Chapter 28. Growing a sustainable network

A working draft, November 2026. This book is being written while The Grove is being built; expect it to change. This chapter is a strawman: problems and candidate answers to argue with. None of it is built, and little of it is decided.

In this chapter

• Why attempts to build outside the money system tend to be owned, sold or closed
• Why the picture isn't a commune doing without, but a world better than ours: beauty, cities, technology
• What "sustainable" could mean for a network of organisations: three loops to close, and a test of what it could lose without collapsing
• How a first site might be funded with nothing, how surplus could seed the next, and how assets might stay in the commons
• Why the state's reach doesn't stop at the network's membrane, and why that argues for sharing rather than pricing
• What stays dependent on the outside world however large the network grows, and what we don't know

Every attempt to build a society outside the money system seems to end the same way. The founders own it, the next generation sells it, or the tax office closes it.

That's the doubt, and history gives it plenty of support. Communes have been bought out by their own members. Co-operatives have demutualised when the assets were worth more split than shared. Communities that hoped to leave money behind found the state still wanted its share, in its own currency. This chapter doesn't pretend to have solved any of that. It's a strawman: a set of problems we can see coming, with candidate answers to argue with.

The question

Chapter 30 pictures a society whose needs are met by many small organisations, owned by no one. Suppose a network of organisations on The Grove took that on as a shared purpose. Not a commune that drops out, but a growing web of self-managed organisations that together provide for people's needs, and that become steadily less dependent on the world outside.

How would it start, with no capital and no land? How would it keep what it builds from being sold? How far could it move away from outside money, and where would it stop?

Not a step back

When people hear this kind of thing, many picture a commune: a few dozen people in basic housing, growing vegetables and doing without. That isn't the picture.

The picture is beauty. Homes and buildings worth living in. Neighbourhoods, towns, and in time cities. The best of what technology can do, put to work for the people who live with it rather than for whoever owns it. Needing less outside money isn't the same as having less. A great deal of what makes ordinary life expensive today is rent paid to owners, interest paid to lenders and margins taken somewhere far away. Take those out, and the same effort goes much further.

So the aim isn't a smaller life, or a purer one. It's a better one: a world better than ours, not a compromise with it.

I don't see people doing without. I see beauty: places people are proud of, cities even, full of craft and technology, built by people who own what they build together. Not a retreat from the world we have, but something better than it.

What such a society would contain is for the people in it to work out. This chapter is about the frame: the mechanics that might let it begin and keep growing without being captured.

What sustainable could mean

Not total self-sufficiency. A society that makes everything itself is poorer and more brittle than one that trades, and even ecosystems exchange nutrients across their edges. The aim we're thinking about is to meet the essentials from within, trade the surplus by choice, and need a little less outside money every year.

For that to hold, three loops have to close.

Materials and energy. Inputs regenerate, soil, water, sun, rather than run down.

Capital. Assets fund the next assets without fresh outside debt.

People. Contribution doesn't burn people out, and the culture renews itself. This is the loop most intentional communities break on, more often than the money one.

There's a sharper way to put the goal. Self-sufficiency is about what you produce. Sovereignty, in the sense Chapter 1 gave it, is about whether you can walk away from a dependency without harm. The second is more achievable, and it gives the network a question it could ask itself continuously: what could we lose without collapsing? That's a gradient, not a finish line, and it suits a network that reads itself, as Chapter 2 hoped.

The more needs the network meets within, the fewer levers the outside world holds over it. That's close to arithmetic, with one caution: a single need that can't be met from within can still be lever enough.

Starting with nothing

At birth, someone holds the title, the keys and the signatures. That's the founding paradox: the thing meant to be ownerless starts out owned, or at least held in a few people's names.

The people who start it aren't necessarily the ones with the money, and they're often more than one. More often founders bring the energy: the idea, the first gathering, the will to keep going. Nor do they have to be the ones who hold the root, the seat that stewards the whole, once it's growing. The money can come from many places, outside and in. A bank or an ethical lender. Many small loans from supporters who believe in it, which is how many housing projects in Germany's Mietshäuser Syndikat, which comes up again below, are funded.¹ Community shares, where in the UK a co-operative or community benefit society can raise money from many people while each member still has one vote. And members lending their own savings to the place they live in.

