Gift Economy

Introduction

The internet is often called a "gift economy".

However, in P2P Theory, I argue that peer production is not a form of reciprocity-based gift economy, but non-reciprocal communal shareholding. For more information on this argument, see here at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/3.4_Placing_P2P_in_an_intersubjective_typology

However, both peer production and the gift economy proceed from the same 'gifting spirit' and are therefore related. A gift creates a future obligation for reciprocity, if favors a more personalized economy; in a market economy money is exchanged for past expenditure of effort, and no reciprocity or obligation is created, it is a totally impersonal process. In peer production, value is created not in exchange from a gift by another, but in exchange for the emotional and spiritual value, and recognition, that derives from working on a project of common value.

The Wikipedia article on the Gift Economy is here, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

Citations

Johan Soderbergh on the gift economy:

"On the question if peer-to-peer is a gift economy, I take a slightly different viewpoint on what archaic gift economy is really about. In my mind, when discussed on the Internet, the focus has wrongly been on gift economy as an inversion of the logic of market economy, where accumulation of capital is simply replaced with accumulation of moral debt. My reading of Marcel Mauss and Levi-Strauss is that gift economy is not primarily about allocating resources. Usually, tribal people are self-sustaining in life-supportive goods and gift swapping are restricted to a particular class of goods, tokens such as clams and jewelry. The real importance of gift is to strike aliances between giver and receiver. Both of them are winners, to put it pointingly, the loser is the third part who was left out from the exchange. Hence, I think the gift economy parallel is valid in parts of the virtual community, where aliances and communal bonding is key, and not valid in other parts, where relations are completely impersonal." (personal communication, March 2005)

John Frow on the gift economy, citing Gregory:

"a gift economy depends upon the creation of debt, where what is at stake is not the things themselves or the possibility of material profit but the personal relationships that are formed and perpetuated by ongoing indebtedness. Things in the gift economy are the vehicles, the effective mediators and generators, of social bonds: putting this in terms derived from Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, Gregory writes that `things and people assume the social form of objects in a commodity economy while they assume the social form of persons in a gift economy'."

Recall the schematic opposition that Gregory sets up between two modes of exchange:

commodity exchange gift exchange alienable objects inalienable objects reciprocal independence reciprocal dependence quantitative relationship qualitative relationship between objects between subjects"

(source: personal communication)

Dave Pollard on the war between the gift economy and the market economy

One of the principles of the Gift Economy is that the gift must always move (each time we receive, we must pay it forward). A second principle is that in the Gift Economy we are agents, not (passive) consumers -- and what we give is generally what we have some mastery over, something we do well. Market Economy fans work hard to undermine these principles: The 'value' of every exchange, they say (usually some product in return for money, a surrogate for 'equivalent' goods or services) must be provided back to the giver, rather than forward to someone else. And the act of consumption is advertised as a pleasure in and of itself, a reward for previous personal sacrifice (unpleasant work), which imposes no obligation or responsibility on the consumer (or on the producer, for that matter).

It is hard to overcome the constant propaganda barrage of the Market Economy, whose adherents invest billions of dollars in their 'commercial messages' and take up between 10% (some radio stations) and 75% (many magazines) of the total 'information bandwidth' of the media -- a cost we 'passive consumers' of course pay back to them in the final cost of the product.

Let's not kid ourselves: This is war. File-sharing is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle between advocates of the Gift Economy and the Market Economy. Believers in the Market Economy see everything as property, and the use of any property without payment as theft. They are using absurdly anti-innovative patent law, armies of lawyers and their control of major political parties to try to crush every aspect of the Gift Economy. Even philanthropy is viewed through a Market lens -- they expect a generous tax deduction, and will spend more on self-aggrandizing commercials (for which they also get a tax write-off) telling 'consumers' about their 'generosity' (for which they expect consumers to give them a lot of additional full-price business in gratitude) than they spend on the philanthropic contribution itself. They don't like the Internet, which they see as anarchic and uncontrolled, and once planned to set up an Alternate Internet which would be run as a commercial operation.

So we're up against a lot: Failed Gift Economy projects, anti-Gift Economy propaganda, and political, legal and economic measures perpetrated by the rich and powerful to prevent 'price-less' transactions. How do we contend with this? Are the prospects for a Gift Economy doomed by the Tragedy of the Commons -- the sense that if something belongs to everyone, it is no one's responsibility and has no value?

I believe we need to do three things simultaneously:

1. Use our collective ingenuity and collaborative skills to make the Gift Economy work: The successes of the Gift Economy to date are primarily due to a combination of human creativity and innovation, applied to create enabling, sharing technologies. We need to apply these same skills to ensure that we find ways that will address its failings-to-date:

• The exploitation, exhaustion and even bankruptcy of many of those who give much more than they receive, from open source programmers to bloggers to independent artists.

• The precarious dependence of many Gift Economy institutions (like libraries, public broadcasters and public research programs) on government and other public-sector largesse.

• The loss of trust essential to community sharing as communities become larger and more impersonal.

• The degradation of the creative commons as a consequence of the Tragedy of the Commons.

• The trend for more and more online information to require a paid subscription or pay-per-use.

• The use of increasingly manipulative, hard-sell techniques to coerce charity as more positive appeals to generosity prove inadequate.

• The steady loss of electronic freedom and discouragement of innovation in the face of huge, expensive 'digital rights' campaigns and over-reaching intellectual property law campaigns.

2. Personalize the messages and workings of the Gift Economy: If you know the person who gives you a gift, you are far more likely to pay it forward. That's not (primarily) because we know the donor will ask us if we've done so, it's because we tend to value something more highly when we know, trust and respect who it came from. We need to find ways to personalize the gifts we receive from others, to make them more one-to-one, more human.

3. Fight the regressive forces opposed to the Gift Economy with everything we have: It will take a long time for the Gift Economy to eat away at and finally replace the Market Economy from the outside in. We cannot hope to eliminate the Market Economy quickly -- in fact it would be hugely disruptive, perhaps disastrous, to do so even if we could. We must focus our fight on the reactionaries -- those who are so ideologically obsessed with privatizing everything, making everything property, and undermining public belief in public institutions, government and self-regulation. And we must focus on those who are trying to destroy and undermine Open Source, the Creative Commons, the Internet and our electronic freedoms, 'price-less' sharing of assets and information, true philanthropy and volunteerism, self-sufficient individuals and communities, collective effort and collaborative innovation. It's a fight against doctrinaire corporatism, against lawyers who are trying to patent and copyright everything forever, and against ignorance that there are workable alternatives to an untrammeled Market Economy." (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/07/31.html#a1227)

Reading Resources

Richard Barbrook. The High-tech Gift Economy

URL = http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

This is a seminal essay that was often discussed during the first phase of the dotcom era. Abstract from First Monday: "During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy."

- Yochai Benkler on peer production

Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.

URL = http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf

The Political Economy of the Commons

URL = www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/3/up4-3Benkler.pdf

The concept of Information Commons is defined by Yochai Benchler in "The Political Economy of Commons", in Upgrade, juin 2003, vol. IV, n° 3

Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.

URL = http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf

"The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods�? as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design." (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf )

- Marshall Sahlins

The Original Affluent Society

URL = http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf

Marshall Sahlins, celebrated anthropologist, was one of the first to challenge the industrial-era myth of progress, showing in his essay on The Original Affluent Society, that tribal economies were in fact operating in a context of abundance.

"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. Which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."