“Co-working in the front, revolution in the back.”

Recently, Index founder Hugh Francis and director Elie Andersen talked with post–office founder Bryan Wolff. We discussed the development of Index Nodes, a global network of independently operated spaces we’re growing to empower people all over the world to open the third spaces their community needs. We also shared some advice we’d give to give to those looking to open new creative spaces, and what values underpin the expansion of this program.

You can watch our interview, or read an edited transcription below. For more information about the Index Nodes program, visit our dashboard →

Elie Andersen: For those who don’t remember or weren’t yet part of our community, remind us of Index’s origin story.

Hugh Francis: When we all went into lockdown during the pandemic, all of a sudden we felt really isolated and really lonely. But I actually think that feeling of loneliness existed before the pandemic, but when the pandemic happened, suddenly we were all like, super isolated, and that isolation was super obvious.

So we launched Index online at that point, to get people who were sitting alone in their houses to come together, and it grew into this peer-to-peer learning environment, to the point where we were having like, 250, or 300, people come into the Zoom rooms.

And what became clear as Covid started lifting is that this community wasn’t going anywhere. They still felt lonely, they still felt like they wanted to come together and learn together and have a space to congregate. We also kept hearing that people wanted a physical space to go to. But since Index started online, we had people all over the world who were gravitating towards these groups.

It started to feel like there was kind of this global mycelial network of people whose vibe was aligned with the way that Index talks and the spaces that Index was creating. So we wanted to make sure that when we built a physical space, it wasn’t centralizing and boxing out people who are coming to Index from all over the world.

One of the things that has always been a big part of the conversation about Index is how to make sure that this global network of creative and free thinking individuals can still be a community, even if we do build a space. So we began asking, can we have Index Nodes somewhere else other than New York City? Which is when we began talking to Bryan about his ideas for post-office.

Bryan Wolff: Yeah, the feelings you’re describing of loneliness and seeking connection, and wanting to combat that in some way or form very much relate to our origin story as well. I think a lot of what people started in that somewhat gruesome year of 2020 was dealing with these themes, in one form or another.

Initially for me, it was in the form of a practice, figuring out how to work on these ideas through Decentralized Agency. We were trying to figure out a way of working where we could focus on these kinds of topics, but we were doing so in a prefigurative way. And we began to feel like we could accelerate much more if there was a space to do so, where other people could come into it physically, beyond just a Discord.

So it was that idea, which I think I mentioned off-the-cuff to one of you, and you said, well actually, we’re actively thinking about Index Nodes. So what for me maybe felt more latent, or sort of like a pipe dream, became this beautiful coming together.

We discussed that, for Index Nodes, the conversation has to originate with, what does your city need? Or, what does the location need? And our answer was the same as in New York: Amsterdam needs a physical space for people to get out of isolation.

But Amsterdam also has a really unique history of third spaces, and a long squatters’ history as well. Some of the most iconic cultural institutions like Paradiso started as a squat. This place called ot301, which is sometimes a concert venue, sometimes a club, also has workspaces and studios in one giant building, that used to be a squat; then they rented it from the city, then bought if from the city, and it’s now under collective ownership. There are so many beautiful spaces in with stories like these our city’s history, but squatting has now become illegal. And basically, the whole city has become commercialized to the point where these third spaces are now in the form of a Soho House, where commerce is much more important than the creative community they’re purporting to support.

Paradiso & ot301, spaces in Amsterdam that evolved from a squatters’ history.

EA: Index and post-office both emerged from desire to create spaces that are resistant to the over-commercialized landscape of our respective cities. But at the same time, we’re working within that system: We’re paying rent in two of the most expensive cities in the world. And so we’re inherently dealing with business and money. I have been learning so much since opening our space about the balance of hospitality and transaction. How have you guys been thinking about engaging in capitalism, exchange, and transaction in ways that are non-extractive and that are still true to our origins of bring artist- or creative-run, collectivist spaces, made by us and for us?

HF: The thing that we’re trying to do differently with Index is to ensure that people aren’t being turned into products. The thing about the Soho Houses and the WeWorks and the Neue Hauses of the world is that they’re definitely nice spaces, they’re nice places to go — but you can’t help this underlying feeling that you’re being both extracted from and also productized as a member of those spaces. Come work next to these successful companies, and suddenly, you’re part of the sell. And the problem with that is you don’t really have any transparency as to whether you’re being ripped off, so you kind of feel like you are.

