The disadvantages of running a climate activism organisation without money seem obvious, but after 4 years the See Through Network has found many of them illusory. Indeed, the benefits of running a network on zero money and 100% motivation are not apparent until you try.
Volunteers launched The See Through Network in 2021 with climate journalistic/outreach programme See Through News, followed by See Through Games in 2022 (real-world and online educational games), See Through Carbon in 2023 (accurate, free, open-source, transparent carbon reporting ecosystem) and See Through Together in 2024 (social media content).
At first, the network assumed it would need funding. Four years in, it has a global reach exceeding a million, hundreds of contributors from a wide range of backgrounds working pro bono – and no bank account. Far from looming, the need for funding is receding.
This article explains why. It does not advocate that all climate activists should start working for free, but simply tells the unusual story of how one group has thrived by doing so.
Money’s magic power
Money might be imaginary, but it can produce powerful hallucinations.
Like an optical illusion that tricks your brain into seeing a vase until you perceive it as two faces, some things are obvious until they’re not. And once you’ve seen one, you can’t see the other.
Money is so embedded in our modern psyche, we forget it’s not real. We often attribute remarkable superpowers to money that a moment’s reflection would prove to be nonexistent.
Most people, for example, take the following statement to be a truism so obvious it barely needs stating:
All meaningful climate activism always requires money.
Yet a moment’s reflection contradicts every element of this assertion. People volunteer all the time.
Can’t buy me love. Or motivation.
What might a logical alien deduce from the assertion that ‘all meaningful climate action always requires money?’:
- Money is the only thing that ever motivates anyone to do anything
- Nothing is more motivating than money
- Nothing meaningful can get done without paying someone something
Re-stated like this, these deductions are obviously false.
- 1 must be untrue: we invented money 5,000 years ago; humans have been around for around 300,000 years. If money were our sole motivator, what motivated us to make it through the first 98% of our existence?
- 2 could be true, but obviously isn’t. Many recent Nobel prize-winners have demolished the assumption that we all act on rational self-interest. Real-world humans constantly act in ways that lose us money – because we value other things more.
- 3 is contradicted by countless areas of post-money human activity: mothers raising children, litter-picking, barn-raising, helping old people cross roads, voluntary fire brigades…
The more interesting question is why we think money is essential for any meaningful impact.
Why do we reflexively regurgitate assertions like ‘all meaningful climate activism always requires money’, when they’re so patently untrue?
Money By Gaslight
When the UK and USA were preoccupied by an existential threat rather than making money, three hit movies featured the word ‘gaslight’ in their title.
- Gaslight (1940): UK psychological thriller based on a 1938 stage play. To distract his wife from his criminality, a coercive husband convinces her she’s insane.
- Gaslight (1944): an even more successful Hollywood remake earned Ingrid Bergman an Oscar.
- Fanny by Gaslight (1944): an innocent girl’s life destroyed. She discovers her ‘respectable’ Victorian upbringing was built on prostitution, corruption and infidelity.
These black-and-white movies help understand why we’re so quick to assume all meaningful climate activism always requires money.
The first two introduced ‘gaslighting’ into modern parlance. No longer synonymous with artificial light, ‘gaslight’ now means ‘to manipulate someone using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning’.
How better to describe how Big Oil has convinced us to continue our addiction to their product, long after its damage has been proven? Like poor Ingrid Bergman, we’ve been manipulated into believing resistance is futile. We may as well shut up, be grateful, blame ourselves, and ignore the criminality taking place in plain view.
Fanny By Gaslight provides a perfect metaphor for the results of Big Oil’s gaslighting. Most news headlines, from wars to migrants, football, celebrity spats, are rooted in fossil fuel, greenwashing and climate stress.
Like Fanny, we’re victims of Big Oil’s massive wealth and pervasive influence. Its money funds the prostitution, corruption and bad faith underlying both the news agenda and the media business itself.
The digital revolution has not loosened this grip. Big Data depends on vast power-hungry data centres. Ignore the wind turbines in their advertising and you’ll find:
- at least 75% are powered by fossil fuel
- our Silicon Valley Overlords go to great lengths to obscure the real number
While we burn, drown and shrivel, the Three-Headed Beasts of Government, Business and Media continue business as usual. Linked below the neck by power, Beast is linked to Beast. All wallow in the Money Mire.
We’re distracted by culture wars, fake news, divisive blame games and other diversions from taking meaningful action to arrest carbon emissions.