Whoever lends, the same rule holds as everywhere on The Grove: money can fund the work but never buys a say. A loan is repaid, with interest if that's agreed. It never comes with a vote.

Inside an organisation on The Grove, part of this is already handled. The founder holds no last word, and the guardrails in Chapter 6 bite the moment a second person takes a seat. What the system can't reach is what sits outside it: a loan signed in one person's name, land registered to a few early members, a bank mandate with one signature on it. Those need a handover of their own.

So the strawman is soft first, hard late. The real value of a young community is the people in it and what they know, not its buildings. The first thing to grow is knowledge: a school, online, teaching what the community is learning to do. Knowledge costs almost nothing to copy, which makes it the first place costs fall towards zero, and the first source of outside income. Hard assets come later, once there's a collective able to hold them, and whatever is held in one or a few people's names passes to the organisation as its capacity to hold it grows.

What's open is what triggers the handover. A milestone tied to the organisation's capacity seems right. Leaving it to the choice of whoever holds them seems like founder's syndrome with extra steps.

Land and buildings

Land and housing need more money than a young community has. The strawman: borrow, from whoever will lend on fair terms, and let the outside world pay the loan. Build housing, rooms and space for courses, and let some of it to people outside the network. Outside rent services the debt. Members' own rent, where there is any, builds equity in their own commons rather than a landlord's. Schools and courses work the same way: the outside world pays to learn, and that money flows into the build.

The open question is how much of each site faces outward. Too little and the debt never clears. Too much and you've built a hotel with a community attached.

Surplus that seeds the next site

Once the first loan is paid, outside rent becomes surplus. The strawman is a revolving fund that lends to the next site, which repays from its own outside rent, which funds the site after that. The fund isn't the network. It's an organisation like any other, with its own purpose, lending into the commons, its own legal form and its own members.

There's a working precedent. The Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany has used a version of this since the early 1990s: established housing projects pay a solidarity contribution that helps new ones start.² Whether the fund charges interest, how it chooses between sites, and whether sites can choose their fund are all open.

Keeping it in the commons

A site that has paid off its debt holds a valuable asset. One generation can vote to sell it, split the proceeds and walk away. Many kibbutzim faced exactly that pressure.³

The strawman borrows the Syndikat's answer: a lock-share. Each site is its own organisation with its own legal form, owned by its residents. The fund that lent to it holds one further share, with a single power: a veto on selling the asset or turning it into private property. Day to day, the residents decide everything. The lock only bites at the moment someone tries to cash out.

Where the lock should sit, with the fund, with a group of other sites, or with any site in the network, is open. So is what happens when a site genuinely needs to sell, to move somewhere better, say.

No single point of failure

The network could take a legal form, like any organisation on The Grove. But anything holding the whole network's assets becomes a target: one lawsuit, one regulator, one hostile government or buyer reaches everything.

So the strawman keeps the network's balance sheet thin. It holds agreements and the shared code, not the land. Assets and the liability that comes with them sit in the organisations that use them. And there would be several funds, in several countries, so that no one country's law can freeze the whole, with each site free to choose which to borrow from. How funds coordinate without becoming a cartel is open.

Money between organisations

Outside money is the outside world's lever. How would organisations in the network trade with each other without it?

The cleanest form we know is mutual credit. When one organisation supplies another, the supplier's balance goes up and the buyer's goes down by the same amount. The balances always sum to zero, nobody issues them, and there's nothing to buy or speculate on. It isn't a token in the crypto sense, and it fits The Grove's rule that nobody needs to hold one. Switzerland's WIR has run this way between businesses since 1934, and Sardex in Sardinia is a newer example.⁴ Outside money would be used only where something crosses the membrane. Credit limits, and how an organisation that leaves settles its balance, are open.

