from their ESG/CSR budget, to deploy at their European HQ as an ‘employee awareness raising’ exercise.
• Hearing this, a FTSE 500 CEO, also spotting the value of the data The Think Game gathered, offered to hawk it around his big business boss peers.
• Our Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) scheme remotely trained schoolkids at Kenyan HIV orphanages in visual storytelling for their local solutions to UN Sustainable Development Goals. When two of their videos won awards in a global competition, its global fintech company sponsor asked for our bank account details to pay us to do more.
• The Europe and Africa ESG team of one of the world’s top ten banks requested a demonstration of The Learn Game. They said they’d recommend adopting it to their ‘Green Team’ of volunteers, and seek funding from their ESG budget.
• A media advisor to private equity groups approached us regarding the commercial value of the IP assets of The See Through News Newspaper Review Project

Stumbling across goldmines

The irony was not lost on us.

After careers spent hustling and chasing for money, now we were trying to reduce carbon we seemed to keep stumbling across potential gold mines.

Maybe it’s a peripheral vision thing, like when you search high and low for something, and only spot it out of the corner of your eye once you’ve given up.

Rubbing our hands, we established See Through News Enterprises as a limited by guarantee company. With this legal entity, we set up a business bank account to rake in the lolly, 

But then something odd happened. 

Our projects were all going just fine without money, and it was unclear how spending money would improve things.

Obliged to start without money, we had to be creative, and make the best of what was to hand. In turn, our mend-and-make-do culture inspired volunteers to join. 

Some were deterred by the fact we not only didn’t pay them, but had no prospect of ever paying them. But the same thing that repelled them, attracted others.

Gradually we realised that for many new recruits, especially those jaded or disillusioned by volunteering for climate activist groups with bank accounts, our zero-budget model distinguished the See Through Network from the thousands of other climate action groups that spent much of their time wallowing in the money mire.

Years before, during my year filming Ben ‘The Man Who Built His House In The Woods off Grand Designs’ Law, Ben often used a particular phrase when asked to explain his sustainable lifestyle, as well as his roundwood timber frame constructions.

He’d explain it as ‘building from resource’. It’s a kind of ‘retronym’, like ‘analogue watch’, ‘rotary phone’ or ‘acoustic guitar’, where we need to re-name things retrospectively once technology has moved on.

‘Building from resource’ used to be our only option, until globalisation made ‘building from design’ a possibility, but we need to re-learn it fast as it

1. still works fine
2. is more likely to be sustainable
3. is deeply satisfying, at an atavistic, DNA level

Years later, seeking a sustainable model for the See Through Network, might it be possible to ‘build from resource’?

Maybe the gold mines we’d stumbled across didn’t contain iron pyrites, ‘fool’s gold’, but the real thing.

And maybe we weren’t stumbling, but feeling.

Superpower, superemitters

In Part 1: Zig-Zagger, I described my ringside geopolitical seat during my first few zigs and zags. 

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, not even climate scientists were thinking of super-emitters. All eyes were on fixed on shifting superpower status. We missed the environmental connection at the time, but political power derives from economic power, and in our lifetimes economic power derives from burning fossil fuels.

Yet looking back, Patchy McZigZag turned out to be a kind of Forest Gump, just happening to be around when critical events unfolded.

• Tiananmen:  I was on a head office training scheme in Tokyo when Western TV satellite trucks, in Tiananmen Square to cover Gorbachev’s state visit, started live broadcasting student protests instead. On a tiny TV in my cramped hotel room, I watched live coverage by my future employers CNN, as the demonstrators demanded more, and were crushed.

• Berlin Wall: I was on secondment in Osaka when the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War we’d all grown up with had thawed. The USSR was shedding its satellite states. Gorbachev was a goner. Remnant Russia was a chaotic, peripheral, defeated and broken ex-superpower. 

• Japan Threat: I quit working at Japan Inc.’s biggest beast as Japan’s Bubble Economy peaked, threatening to replace the USSR as America’s only superpower rival. As the Bubble Economy burst and Japan’s superpower threat waned, I was producing reports for America’s top-rating evening news show on the world’s #1 bilateral relationship.

• Rise of China: As China replaced Japan as the USSR’s superpower I was reporting on China’s economic conversion to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ as CNBC Shanghai Bureau Chief. By 1998, I was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Producer, arranging coverage of President Clinton’s visit, the first US Presidential visit since Tiananmen, presaging China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.

My Forrest Gump decade was all the weirder for being a Brit employed by American TV News. 

