Gift Economy

Definition

"A gift economy is a social theory in which goods and services are given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future quid pro quo. Typically, a gift economy occurs in a culture that emphasizes social or intangible rewards for solidarity and generosity: honor, loyalty or other forms of gratitude.In some cases, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within a community. This can be considered a form of reciprocal altruism. Sometimes there is an implicit expectation of the return of comparable goods and services, or the gift being later passed on to a third party. The concept of a gift economy stands in contrast to a planned economy or a market or barter economy. In a planned economy, goods and services are distributed by explicit command and control rather than informal custom; in barter or market economies, an explicit quid pro quo — an exchange of money or some other commodity — is established before the social transaction takes place. In practice, most human societies blend elements of all of these, in varying degrees." (http://www.gcredit.org/)

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/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

Description

Gifford Pinchot [1]:

"In the potlatches of the Chinook, Nootka, and other Pacific Northwest peoples, chiefs vied to give the most blankets and other valuables. More generally, in hunter-gatherer societies the hunter's status was not determined by how much of the kill he ate, but rather by what he brought back for others.

In his brilliant book The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde points to two types of economies. In a commodity (or exchange) economy, status is accorded to those who have the most. In a gift economy, status is accorded to those who give the most to others.

Lest we think that the principles of a gift economy will only work for simple, primitive or small enterprises, Hyde points out that the community of scientists follows the rules of a gift economy. The scientists with highest status are not those who possesses the most knowledge; they are the ones who have contributed the most to their fields. A scientist of great knowledge, but only minor contributions is almost pitied - his or her career is seen as a waste of talent.

At a symposium a scientist gives a paper. Selfish scientists do not hope others give better papers so they can come away with more knowledge than they had to offer in exchange. Quite the reverse. Each scientist hopes his or her paper will provide a large and lasting value. By the rules of an exchange economy, the scientist hopes to come away a "loser," because that is precisely how one wins in science.

Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat. Information also loses value over time and has the capacity to satisfy more than one. In many cases information gains rather than loses value through sharing. While the exchange economy may have been appropriate for the industrial age, the gift economy is coming back as we enter the information age." (http://context.org/ICLIB/IC41/PinchotG.htm)

Typology

Five dimensions of online giving, by Jorgen Skageby at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-06/ip-tfd061307.php

"There are five dimensions to gift giving among users of online communities, Skågeby explains.

These are "initiative" in which an individual decides spontaneously to give a gift to another member of the community. This can be active with one person giving a piece of advice or a useful link in an online forum or passive where community members download something from a specific user automatically through a peer to peer network. In this case, the gift giver plays no role other than making the digital goods available online.

The second dimension is "direction" and tracks the path of a gift. For example, a public gift might come from an individual or organisation, a musician say, who loads their mp3 files on to their MySpace page, or a photographer who shares her photos using Flickr.com. Direction can also apply to gifts given to small communities or groups or given among online friends. An entirely private gift would be a single individual giving a gift to another or a very select group of friends.

The peer to peer networks, including the BitTorrent approach exploit another dimension of gift giving, the "incentive". Incentives can be enforced or voluntary. In the case of BitTorrent file sharing, users can only download a given gift, or file, if they simultaneously share that file as it downloads with other users, so the incentive process is often bidirectional.

Incentive gifting is exploited in illicitly distributing copyright materials such as movies and music, but also has a legitimate use in distributing large files within businesses and other communities. Voluntary incentive involves a points system so that users who share most, gain kudos or better access to additional gifts.

The final two dimensions of gift giving online are "identification", knowing who is giving or receiving a gift, or remaining anonymous. In some systems, such as BitTorrent, gifting is essentially anonymous, while users are known on MySpace when they share digital gifts.