We think money is essential, because it suits those with the most money for us to believe that it’s true.
Also, they have loads of it.
Money and activism productivity
Whatever your job, do a mental inventory of your waking, working hours, dividing them between the Money Bin and the Business Bin:
- The Money Bin: all the hours involving money in any way. Include fundraising, budgeting, accounting, auditing, contracts, negotiation, legal matters, invoicing, chasing payments, cash-flow etc. etc.
- The Business Bin: everything else, i.e. the thing you’re actually paid to be doing
Now compare the two. If the Business Bin is more than half the total, you’re remarkably lucky, and probably doing quite an important job. If you work in the NGO/charitable or creative sector, you’re doing well if you spend 20% on non-money-related ‘core’ activities.
Many jobs, especially in the NGO/charity/activist sector, end up with activists, whether employees or volunteers, in Money Bin activities.
The stories we tell ourselves
When asked what we ‘do’, we reply with words like ‘sales’, ‘hospitality’, ‘insurance’, ‘electronics’, ‘food’, ‘online retail’, ‘advertising’ etc. We tend not to say ‘dealing with money’.
Why?
The answer is complex, but boils down to a fundamental aspect of Homo sapiens as social primate:
- It enhances our status
- We all want to be the heroes of our own stories
- We all want to tell The Best Story
None of which involves, or even alludes to, money.
Economist David Graeber meticulously documented this phenomenon in his pithily-titled Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).
Graeber analysed the societal harm wrought by meaningless jobs, and the psychological harm of linking work to self-worth.
Exclude ‘meaningful’ jobs (growing food, making clothes, making things, caring for each other etc,) and what’s left are ‘bullshit jobs’.
Graeber reckons his 5-category taxonomy of meaningless jobs (flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters) covers more than half of most employment.
This association of labour with virtuous suffering is powerful and pervasive, but also very recent in human history.
It’s neither ‘natural’, nor obvious.
Not everyone is only motivated by money all the time
Return to the counter-factual list above, of everyday human activities that refute 3. Nothing meaningful can be done without paying someone something’.
Try adding more:
- religion-based charities
- secular charities
- caring for elderly
- disabled or vulnerable family
- friends and neighbours
- emergency flood defences
Many of these activities are those pursued by the ‘Voluntary Sector’, i.e. charities, NGOs, non-profits, social enterprises etc.
Here’s another way of characterising them. Any formal, non-governmental entity for which their essential purpose doesn’t feature phrases like:
- ‘pursuit of profit’
- ‘delivering shareholder value’
- ‘optimising return on investment’
Which leads us to another Emperor’s New Clothes statement of the obvious. So obvious that it seems foolish to even mention it:
They all have bank accounts.
Money’s Too Tight To Function
To have a bank account is to require money to function. It means that someone, somewhere, in the organisation gets paid for ‘doing their job’.
Now try explaining, in simple terms to a small child, why people working for the kind of activities we associate with ‘Voluntary Sector’ (like climate activism) need to be paid.
Try doing so without using phrases like:
‘people have to eat’
‘people have mortgages to pay’
‘people have families to feed’
Note that we rarely deploy such phrases when discussing the list of voluntary activities refuting the ‘nothing meaningful can be done without paying someone something’ assertion – caring for the elderly, emergency flood defence, litter-picking etc.
Big charities, or public sector roles like running universities or schools, often pay their top executives 6-figure salaries. This is more than an order of magnitude bigger than what they pay their average employee.
Standard justifications are the ‘need to compete with business’. Now explain to your small child the importance of the difference between ‘charities’ and ‘business’.
If your small child finds all this confusing, circular or contradictory, they wouldn’t be wrong.
They might even ask an even more awkward question.
What happens when some people get paid, and others don’t?
No second-class colleagues
The answer, familiar to anyone who’s volunteered for a charity, or has managed volunteers for a charity, is resentment.
Volunteer resentment can emanate from both the paid and unpaid, often featuring language like:
(unpaid)
- We do all the work
- The bosses take us for granted
- How come they get paid and we don’t?
(paid)
- Volunteers can be more trouble than they’re worth
- It’s hard to get rid of incompetent or unreliable volunteers, as you don’t pay them
- I spend all my time trying to get people to do what they’ve promised
This kind of resentment is unsurprising.