Being part of the product line at one of these places makes you feel like these are not well-equipped environments to critique the act of consuming in the first place. So there’s a whole subset of conversations that we, as creative people, want to be having in these spaces but can’t because it doesn’t feel congruent with existing inside them.

So Index and post-office may approach this idea in different ways, but essentially both our spaces involve members in the financials of what we’re doing. All our members know how much it costs to run our spaces. In New York, we have quarterly town halls where we talk openly about how much money we’ve lost — and maybe some day, might make. We talk about what members are needing in the space, how we can upgrade it, how to make continual improvements based on the needs of our members. Ultimately, we want them to be owners of the space itself, and there’s more we want to do in the future to give them even greater sense of ownership.

And I think that same philosophy applies to how we opened and how post-office came about, because a traditional model for a network of spaces might look like a franchise. But we funded post-office in a grant program. post-office is a completely freestanding entity that yields a free benefit to its members, which is that anyone who’s a member of post-office can come to Index NYC and work for free, and anyone who’s a member of Index NYC can go to post-office and work for free.

But other than that, there is no financial connection. There’s no money flowing between these spaces at all. And I think that’s integral because we are a solidarity community. There’s no transaction happening between these spaces. And that means that we can focus on creating the best environment for the right conversations to happen. And that’s why people are going to continue to gravitate toward us.

“Just because we’re playing within capitalism doesn’t mean we have to play by the old rules.”

EA: Our members aren’t a product — they’re not users. They’re members, they belong here.

BW: Right. And it’s tricky sometimes because everyone uses the word member — what does that even mean? But at our spaces, we want people to feel truly as members of the space and of the community. And, to me, the key to that is transparency.

Just because we’re playing within capitalism doesn’t mean we have to play by the old rules. And so, to lean into transparency fully changes the conditions of how we act, and how people can act with us. So we’re transparent about our roles, our finances. We try to empower our members to feel they can change the space to fit their needs. And we’re also still using money. But once we get to a place of equilibrium, or a place of surplus, we can extend this value of transparency toward maybe buying a space to put into collective ownership.

These are long-term goals, but what we’re doing today is saying we don’t have to wait until there’s a perfect moment where we don’t have to pay rent — we’re going to start offering some compromised version of that, where at least we can start coming together and having these conversations. You guys were doing that years ago, not waiting to open a physical space, figuring out how to get started with the tools available at the time on Zoom and in the digital space, and figuring out how to communicate your values to others in order to solidify the community.

EA: And values transcend location, like, we can have the same values here in New York that you share, and that others share in places around the world. And I think that’s what makes the Index Node network a really captivating idea. How do you guys see the Index Node program expanding to other parts of the world? What could it look like to bring a new space online?

“Co-working in the front, revolution in the back.”

BW: I think it has to start with the same question of what does the place need? Also, I think this idea of transparency, that anyone who’s a part of the space has a say about how the space is used.

As of now, Index the Index model is sort of, “co-working in the front, revolution in the back,” and post-office is close to that model too. But I’d love to see someone from another city be like, we need a cinema. And so our space is an arthouse cinema first, but then we’re using the same rooms for events and for presentations. And to see our financial values apply to different models, like if you buy a ticket to a movie, what kind of ownership does that get you? How would collective ownership and management work in different contexts?

HF: Yeah, I don’t have much to add to that. I think that, provided that Index is doing the work to uncover and empower people in those communities to serve their own communities better, then I think it’s going to be additive to the network by virtue of starting local and expanding outward.

EA: So, we talked about transparency. We talked about originating in need, asking what does a place need? Are there any other attributes that other Index Nodes must or will have in common?

BW: One thing that I think all Index Nodes must have in common is accessibility through some kind of a public offering. Index and post-office are doing it through programming. You don’t have to be a member to be part of the community, you can just come along to events and see what it’s about. So, like you said, (1) originating from a place of need, (2) financial transparency, and (3) some sort of connection to the public that leaves the door open to non-members.

“This solidarity economy that we’re building is far more important than any type of transactional one, for sure.”

HF: Yeah, I mean, basically, the recipient of a grant to build an Index Node has one requirement, which is that they offer some free benefit to all the members of all the other spaces that are are also in the network. So, provided that you’re yielding up that free benefit, you can build whatever space you want, and you can serve your community in whatever way you would like to.