My primary school still had world maps with a sprawling pink splodge demonstrating why the sun never set on the British Empire. By the time I went to university the sun had pretty comprehensively set. Solid pink was now a patchwork, as ex-colonies won independence,

This meant I had no patriotic dog in America’s superpower fight. But Americans were literally paying me to keep a close eye on developments.

I found it funny that my American employers thought they were seeing the ‘Rise of China’, as if it had come from nowhere. 

My year studying in China in the mid-80s had taught me the longer-term perspective you get if your place of birth counts its superpower status in millennia, rather than decades or centuries.

Even uneducated peasants scraping a living in remote provinces lectured me on ‘five thousand years of Chinese civilization’. From their perspective, China was returning to business as usual after a rough couple of centuries. China’s blip had coincided with the rise of upstart superpower America. ‘Rise’, my arse (as they also say in Chinese). This was a ‘Return’.

As China emerged from its decade of self-harm, the Cultural Revolution, scientists were starting to realise the Industrial Revolution had turned out to be a species-level act of self-harm, which we’re yet to stop, let alone reverse.

At the start of my year studying at Shandong University in 1984/85, some Red Guard embers were still glowing. By the end, a billion Chinese had embraced the new market reforms and were getting busy getting rich. 

What happened next both triggered the need for the See Through Network, and inspired its pragmatic approach.

Crossing the river by feeling for the stones

My adult life has been a front-row seat at the greatest growth in material prosperity in human history. Little surprise then, that the person credited as its ‘architect’ has influenced me, and hence the See Through Network.

The architect of China’s rise/reversion to the mean, was diminutive Long March veteran Deng Xiaoping. As China’s leadership pendulum swings back towards the emperor/dictator/cult leader, it’s easy to forget it’s all built by a 4’11” former general whose only official title for many years was Honorary President of the Chinese Bridge Association. 

In the West, Deng is often remembered for the ruthless determination to retain Chinese Communist Party control he displayed in the post-Tiananmen crackdown.

In China, Deng is known for his pivotal role in restoring China to superpower status. In 1989, the world could still afford to ‘condemn China to pariah status’.  While America’s attention was focused on Japan knocking it from its economic perch, Deng’s ‘Southern Tour’ dimmed the red light of ideology, and gave Chinese entrepreneurs the green light.

The consequences, geopolitically and environmentally, have been earth-shattering, but Deng’s practical approach, focused on outcomes rather than motivations, also influenced me, and the See Through Network.

Tiananmen aside, Deng was a charismatic leader, and brilliant communicator. He got his way not through force, didact and bluster, but largely through persuasion, compromise and example. Those were the days.

Abroad, Deng charmed, beaming in a ten-gallon hat at a Texas rodeo. At home,he cut an avuncular image, delivering gnomic proverbs with a wry smile and a thick Sichuan accent. 

Deng had a genius for expressing massive ideological shifts in folksy proverbs. Instead of producing bound copies of impenetrable neo-Marxist ‘Thoughts’, he understood the importance of using everyday phrases. He spoke little, but to great effect. 

The Cultural Revolution – in which Deng’s son Pufang was paralysed after Red Guards forced him from a window – was the result of ideology gone mad. Deng carefully chose his words to channel China’s shared national trauma into a push for prosperity, focused on improving people’s lives.

One of Deng’s best-known homilies to signal his determination to end ideological civil wars was  不管黑猫白猫，能捉到老鼠就是好猫 (bùguǎn hēimāo báimāo, néng zhuō dào lǎoshǔ jiùshì hǎo māo) –“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat”.

But my favourite Deng zinger was an even pithier expression of pragmatism – ‘磨石过河 (mó shī guò hé) Crossing the river by feeling for the stones.

The See Through Network has adopted this phrase, used by China’s arch-pragmatist to inadvertently trigger China’s rise to the world’s biggest emitter, to guide our approach to trying to reverse global emissions.

Feeling for the stones

Stone by stone, grope by grope, See Through’s path became clearer.

The temptation to hustle for money from those corporate ESG teams was soon washed away, a dead end.

• Entire ESG teams, who’d been so keen to ‘do business with us’ became the first victims of corporate downsizing. Even the award-winning team that has created the competition our Kenyan mentees had won all got canned overnight when belts were tightened.

• As our projects rose up the corporate ladders, a pattern emerged. The enthusiasm of the ESG teams for See Through Projects was genuine, but they wielded no power. The moment See Through project proposals landed on the desks of the ‘grown-ups’ who actually held the purse strings (it never turned out to be the ESG teams), they started attaching new conditions and strings and voicing new reputational concerns. It was almost as if they weren’t really that bothered about carbon reduction.

Hmm.