Another dimension is "limitation", which controls the level of access to gifts, either giving or receiving can be open to all or restrictive. An open gift system might be the free software available for anyone to download on the free software network sourceforge.net, whereas a private BitTorrent or other network would be considered a restrictive gift network." (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-06/ip-tfd061307.php)

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)

Discussion

The gift economy, not barter, preceded the market economy

David Graeber:

"One of the traditional roles of the economic anthropologist is to point out that the standard narrative set out in economic textbooks – the one we all take for granted, really, that once upon a time there was barter; that when this became too inconvenient, people invented money; that eventually, this lead to abstract systems of credit and debt, banking, and the New York Stock Exchange – is simply wrong. There is in fact no known example of a human society whose economy is based on barter of the ‘I’ll give you ten chickens for that cow’ variety. Most economies that don’t employ money – or anything that we’d identify as money, anyway – operate quite differently. They are, as French anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously put it, ‘gift economies’ where transactions are either based on principles of open-handed generosity, or, when calculation does take place, most often descend into competitions over who can give the most away. What I want to emphasise here, though, is what happens when money does first appear in something like it’s current form (basically, with the appearance of the state). Because here, it becomes apparent that not only do the economists get it wrong, they get it precisely backwards. In fact, virtual money comes first. Banking, tabs, and expense accounts existed for at least 2 thousand years before there was anything like coinage, or any other physical object that was regularly used to buy and sell things, anything that could be labeled ‘currency’.

‘Money’ in that modern sense, a uniform commodity not only chosen to measure the value of other commodities, but actually stamped in uniform denominations and paid out every time anyone bought or sold something, was an Iron Age innovation – most likely, invented to pay mercenaries. Barter in the sense imagined by Adam Smith, the direct exchange of arrowheads for shoes or the like, can sometimes develop at the margins between societies, or as part of international trade, but it mainly tends to occur in places where people have become accustomed to the use of money and then that supply of money disappears. Examples of the latter include some parts of 18th and 19th century West Africa, or more recently, if more briefly, in Russia or Argentina." (http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years)

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)

An update on the Gift Economy discussion by Dave Pollard, at http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/12/06.html#a1718

Genevieve Vaughan on the difference between gifting and exchange

"One particularly important loop in the thread of gift giving is the double gift: giving in order to receive a return gift - what we call 'exchange'. Exchange requires quantification and measurement, an equation between what is given and what is received to the satisfaction of both parties. Our present economic system is based upon exchange.

Exchange is at odds with gift giving. The competition which is characteristic of Capitalism pushes the exchange way against the gift way. In fact two paradigms or worldviews are formed, one based on exchange and the other on gift giving.

One of the ways the exchange paradigm wins its competition with the gift paradigm is by defining everything in terms of its own aspects of categorization, competition, quantification and measurement, at the same time hiding the activity of the gift paradigm. This concealment is an important factor in degrading gift giving and making it inaccessible, both as a continuing activity and as an interpretative key for the understanding of other aspects of life.

Because exchange is so much a part of our lives we use it as a strong metaphor for understanding everything. For example, we may consider an interaction to be a loving exchange when instead it is taking turns in giving and receiving. We are not usually conscious of the fundamental distinction between giving in order to receive and giving in order to satisfy the need of the other.

Giving in order to receive - exchange - is ego-oriented. It is the satisfaction of one's own need that is the purpose of the transaction. Giving to satisfy another's need is other-oriented. These two motivations constitute the basis of two logics, one of which is intransitive (exchange), the other of which is transitive (gift giving).

Exchange creates and requires scarcity. If everyone were giving to everyone else, there would be no need to exchange. The market needs scarcity to maintain the level of prices. In fact when there is an abundance of products scarcity is often created on purpose. An example of this is the plowing under of 'overabundant' crops (which may happen even when people are standing by who are hungry). On a larger scale scarcity is created 1. by the channeling of wealth into the hands of the few who then have power over the many; 2. by spending on armaments and monuments which have no nurturing value but only serve for destruction and display of power; and 3. by privatizing or depleting the environment so that the gifts of nature are unavailable to the many. The exchange paradigm is a belief system which validates this kind of behavior. Individuals who espouse it are functional to the economic system of which they are a part. Exchange is adversarial, each person tries to give less and get more, an attitude which creates antagonism and distance among the players. Gift giving creates and requires abundance. In fact, in scarcity gift giving is difficult and even self sacrificial while in abundance it is satisfying and even delightful.

