OMG yes! This is me too! I want to walk the talk, especially when so much of my tech politics writing is about whether or not other projects are walking their talk. But it would really nice to make even a modest living from my work. If I could find enough regular supporters to have an income of about $US200 a month, that would be a huge step forward.

For about 20 years, my strategy was to survive on social welfare benefits (equivalent to about US$130 a week). This year, I’ve been living in China, and my wife has been paying the bills for both of us. This is a good deal for the commons, but not such a great deal for my wife, who has to support two people on a modest teaching salary (equivalent to about US$260 a week plus free accommodation, electricity, and internet).

I tend to steer clear of platforms like Medium and LeanPub because they are proprietary datafarms, owned by venture capitalists. Again, I set high standards in my writing, and I want to walk the talk. But my experiments with ethical replacements like Liberapay and OpenCollective, and soliciting donations through BitCoin and Ko-fi, have yielded no results. As I said in a recent blog post about this problem:

“… figuring out which of these are honest, and *viable*, is a high-stakes research project in and of itself. With real money involved, there’s no kind of software more attractive to bad actors, idealistic incompetents, and venture capitalists. They all take time to set up and learn to use well, and you can’t get any benefit out of them without giving them real personal details and banking information. On top of that, there’s a risk involved in implicitly endorsing them if they end up being dodgy.”

Perhaps part of the problem is that we are approaching this problem as isolated individuals? Could some kind of platform cooperative be the solution?