The state doesn't stop at the membrane

This is the one we didn't expect at first. Tax isn't only levied on what crosses the boundary. The state taxes economic activity wherever it happens, and values it in its own currency. A trade settled in WIR still owes VAT and income tax in francs. A member paid in credits for regular work is, to the tax authority, an employee owing income tax in pounds. Land taxes apply whether a building is let or shared.

So the outside money a network needs grows with how much of its inner life it puts a price on, not just with what it imports. The outward-facing work has to earn enough for imports and for tax on everything priced inside. That points straight at the next idea: price as little as possible. And where money is used inside, prefer forms that don't swing in value, so ordinary life doesn't generate capital-gains paperwork. The rules differ by country and change often. Each site would need its own tax adviser; there's no global answer.

Sharing rather than trading

If pricing everything creates tax, share instead. But a community still needs to see who gives what, or it gets free-riders on one side and burnout on the other. How do you keep a record of sharing without it becoming a trade?

Something becomes a trade when there's a quid pro quo: I give you this because you give me that, at an agreed value, with a balance someone can call in. Take those away and what's left is a record. So the strawman is a commons log with six rules:

• Record what flows, not debts between people. "Six hours to the kitchen." "Used the workshop on Tuesday." Nobody owes anybody else.
• Contribute to the whole, never to each other. Twin Oaks in Virginia has worked like this since 1967: members give labour hours to the community, and the community provides housing, food and care. No member pays another.⁵
• Access comes from membership, not points. The moment using something needs enough credits, the credits are money.
• Nothing can be passed on or cashed in. You can't give records away, sell them or cash them out. They're recognition, not currency.
• Many kinds, not one unit. Care, building, teaching and land work stay separate. Collapse them into one number and you've reinvented a price.
• Imbalances are met by conversation, not settlement. When someone keeps taking more than they give, or keeps giving until they break, people talk.

The split that falls out is clean. Mutual credit between organisations, where prices help. The commons log for life within one, where they don't.

There's a harder part. A commons only works if contribution is fair. The work gets done on branches, and branches need people's hours, but that tells you nothing about whether each person is giving their share in return for what they receive. Without a way to see that, a few people end up carrying everyone, others quietly take more than they give, and resentment does the rest. It's a downward spiral, and it has ended more communities than money has. So there would have to be a balance for each person: their hours set against the share they agreed to give.

That runs straight into one of our own rules: no points, counts or streaks about people. We'd rather say so than smooth it over. The way we'd hold the two together is the way The Grove already treats promises. Each member makes a promise to the commons, a share of hours in return for a home, food and care, and the record is of that promise being kept, firm on the promise and gentle on the person. Each person sees their own balance. Nobody is ranked, nothing is published as a league table, and nobody is compared with anyone else. When someone falls short for a sustained stretch, or gives far beyond their share until they're running dry, that starts a conversation with the people they share a home and work with, the way an at-risk promise does. And the balance never touches trust, the weight a person carries in decisions, which Chapter 17 keeps apart from money for the same reason.

Whether that's enough to keep a balance of hours from becoming a scoreboard, we don't know. It's the line we'd watch most closely.

And there's the tax authority again. Tax authorities judge substance, not ledger design. If the pattern is "work thirty hours, get a home and food", they may still call it employment with benefits in kind. The real defence is the community's legal form. In the UK, a mutual trading with its own members is generally not taxed on the surplus from that trading, and housing co-operatives owned wholly by their tenants sit outside much of ordinary landlord law.⁶ The US has a specific status for income-sharing communities, which Twin Oaks uses. This may be the hardest problem in the chapter.

When the outward business eats the organism

The rent that pays the debt pulls the culture towards being a landlord. The school becomes the business, and the community becomes staff. The kibbutzim that leaned hardest on outside industry and credit were among those hit worst when the debt crisis of the mid-1980s came.