So that’s kind of why we’re doing this. This solidarity economy that we’re building is far more important than any type of transactional one, for sure. But I think it’s also worth saying that these spaces tend to be good at doing a lot of things. Our space in New York is primarily a place where people come to work. But we also do a tremendous amount of events, both with our members, so our members are able to host events, they’re able to broaden their impact within the community, but there are also cases where people outside of our community produce programs. And then further out than that, we also have an events offering where companies might also want a space to host a gathering, or put on a dinner, or celebrate a launch, and so on. So that’s how Index NYC us usable to our broader community today.

BW: Yeah, post-office is not dissimilar. Our space is essentially one big room. Activities tend to take over, so we’re trying to find that balance between being open to everything, but also usable by multiple people at the same time. We’re trying to figure out how to service events that aren’t coming from members — so far it’s just been members who have taken charge to initiate and lead events. But it’s starting to happen that people who may not live in Amsterdam but are coming to visit and maybe want to do a book talk or something. So we’re developing the logistics for managing those types of events — who’s going to coordinate, be there on the day of, that kind of stuff. The way we’ve done it so far is that these kind of requests get posted to all the members, and if someone’s really excited about it, they can take that up if they want to.

And it’s worked inversely too — we had someone become a member who was already hosting a book club, but didn’t have a consistent home for it. So we said, if you become a member, you can just do your book club here every month.

It’s funny, when we tell people, welcome to our space, you can do anything here, they’re so not used to that that it really takes some examples to show that we really mean truly anything and everything.

“Curation runs the risk of becoming a prison.”

EA: I’ve had some questions from people who are getting to know Index that are like, how do you curate events? How do you find people to facilitate your events? How do you make sure that your events are good? And I’ve been thinking a lot about this because we don’t really have a curatorial process. We help people hone and refine their ideas based on what we’ve learned about how to communicate these ideas to our audience, but I don’t feel like it’s necessarily our place — unless it’s really really value misaligned — to be like, no we’re not going to do that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that Index is not a curatorial initiative — Index is a vessel that takes the form of whatever is inside of it. We’re more like a container. Imagine a fabric bag, and whatever’s inside it changes the form of the bag. Because our programs are proposed and led by a community of peers, not by a single curator, they span a breadth and variety that reflects the diversity of that community.

I’m really inspired by that, as somebody who’s both inside the bag and sometimes holding the bag. It makes me want to keep engaging with this because it’s not the same thing — the same idea — over and over again. I think curation runs the risk of becoming a prison, and if you’re constantly taking the form of and reflecting the changing and evolving ideas and desires and initiatives of the community, then that stays really vibrant.

And I think it’s also a matter of endurance. Curation gets tired. If we want to think about longevity, then really being reflective of the people who make up Index in its respective nodes and environments is the way that we do that. So I think that looks like transparency and collective decision-making, but I think it also looks like a platform that’s a place for our community to do what they want.

BW: That’s it, I think, the do what you want to do. It all comes back to the base values of transparency and needs. And it can feel daunting because our society doesn’t often give us the freedom to ask what we want to do. So it’s this funny paradox of individuality and collectivism: By being a collective, we enable individuals to tap into their very specific interests. And so that’s actually the curatorial program.

I also feel very excited by the eclectic nature of the program that emerges from this process, where it’s like, we’ll have private Magic the Gathering nights for members and their friends, and then later that week, a book talk by Helen Hester, and the next week a water kefir workshop. What do any of those things have to do with each other, besides that these are the interests of our community? This is what people want to teach each other, or learn from each other, or just spend time together.

Another thing is, if you’re part of our space, you have the full excuse to use us to reach out to your inspirations. So like, I’m a fan of this magazine, and now I have a reason to be like, hey, I know you have an issue coming out, want to do an event at our space in Amsterdam? All of a sudden you have this reason to reach out, besides just being like, hey, big fan of your work!

An artist talk with Daniel Arnold, produced by Homes + Studios hosted at Index NYC.

EA: Yeah, and now we have an offering! Especially in places like New York and Amsterdam where space is at such a premium, it’s a pretty valuable contribution to the culture.

HF: Also, if we were to be curatorial, and we were to have a strong opinion about the types of programs and the types of people we want to come to our space, we would be working against becoming the type of company we want to be.

We, ideally, want to be creating a relatively neutral infrastructure so the people who actually inhabit it can make it what it needs to be. If we were to try to curate it, to try to put out a really opinionated message, then it’s not the community space that we want it to be. It no longer exists to fill the gaps of what our community needs.