Even people united by a common passion can grow to resent the fact they work in a 2-tier organisation with 1st-class employees who get paid, and 2nd-class volunteers who don’t.
These perennial gripes, however, can all be averted by the simple expedient of not paying anyone.
If you’ve never heard of such an entity, or doubt such an entity could survive for long, let alone thrive, prosper, grow and deliver meaningful results, you might like to hear about the See Through Network.
It has no money, and hence no means of paying anyone anything.
Sufficient motivation
The See Through Network has no bank account.
- What drives this unpaid global network of pro bono volunteers?
- Why would they donate their expertise across a spectrum of skills from AI to filmmaking, coding, social media, podcasts, carbon accounting and project management?
- What unifying call to arms could have induced this globally dispersed network of zealots to work not just without pay, but knowing there’s no prospect of ever getting paid?
- What common goal unites these climate jihadists, prepared to devote their spare time and hard-earned professional skills?
The 10-word answer is the network Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.
Thousands of contributors around the world, from global north and global south, have ‘invested their time’ to ‘buy into’ See Through’s ‘Unique Selling Point’ (see how money has intruded to the point that we invoke it to explain why none is required?)
The See Through Network has discovered that money is not required to:
- marry hard science with sophisticated storytelling
- deploy a ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology
- interlock brands to mutual benefit in order to nudge ordinary people to reduce carbon
The network’s global reach has surpassed a million people on zero budget and with no publicity.
The See Through Network has not only defied all predictions it would wither without money, but thriving without a bank account has produced some unanticipated benefits.
The Advantages of Not Having Money
If we’re all been gaslit to reflexively list all the reasons why effective climate action is impossible without money, it’s unsurprising we find it hard to imagine any upsides to operating money-free.
Here are four zero-budget benefits that the See Through Network has found so far:
Engagement
Environmental activist groups are easy to spot, because their names include words like ‘green’, ‘nature’, ‘sustainable’, ‘eco’, ‘environmental or ‘zero-carbon’.
One of the reasons is that flagging their green credentials helps them raise money. Unfortunately, such labels deter anyone who’s not predisposed to agreeing with you.
Wear a green badge or dress up as a panda, and the few who are equally committed may drop some coins in your collecting tin. The majority who aren’t not only won’t give you any money, they’ll steer clear and actively avoid you.
What’s good for fundraising, turns out to be bad for engagement.
By branding itself ‘See Through’, the See Through Network benefits from being able to reach people who are immediately put off by such green trigger words, i.e. almost everyone.
Focus
We’re gaslit into thinking of money as lubricant, but it can also be sludge.
See Through Network volunteers are liberated to devote 100% of their available volunteering time to measurably reducing carbon, and 0% on the proxy activity raising and spending the money that ‘facilitates’ carbon reduction.
If, like many working in NGOs and charities, you spend up to 90% of your time dealing with money, that’s an instant order-of-magnitude increase in productivity.
Ten times more bang for your non-existent volunteering buck.
Security
Few countries are overt climate deniers. They at least all pay lip service to it annually at COP conferences and pretend to listen to their scientists’ increasingly desperate climate science reports.
Most countries have policies that recognise the science and reality of human-induced climate change, and are intended to reverse or mitigate global heating’s worst impacts.
But many regimes are autocratic. This makes them particularly suspicious of foreign-funded NGO. They have good reason, from their perspective of retaining power. There’s a long history of foreign-funded entities, overtly and covertly, seeking to promote values, systems of civil societies that threaten autocratic monopoly on power.
Surveillance, hi-tech and old-school, is quick to note communication between local and foreign activists. The next step, for security forces as well as journalists and lawyers, is to Follow The Money, and a midnight knock on the door.
The See Through Network has a policy of radical transparency, but such claims don’t convince suspicious security forces.
More convincing is no trace of any money transfers.
Recruitment
Imagine you’re a big fan of human civilization, want to bequeath your children a sustainable future, and want to contribute what limited time you have to ‘spare’ to effective climate activism.
You’ve also just read this article.
You have a choice between climate activists A, who have a bank account, and climate activists B, who don’t.
Which would you be more inclined to favour with your time and expertise?
Speaking of which…
Act now
If you’d like to take action to measurably reduce carbon, including joining the See Through Network, take your pick from these options.
See Through can promise a range of positive benefits and soul-nourishing rewards that will make you feel better by making a measurable difference to creating the shortest path to a sustainable future.
None of which will involve money.