The strawman is to make it visible. The network would read each site's outward share: how much of its effort and income faces the outside world, and which way that's going. A site whose outward share keeps rising after its debt has cleared is drifting, and the read says so, without blaming anyone, the way Chapter 19 reads drift between a branch's purpose and its work. Paired with the lock-share, the drift can never end in a sale. What a healthy outward share looks like is open. It probably rises while a site is paying for itself, then falls.

Costs falling towards their floors

The long-run hope is that the cost of living falls towards the cost of raw materials. For the cost of one more of something, that's largely true. Knowledge copies for nothing. Sun is free once the panels are up. Labour that's contributed rather than sold carries no price.

But three floors remain. Raw materials the network can't produce. Upkeep: roofs, pumps and panels wear out, and wear never stops. And tax. The honest goal is costs falling towards those three floors, and then working on each.

The order in which a network could bring things within seems roughly: knowledge, then energy, then food, then the upkeep of housing, then health. Law and money last, and never fully.

What stays outside

However large the network grows, and short of ever becoming a country of its own, which may never be the aim, some dependencies stay.

• Tax, in the host country's currency, on activity inside as well as outside.
• Land title under the host country's law. The commons owns the land only because a court agrees it does.
• Courts and contracts. Disputes the network can't settle itself end in someone else's court. Each organisation's operating agreement names its own rules, and a jury clause, as the first place a dispute goes, but whether courts defer to that is untested, as Chapter 18 said.
• Borders and residence. People can only gather where they're allowed to live.
• Outside money for imports. Anything that can't be made inside is bought with it.
• Regulation of building, food, schools and care.

Growth weakens each of these levers without removing any. Spreading across several countries means no one government holds all of them at once, and that may be the most realistic form of sovereignty there is for a network like this.

The shape of it

Pulled together, the strawman runs in six steps.

1. Seed. A gathering of people and a purpose. The school, online. First outside income from knowledge.
2. First site. Borrowed money; housing, rooms and space for courses; some of it let outward. The site is its own organisation with its own legal form, and a fund holds its lock-share.
3. Clearing the debt. Outside rent pays the loan. Inside, life runs on the commons log, with prices only where they help.
4. Surplus. A cleared site's outside income flows into a revolving fund, which lends to the next site.
5. Specialising. Sites differ: one grows food, one builds, one heals, one teaches. They trade in mutual credit. The network becomes self-sufficient long before any one site does.
6. Thinning the outside money. Each year, the network reads what it still buys from outside and what it could lose without collapsing, and works on the largest.

How we're thinking about it

We started from the failures, not the dream. Each part of the strawman answers a known way these attempts end: assets held in a few people's names, the generation that sells, the single body that can be sued or seized, the tax bill on a life that was priced, the side business that swallows the community. Where someone has already solved a piece, the Syndikat, WIR, Twin Oaks, we've borrowed rather than invented.

We kept the network thin and the organisations thick because that's how The Grove already works. The organisation is where people decide and where assets sit. The network holds agreements and the shared code, as Chapter 27 described, and a network that held more would become the centre we've designed out everywhere else.

And we've written it down before building any of it because the mistakes here are expensive and slow. A badly designed proposal can be reworked in a week. A site sold by the wrong generation is gone.

What we don't know

What triggers the handover of assets held in one or a few people's names. Where the lock-share should sit, and how a site that genuinely needs to sell can do so. What a healthy outward share looks like over a site's life. Whether a commons log can stay a record without becoming a scoreboard, and whether it survives a determined tax authority in each country. How several funds coordinate without becoming a centre. What happens to people who leave after years of contributing, and to people who grow old inside: what they take with them, and who cares for them. And what, if anything, the network itself should hold.

What you might take from this

The money part is rarely what breaks these attempts. It's ownership at the start, a sale at the end, the tax on a life that was priced, and people who burn out in between. A network that grows soft things before hard ones, locks its assets against being cashed out, keeps its centre thin, shares where it can and prices only where it must might need a little less of the outside world every year. None of that is proven. It's a place to start arguing. And what it's for isn't less. It's more: a world worth living in, owned by the people who live in it.

Meet the essentials within. Lock the commons. Price as little as you can.

Notes and further reading