Language is based on gift giving. This hypothesis breaks through the taboo against using nurturing (gift giving) as the model for other kinds of human activity and it has important consequences. If language is based on nurturing and if thinking is at least partially based on language then thinking is at least partially based on nurturing. However thinking can also be based directly on non linguistic nurturing. Sending and receiving messages, which is a commonplace way of describing chemical and hormonal interactions in the body, can also be viewed in terms of less intentional giving and receiving. If we view language as gift giving transposed onto a verbal level, and if we accept the idea that it was language that made humans evolve, we could come to the conclusion that it was the gift giving aspect of language, not just the capacity for abstraction that caused the leap forward. This conclusion could lead us to think that gift giving and receiving could be the way forward for humanity to evolve beyond its present danger and distress. Indeed we could begin to take nurturing as the creative norm and recognize exchange as the distortion which is causing a de evolution and a danger to the human species as well as all other species on the planet.

The gift paradigm has the advantage of restoring mothering to its rightful place in the constitution of the human. What has been wrongly proposed in the construction of gender, with devastating effects such as the promotion of the values of dominance, competition and hierarchy (which are non nurturing values), can be countered by re introducing gift giving as a social value and interpretative key. Both male and female human beings are basically nurturers. One gender is not the binary opposite of the other. If we reintroduce the gift paradigm into our interpretation of the world, we will find our 'gift giver within' which will then be validated. Women, as those who have been socially designated as the nurturers, will be rightfully restored to their place as the norm, and men can be reinterpreted in this light as those who have been socially dispossessed of that norm-al behavior but who can re acquire it by espousing nurturing values. Institutions are usually organized around the exchange and dominance paradigm, but they can be reorganized to satisfy needs. The rewards which accompany dominance can be eliminated and gift giving can be affirmed and promoted.

All of us are mothered children. Someone must satisfy our needs unilaterally in order for us to grow up. As time passes we become receivers of ever more complex gifts, and we must creatively receive and use what we are given.

Because we are mothered children we can find gifts everywhere. Even if there is not a mothering intentionality behind some aspect of our environment, we can nevertheless receive it as a gift. Our response to it may be as creative as it would be if it actually were a gift. Since we are in a common creative receivership towards the environment we can attribute this receivership to others and confirm it by receiving their responses as gifts.

Daily life includes many examples of gift giving and receiving. In housework for example, we satisfy the 'needs' of our households to be cleaned and maintained, which in turn satisfies the needs of the people living there for a clean, healthy, uncluttered environment. Without this work, the seemingly direct gift character of the home environment would not be available. Cooking satisfies the 'need' of the food to be made safe and enjoyable so that it is creatively received by the family, whose physiological and psychological needs it satisfies. Farmers need seeds to plant and the knowledge of how to tend the plants and harvest them. Their work involves many subsidiary needs, such as the need for water, fertile soil etc. (Globalization has recently allowed corporations from the North to privatize and make the free gifts of traditional knowledge, seeds, fertilizer and water into commodities that must be bought and sold, a situation which has particularly depleted the people of the South. This is one example of how free gifts are not respected but are made into the objects of plunder.)

Needs for maintenance and repair accompany almost any human or non human-made useful thing in our environment. At the level of advanced Capitalism there are many interdependent needs, for automobile and road maintenance and repair, for example. These needs are usually satisfied through the exchange economy but may also be satisfied free (by individuals who repair their own cars for example). At the level of fully established capitalism, there are many financial needs - the need for capital itself is one. In this case a low interest loan might be considered a gift. Where jobs are scarce, giving someone a job might be considered a gift. The profit made by the capitalist on the labor of the worker, if it is considered in terms of surplus value (the value of the products over and above the amount necessary for the worker's livelihood as expressed in his/her salary), can also be considered as a gift the worker is giving to the capitalist. The low price of labor in the so called Third World and the difference between national economies create a flow of gifts from the South to the North also called 'profit' by the corporations in the North. By foregrounding needs and their satisfaction instead of exchange, we can acquire a new perspective in which we follow the thread of the gift from its simple unilateral beginnings to the tangle created by exchange, with a re proposal of the gift at a variety of levels and in a variety of measures. We can see the fertile and 'generative' capacity of gift giving in the fact that we establish bonds with one another by its means. The recognition and gratitude towards the source of the satisfaction of our needs, and the recognition and care towards the other whose needs we satisfy actually establish the bonds of communication and community which are instead broken by the adversarial logic and process of exchange. Living in a market-based society makes us think of all bonds in terms of exchange, of debt and repayment, however the bonds which are established through gift giving are positive and life- enhancing in contrast to onerous debt and responsibility. Indeed the words co- muni-ty ans co-muni-cation, derive from the latin 'muni' which means 'gifts'.