“Fuck curation, we’re infrastructure.”

I think the hubris of curating anything under the Index banner works against it. And it’s also why you feel like a product at all of these other spaces. You’re fed their point of view, and you can go to the meet-up, or not, but you can’t necessarily change the narrative. So, I don’t know — fuck curation, we’re infrastructure.

EA: What learnings would you share with others looking to open spaces like this within their own communities?

BW: First, I’d advise anyone who wants to open a space like this one to have a good answer for why they want to have a space, and what is it for, and who is it for.

Second, figure out how that vision blends with — or contradicts — a sustainable financial model, contending with the reality of the fact that this space will exist within capitalism.

And within this balance of the conceptual and the practical, new ideas will emerge, and maybe contribute to or enrich the reasons for opening a space in the first place.

Then, I’d say, no one should prepare to open a space unless they’re ready to get really down with the nitty-gritty. You have to be ready to navigate a lot of short-term bureaucracy: figuring out how to incorporate, how to set yourself up so you’re not personally vulnerable to the financial risk of opening. And also the long-term realities: We’re not self-sufficient yet at post-office, and the end of the runway is in sight, so what are our back-up plans? We’ve had to get comfortable with worst-case scenarios.

Also, Index and post-office are different because Index had a community already from doing programs online, and in Amsterdam we said, let’s open a space so that people can come and we can create that community. And that’s also something to think about, do you already have the community, and how do you make sure that whatever space you’re building is answering their needs.

“Even the least business-y businesses are businesses.”

EA: Yeah, I’ve been really inspired throughout my creative life by commune counterculture, back-to-the-land movements — Drop City, Arcosanti, Black Mountain College — and I’d just add that no one should open a space unless they’re ready to be a business owner and a business operator. Utopianism aside, many communes failed because of in-fighting, financial mismanagement, and poor allocation of labor (namely, women doing all the work). But we’re able to learn from that history, so we can prepare for the reality that running a space takes a massive amount of maintenance. Keeping spreadsheets is maintenance, taking the trash out is maintenance, ordering toilet paper is maintenance, writing emails is maintenance.

So a big part of opening a space like that is being responsible for that maintenance, and learning to embrace it. A wise man named Hugh Francis told me to stop being afraid of numbers, and that’s really been the most important thing I’ve learned in the past year. Having a vision is a very emotional thing, but accounting is not emotional. Watering the plants is not emotional.

There’s a wide variety in the labor that comes with seeing your dreams come to life. I’ve dreamed of opening a space like Index for a decade, and bringing the vision to life over the past year has been an enormous amount of work, both emotionally and logistically. But I’ve learned to take solace in the parts of the work that are transactional, precise, and calculable as so much remains wild and unfounded and unformed.

BW: Even the least business-y businesses are businesses. So either prepare to do that work yourself, or bake it into the business model. Make sure there are resources to pay somebody to do that work. We don’t have a revenue surplus now, but when we do, we’ll be able to pay other members to take up some of these tasks.

But, at a certain point, setting up a business also means taking a plunge. I was crunching numbers, crunching numbers, crunching numbers, trying to reduce my financial risk, but at the end of the day, there’s no way to eliminate all risk attached to doing something like this. So at some point, I had to take a leap of faith — and knowing that, as an Index Node, I had the support of these amazing people and wasn’t in it by myself — I just had to press Go, and believe in it.

HF: For sure, I think the “right mindset” as an Index Node operator is that your priority is to serve your community in whatever way you can, knowing that there will be sacrifices that come along with that. You will sometimes have to clean the bathroom or empty the trash because no one else will, and when you start the space, there won’t be enough money coming in to pay someone to do that.

So as long as your heart is in a place of, I’m going to do everything I can to create infrastructure to empower the artists and creative people who gravitate toward this space, then your heart’s in the right place. And that includes making the business financially sustainable. Because if it isn’t, then you’re not serving that community well. You’re setting them up for failure.

So, an Index Node operator has to be ready to support the community, to make some sacrifices that allow it to exist, and to know that it’ll get easier as more people hear about it and you build a reputation. Meanwhile, you’ll feel tremendously rewarded by seeing these people come together and listening to some of the conversations that you never imagined would happen in the space. So that’s the harsh reality of it. It’s not a massively lucrative business, but it’s massively rewarding.