Is there another way?
Yes. People are already building it.
Funding the commons
Some of what the internet depends on was never made for an audience at all. It was made for everyone, often by small groups of dedicated professionals, and almost nobody notices until it breaks.
Open source software is the sharpest example. A Harvard Business School study estimated that firms would need to spend $8.8 trillion to replace the open source software they currently use for free, roughly three and a half times their total software spending. A decade earlier, Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges argued that this software should be treated as public infrastructure, like roads or water systems. Yet only 4% of financial contributions to open source reach maintainers directly.
People and institutions are trying to close the gap:
- Sovereign Tech Fund: public funding for open source infrastructure
- NLnet Foundation: funding open internet projects across Europe
- Wikimedia Foundation: millions of readers keep Wikipedia funded with no advertising
That is the practice at planetary scale. The same instinct works closer to home, where communities organise to own what they make and use.
Cooperative ownership
When the people who make something or use something own it together, incentives are better aligned. There is no outside shareholder pushing for growth at the community’s expense, and no platform owner who can quietly alter the terms of the relationship.
The OECD has documented platform cooperatives as a credible structural alternative to conventional platform work. The first global inventory of journalism cooperatives shows how reader-ownership produces newsrooms that are structurally independent of both advertisers and platform algorithms. The model is already working:
- Stocksy: photographer-owned stock image cooperative, profits shared with members
- The Bristol Cable: UK media cooperative owned by over 2,500 members in Bristol
- The Ferret: Scottish investigative journalism funded by its readers
- Mediapart: independent French digital newspaper, journalist- and reader-owned
- Defector: worker-owned US media, founded by the Deadspin staff who resigned after being told to “stick to sports”
Bristol Cable’s 2,500 members took a decade to build. Mediapart took almost twenty years to reach the scale of a major newspaper. The path is slower because the work is shared, but that is also why it can endure.
Even cooperatives take a community to build. The simplest version of this needs only one person.
Direct relationships
One person decides to pay for something they value. This is sustaining something you use, not charity. What it looks like in practice:
- A recurring contribution to a podcast you listen to every week
- A pledge to a journalist whose work you trust
- An album bought directly from a musician
- A sponsorship of a piece of open source software you depend on
- A membership to an independent newsroom
- A tip to an illustrator whose work you keep screenshotting
Over the last decade, Patreon alone has moved more than two billion dollars from supporters to creators. Most contributions are small. Together, they sustain people doing work they would otherwise have had to give up.
A quiet layer of better tooling has grown alongside the big platforms. Open Collective handles fiscal hosting and transparent budgets for projects of any size. Liberapay is a non-profit cooperative for recurring donations. Thanks.dev routes funding to the open source dependencies your software already uses. The principle they share is simple: infrastructure, not intermediary.
Now that you know this, what can you do?