Language is a transposition of gift giving which co exists with material gift giving proper, but one specific aspect of language has a different structure. Naming and the definition have a structure similar to exchange and perhaps are the original model for it. Money is given and received in place of a product in the same way that the name of something is given and received in its place. (Click on the chapters on definition in my book, "For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange" for a more thorough discussion of this point.)

It is not because of a fatal flaw in human nature that we act so inhumanely to one another, but because of a complex tangle of gift-thread logics and strategies which become contradictory and promote adversarial behaviors. The tangle can be unraveled and understood, not within the exchange paradigm itself but by starting over, putting gift giving first as a theme for understanding the world." (http://www.gift-economy.com/theory.html)

Is the gift economy matriarchal?

From Matriarchal Society: Definition and Theory, By Heide Goettner-Abendroth:

"The relationship between Modern Matriarchal Studies and the Gift Paradigm

There are important analogies between modern matriarchal studies and the gift paradigm.

The subject of matriarchal studies is the investigation and presentation of non-patriarchal societies of past and present. Even today there are enclaves of societies with matriarchal patterns in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. None of these is a mere reversal of patriarchy where women rule -as it is often commonly believed -instead, they are all egalitarian societies, without exception. This means they do not know hierarchies, classes and the domination of one gender by the other. They are societies free of domination, but they still have their regulations. And this is the fact that makes them so attractive in any search for a new philosophy, to create a just society.

Equality does not merely mean a levelling of differences. The natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own honour and through complimentary areas of activity, they are geared towards each other.

This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths. More precisely matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature.

The differentiated rules of matriarchal societies have been meticulously researched regarding existing societies of this type. Merely historical facts will not reveal how matriarchal people thought and felt, how they conducted their politics and how they lived their faith.To be able to research this is an advantage of anthropology. In my principal work "Das Matriarchat" I presented matriarchal societies throughout the world and was able to deduce from these examples their rules and functioning on all levels of society. I base my arguments on my research of twenty years.

In order to show up the analogies between matriarchal research and the gift paradigm, I will give you a brief overview of some of the rules and regulations of matriarchal economy. This economy is a subsistence economy. It is usually based on agriculture using animals for labour, (Mosuo in YÉnnan/China, or the Minangkabau of Sumatra/Indonesia) although in some instances there are societies using animal husbandry (such as the Tuareg in Northern Africa). There is no private property and no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for "Mother Earth" can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people, and therefore the harvest and the flocks can not be owned privately. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals belong to the matriarchal clan (matrilineal and matrilocally organised clans) and are worked on communally. Parts of flocks can be united with other parts and land often changes hands within the peasant community as chosen by lot.

The women, and specifically the oldest women of the clan, the matriarchs, hold the most important goods in their hands, for they are responsible for the sustenance and the protection of all clan members. The women either work the land themselves or organise the work on the land; the fruits of the fields are given to them and the milk of the flocks as well. The big clan houses also belong to them or the tents in case of nomadic tribes.

Matriarchal women are managers and administrators, who organise the economy not according to the profit principle, where an individual or a small group of people benefits; rather, the motivation behind their action is motherliness. The profit principle is an ego-centred principle, where individuals or a small minority take advantage of the majority of people. The principle of motherliness is the opposite, where altruism reigns and the well being of all is at the centre. It is at the same time a spiritual principle, which humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies for the principle of motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children in spite of their diversity. For example with the Mosuo, the woman who is elected to be the clan mother from among her sisters, is the one who most clearly displays the attitude of care for the other clan members.