But something more interesting was emerging, as we inched our way across the river. The longer we went without money, the less clear it became what we’d need to spend it on if we got any.

Whenever we needed a particular skill or expertise, someone in the network would know someone happy to provide it pro bono.

Free versions of software platforms, from comms to video editing or graphic design, were good enough. When we needed to buy a licence for a particular app, someone paid for it. I was happy enough to pay for the only ‘hard’ running costs – website hosting – from my own pocket. The fees were the equivalent of a mediocre pub meal for two every month, and gave me a lot more pleasure.

By the time we launched the Network’s carbon reporting ecosystem See Through Carbon, in 2023, our zero-budget model had moved beyond a temporary fix, and had become an  essential feature.

Money, so often seen as liberating, was also a form of control. In a world of greenwashers, the best way to stay honest when it came to carbon reduction was avoiding being controlled by anyone with money.  

See Through’s founding storytelling allegory, about the Three-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media, linked below the neck by power, and wallowing in the Money Mire separating us from carbon drawdown, started feeling less allegorical.

• Multi-billion dollar multinationals, struggling to comply with new EU carbon reporting legislation, approached us days after we soft-launched See Through Carbon, but didn’t trust a free service as it was ‘too good to be true’
• Silicon Valley AI start-ups licked their lips at our data, but just couldn’t get past the concept of not ringfencing it with a paywall, or not generating lucrative IP. 
• Local government climate officers tasked with cutting small business emissions assumed we couldn’t act without their support. They didn’t grasp that we were doing it anyway, without their permission or support, or funding, and faster and more effectively.

We’re so used to seeing money as lubricant, we tend to ignore it when it’s sludge.

When in doubt, we reminded ourselves of our Goal to ‘help the Inactive Become Active’. We’d wasted a lot of resources, time and effort on a lot of money-related talk, resulting in zero action. 

It was a lesson in the sheer volume of people in business and government who claim to be ‘doing something about the environment’ with negligible real-world impact. What they all had in common was that they had bank accounts.

Whatever your motivation, maybe getting paid to do something subtly diminishes your incentive to make a real impact.

This came as a surprise. The See Through Newsletter regularly carried articles about barter, alternatives to money, and the pernicious corruption of money on the serious business of carbon reduction.  

If we were to have any real impact, we came to realise that See Through Network should reject metrics like:

• Fundraising. Money intended to be means, rapidly becomes the goal.
• Likes, clicks and views. Though necessary for impact at scale, these metrics are optimised to further enrich our Silicon Valley Overlords, and all generate emissions themselves.
• Raising awareness. Like ‘education’ and ‘informing’, this is a only step towards cutting emissions, not the destination. Awareness is no longer the problem, action is.

Instead, we resolved to measure See Through Network outcomes in:

• Tonnes of CO₂e. Using the same metric as climate scientists was the best protection from mission creep, corruption or prostitution. 

The key trick, we discovered, was to focus on outcomes, not motivations.

The Network was doing just fine without money. All those pitches, meetings and contract negotiations had distracted us from our primary goal of measurably reducing carbon.

Finally, we asked the right Money Question.

The Money Question v3

Why do we need money at all?

We all have Money Goggles strapped on at birth. Removing them can be painful, but enlightening once they’re removed. Most people never try, so they never know.

We started asking the right version of The Money Question in December 2022. Shortly before Christmas, we received an unsolicited donation-in-kind worth US$500K. Before it expired in April, we’d found a way to use the voucher (for supercomputer-grade cloud processing) to promote carbon reduction in the Global South.

This astonishing donation shocked us into asking Money Question 3. If we don’t need money to do what we do, and can inspire unsolicited donations like this, why change anything?

It proved that far from being a handicap, our zero-budget policy was – ironically – a Unique ‘Selling’ Point. 

That’s when we started using the strapline ‘If you can’t buy integrity, why should you be able to sell it?’.

I no longer worried that people might be deterred by my name card declaring my job to be ‘Gift Horse Distributor’. If they found that ‘unserious’:

1. They clearly don’t understand our storytelling methodology
2. Just wait till they hear we don’t have a bank account

All we ever want to talk about is emissions reduction, yet sceptics find it hard to get past the Money Question. 

Many feel obliged to offer us unsolicited advice, as if we were a bunch of idealistic hippies offering salvation through meditation. High status men (it was usually men) in expensive suits felt compelled to tell us ‘you’ll need money at some point’. 

The more I hear this and try to diplomatically steer the conversation back towards carbon drawdown, the more it strikes me that such people find it more important to prove climate activism is impossible without money than to actually take action to cut emissions. 