Motherliness, as an ethical principle pervades all areas of a matriarchal society, and this holds true for men as well. If a man of a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, the criterion is "He must be like a good mother." (http://www.gift-economy.com/athanor/athanor_005.html)

On the link between community, monetization, and gifting

Excerpted from Charles Eisenstein:

“Com­mu­nity is nearly im­pos­si­ble in a highly mon­e­tized so­ci­ety like our own. That is be­cause com­mu­nity is woven from gifts, which is ul­ti­mately why poor peo­ple often have stronger com­mu­ni­ties than rich peo­ple. If you are fi­nan­cially in­de­pen­dent, then you re­ally don’t de­pend on your neigh­bors—or in­deed on any spe­cific per­son—for any­thing. You can just pay some­one to do it, or pay some­one else to do it.

In for­mer times, peo­ple de­pended for all of life’s ne­ces­si­ties and plea­sures on peo­ple they knew per­son­ally. If you alien­ated the local black­smith, brewer, or doc­tor, there was no re­place­ment. Your qual­ity of life would be much lower. If you alien­ated your neigh­bors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle dur­ing har­vest sea­son, or if your barn burnt down. Com­mu­nity was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight ex­ag­ger­a­tion, we could say we don’t need any­one. I don’t need the farmer who grew my food—I can pay some­one else to do it. I don’t need the me­chanic who fixed my car. I don’t need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don’t need any of the peo­ple who pro­duced any of the things I use. I need some­one to do their jobs, but not the unique in­di­vid­ual peo­ple. They are re­place­able and, by the same token, so am I.

That is one rea­son for the uni­ver­sally rec­og­nized su­per­fi­cial­ity of most so­cial gath­er­ings. How au­then­tic can it be, when the un­con­scious knowl­edge, “I don’t need you,” lurks under the sur­face? When we get to­gether to con­sume—food, drink, or en­ter­tain­ment—do we re­ally draw on the gifts of any­one pre­sent? Any­one can con­sume. In­ti­macy comes from co-cre­ation, not co-con­sump­tion, as any­one in a band can tell you, and it is dif­fer­ent from lik­ing or dis­lik­ing some­one. But in a mon­e­tized so­ci­ety, our cre­ativ­ity hap­pens in spe­cial­ized do­mains, for money.

To forge com­mu­nity then, we must do more than sim­ply get peo­ple to­gether. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talk­ing, and we want to do some­thing, to cre­ate some­thing. It is a very tepid com­mu­nity in­deed, when the only need being met is the need to air opin­ions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn’t it too bad that other peo­ple don’t … hey, I know! Let’s col­lect each oth­ers’ email ad­dresses and start a list­serv!

Com­mu­nity is woven from gifts. Un­like today’s mar­ket sys­tem, whose built-in scarcity com­pels com­pe­ti­tion in which more for me is less for you, in a gift econ­omy the op­po­site holds. Be­cause peo­ple in gift cul­ture pass on their sur­plus rather than ac­cu­mu­lat­ing it, your good for­tune is my good for­tune: more for you is more for me. Wealth cir­cu­lates, grav­i­tat­ing to­ward the great­est need. In a gift com­mu­nity, peo­ple know that their gifts will even­tu­ally come back to them, al­beit often in a new form. Such a com­mu­nity might be called a “cir­cle of the gift.”

For­tu­nately, the mon­e­ti­za­tion of life has reached its peak in our time, and is be­gin­ning a long and per­ma­nent re­ced­ing (of which eco­nomic “re­ces­sion” is an as­pect). Both out of de­sire and ne­ces­sity, we are poised at a crit­i­cal mo­ment of op­por­tu­nity to re­claim gift cul­ture, and there­fore to build true com­mu­nity. The recla­ma­tion is part of a larger shift of human con­scious­ness, a larger re­union with na­ture, earth, each other, and lost parts of our­selves. Our alien­ation from gift cul­ture is an aber­ra­tion and our in­de­pen­dence an il­lu­sion. We are not ac­tu­ally in­de­pen­dent or “fi­nan­cially se­cure” – we are just as de­pen­dent as be­fore, only on strangers and im­per­sonal in­sti­tu­tions, and, as we are likely to soon dis­cover, these in­sti­tu­tions are quite frag­ile.” (http://www.nationofchange.org/build-community-economy-gifts-1325082127)

Peer-to-Peer Potlatch and the Acephalic Response

From: Andrew Whelan: Leeching Bataille : Peer-to-Peer Potlatch and the Acephalic Response.

Andrew Whelan:

“There are significant problems with ‘gift economy’ accounts of peer-to-peer (p2p). In what follows this argument is advanced on several grounds. Firstly, empirically: it may have been at one time that p2p operated like a gift economy, and it may be now that some elements of the p2p ecology operate like gift economies. But certain social and structural facets of ‘free culture’ online generate serious problems for conventional gift economy readings. In addition, there are notorious problems with conceptualising the actual practice of gifting and how it can best be understood in relation to reciprocity: the consequences of the ideology of the ‘pure’ gift and so on.

Secondly, then, there are good theoretical grounds for questioning the appropriateness of the gift model for p2p. There are inherent features of the theory of the gift and the model of reciprocity involved which tend to “elide inequalities of power” (Osteen 2002: 3). Furthermore, regarding p2p, the gift has often been picked up only partially; with deployments retaining elements of the economism the theory of the gift attempts to overcome. Many references to the anthropology of the gift in relation to p2p dilute significantly both the totality of the gift in the anthropological accounts Mauss drew on, and the enormous importance accorded to the gift and what it stands for in Mauss, Bataille, and numerous others.

Thirdly, the gift economy reading does not go far enough. It misconstrues p2p as utopian, positive, progressive, reciprocal, communal. It pretends that the ‘good guys’ (the ‘pirates’) are not (or not only) hyperconsumers. It underplays the extent to which downloaders and the monopolistic content producers are locked together in a grotesque embrace. It fails to grasp the consequences of Mauss’s account of the gift (let alone Bataille’s) when it asserts that p2p exchange is assessable as a utilitarian good, a good with calculable benefits, when in fact p2p presents a kind of supereconomics or antieconomics. It misidentifies a naïve and faulty model of the political in a contested and problematic social and cultural practice. It fails to account satisfactorily for the incredible responses to p2p from state and corporate agencies (for the violence of that particular gift). In short, it doesn’t work, and it also obscures from view some of the most important aspects of p2p; it artificially isolates p2p from the total social phenomenon in which it is embedded: the ‘general economy’ (Bataille 1988).” (http://www.freeebay.net/site/content/view/797/52/)

Examples

Eric Raymond on the Hacker Culture as a Gift Economy

Eric Raymond [2]:

"To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture, it is helpful to move from history further into anthropology and economics, and examine the difference between exchange cultures and gift cultures.

Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status; it's wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that history that ran before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in small nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals (those most effective at informing coalitions and persuading others to cooperate with them) got the healthiest mates and access to the best food. This drive for status expresses itself in different ways, depending largely on the degree of scarcity of survival goods.

Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status.

The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command hierarchies, allocation of scarce goods is done by one central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale very poorly; they become increasingly brutal and inefficient as they get larger. For this reason, command hierarchies above the size of an extended family are almost always parasites on a larger economy of a different type. In command hierarchies, social status is primarily determined by access to coercive power.

Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sophisticated adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation (and in fact, the dominating effect of competitive desire is to produce cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social status is primarily determined by having control of things (not necessarily material things) to use or trade.

Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above, and how they interact with each other. Government, the military, and organized crime (for example) are command hierarchies parasitic on the broader exchange economy we call `the free market'. There's a third model, however, that is radically different from either and not generally recognized except by anthropologists; the gift culture.

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the `survival necessities' -- disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one's peers.

This observation is not in itself entirely sufficient to explain the observed features of hacker culture, however. The crackers and warez d00dz have a gift culture that thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of the hackers, but their behavior is very different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.

What this shows, in case it wasn't obvious, is that there is more than one way to run a gift culture. History and values matter. I have summarized the history of the hacker culture in A Brief History of Hackerdom ; the ways in which it shaped present behavior are not mysterious. Hackers have defined their culture by a set of choices about the form which their competition will take. It is that form which we will examine in the remainder of this paper.