Thinking nothing is possible without money is, after all, a cracking excuse for inaction. As a bonus, you remain the hero of your own narrative, which is all any of us wants from life.

If you have lots of money, and assume money confers power, I can see why zero-budget activism might be quite troubling.

But after spending so much time debating various iterations of The Money Question internally, we were all getting bored with any version of it.

As we were trying to focus on carbon, money talk became increasingly irksome. For a while we’d respond to such reflexive assertions with a polite enquiry to list the things we’d need money for, so we’d know when it happened.

Now we pre-emptively recite our compilation of all the things we were told were impossible to achieve without money, in ascending order. We call them The Ten Requirements: 

Activists Shalt Need Money To:

1. Pay ‘hard’ costs 
2. Manage volunteers 
3. Engage participants 
4. Build & maintain IT
5. Have measurable impact
6. Create original content
7. Gain social media reach
8. Engage influencers
9. Have others pay volunteers
10. Operate at scale

We ticked off 1-8 within four years. Without money.

Sceptics may yet be right about numbers 9 and 10, but their credibility is somewhat diminished by having been equally confident about 1-8. 

We understand the question though. Journalists, lawyers and spies all know to Follow The Money. 

With no money to follow, you have to think of a different question.

Which is usually ‘Why would anyone volunteer to do work without pay?’.

A Rhetorical Question Answered 

The four arms of The See Through Network are driven by a global pro bono collaboration of contributors. All provide their time, expertise and ideas because they want to measurably reduce carbon.

Their skills range from carbon consultants to academics, AI gurus, IT execs, tech entrepreneurs, filmmakers, composers, advertising creatives and community Facebook moderators. 

Their reasons for volunteering are as varied as the individuals but include:

• Veterans ‘giving something back’
• Mid-career professionals doing some personal offsetting or seeking new skills
• Early-career novices seeking experience and mentoring
• Global North people in bullshit jobs wanting to do something meaningful
• Global South people, hit first and worst by climate change, wanting to fight back
• Tech execs, like the CEO who donated the US$500K-worth of supercomputing, who want AI to be used for sustainability, not slop

That’s why these people volunteer to do work without pay.

I very much hope that’s the last thing I have to say about The Money Question, but suspect not.

Some Payoffs

Comedians call them ‘callbacks’. Dramatists favour ‘foreshadowing’. Farmers call it ‘harvesting’. Storytellers call them ‘payoffs’

Here are a few from seeds I planted earlier in this unconventional bio that tell you what I think you should know about me, and the values of the See Through Network.

Pragmatism

Volunteers from engineering and IT backgrounds often ask which PDM (Product Development Model) See Through follows. Do we use Waterfall? Agile? Scrum?

We tell them we favour CRFTS, ‘Crossing the River by Feeling for The Stones’. 

I saw the first economic reforms as a student in China in 1984. Thirteen years later I reported his funeral. Now it’s Payoff #1.

Community

Like many journalists, I’m a ‘supernode’. In my personal and professional lives, I’m the one who stays in touch, puts people together, organises reunions, calls people out of the blue for a catch-up, for no particular reason. 

My knack for making and keeping different types of friends from different backgrounds and cultures goes by many names. My business colleagues call it ‘networking’. My fellow-hacks call it ‘contacts’. Chinese chums know it as guanxi. Japanese mates call it ningen kankei.

I label it ‘community’. Like I say, I’m a big fan of human civilization. 

So are all the contributors to the See Through Network. Payoff #2.

Perseverance

My failure to get anyone to pay to turn the footage I spent a year – and a chunk of my savings – following Britain’s ‘greatest living woodsman’ was a stunning blow at the time, the beginning of the end of my commercial filmmaking career. 

Today, See Through’s production team has recycled this footage as Ben Law’s Woodland Year. It’s See Through Together’s most popular Playlist.

Fragrant roses indeed. And Payoff #3.

Focus

See Through Together’s next most popular YouTube Playlist is Room From A View. This requires even more production time and expertise, as we’re filming, editing and uploading it as it unfolds, with no one knowing what will happen next or how long it will take.

Room From A View is also a case study of See Through’s Transparent Trojan Horse methodology. By only talking about money, and never mentioning zero-carbon construction, its stretch goal is to induce climate deniers into building sustainably because it saves money.  

Outcomes, not motivations. Payoff #4.

Alchemist

I’m the kind of person who can create something from nothing, and inspire like-minded people to pitch in for a common purpose. 

It’s why so many people think the See Through story is’ too good to be true’. Gift Horse Distribution is a much tougher business than you might think.

That’s quite enough from me. 

Which version of my bio did you prefer? Payoff #5.