The Joy of Hacking

In making this `reputation game' analysis, by the way, I do not mean to devalue or ignore the pure artistic satisfaction of designing beautiful software and making it work. We all experience this kind of satisfaction and thrive on it. People for whom it is not a significant motivation never become hackers in the first place, just as people who don't love music never become composers.

So perhaps we should consider another model of hacker behavior in which the pure joy of craftsmanship is the primary motivation. This `craftsmanship' model would have to explain hacker custom as a way of maximizing both the opportunities for craftsmanship and the quality of the results. Does this conflict with or suggest different results than the `reputation game' model?

Not really. In examining the `craftsmanship' model, we come back to the same problems that constrain hackerdom to operate like a gift culture. How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for quality? If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics are available besides peer evaluation? It appears that any craftsmanship culture ultimately must structure itself through a reputation game -- and, in fact, we can observe exactly this dynamic in many historical craftsmanship cultures from the medieval guilds onwards.

In one important respect, the `craftsmanship' model is weaker than the `gift culture' model; by itself, it doesn't help explain the contradiction we began this paper with.

Finally, the `craftsmanship' motivation itself may not be psychologically as far removed from the reputation game as we might like to assume. Imagine your beautiful program locked up in a drawer and never used again. Now imagine it being used effectively and with pleasure by many people. Which dream gives you satisfaction?

Nevertheless, we'll keep an eye on the craftsmanship model. It is intuitively appealing to many hackers, and explains some aspects of individual behavior well enough.

After I published the first version of this paper on the Internet, an anonymous respondent commented: ``You may not work to get reputation, but the reputation is a real payment with consequences if you do the job well. This is a subtle and important point. The reputation incentives continue to operate whether or not a craftsman is aware of them; thus, ultimately, whether or not a hacker understands his own behavior as part of the reputation game, his behavior will be shaped by that game.

Other respondents related peer-esteem rewards and the joy of hacking to the levels above subsistence needs in Abraham Maslow's well-known `hierarchy of values' model of human motivation. On this view, the joy of hacking is a self-actualization or transcendence need which will not be consistently expressed until lower-level needs (including those for physical security and for `belongingness' or peer esteem) have been at least minimally satisfied. Thus, the reputation game may be critical in providing a social context within which the joy of hacking can in fact become the individual's primary motive.

The Many Faces of Reputation

There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute (prestige) is worth playing for:

First and most obviously, good reputation among one's peers is a primary reward. We're wired to experience it that way for evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as ``honor, ``ethical integrity, ``piety etc.; this does not change the underlying mechanism.)

Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy, the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others. If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you.

Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation may spill over and earn you higher status there.

Beyond these general reasons, the peculiar conditions of the hacker culture make prestige even more valuable than it would be in a `real world' gift culture.

The main `peculiar condition' is that the artifacts one gives away (or, interpreted another way, are the visible sign of one's gift of energy and time) are very complex. Their value is nowhere near as obvious as that of material gifts or exchange-economy money. It is much harder to objectively distinguish a fine gift from a poor one. Accordingly, the success of a giver's bid for status is delicately dependent on the critical judgement of peers.

Another peculiarity is the relative purity of the open-source culture. Most gift cultures are compromised -- either by exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or by command-economy relationships such as family or clan groupings. No significant analogues of these exist in the open-source culture; thus, ways of gaining status other than by peer repute are virtually absent." (http://futurepositive.synearth.net/stories/storyReader$223)

The above essay is taken from: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/

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."

More Information

1. The Potlach Protocol proposal for a decentralized gift economy
2. María Suárez: The gift economy in the Net

Feminist gift theory:'

1. Feminist Gift Theory at http://www.gift-economy.com/theory.html
2. Rauna Kuokkanen: The gift as a world view in indigenous thought
3. Paola Melchiori: Insights on the gift and the insight of the gift
4. Rokeya Begum: On the feminism of the gift economy

See Also

• Reciprocity
• Resource-based economy
• Effortless Economy