gift-economics

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Welcome to /gift-economics! Excited to get our discussions started off on the right foot.

The subtitle of Ted Gioia's excellent essay, Why I Take Gifts Seriously, poses a challenging and important question:

"The digital economy is built on the unpaid labor of the gifted. What can we do to protect them?"

Gioia has an interesting take:

"We have now entered into the crux of the dilemma facing gifted people in our cultural ecosystem, one that has grown into a huge crisis in the digital age. All creative people grasp, if only subconsciously, that their gifts were meant for giving. Even more to the point, the value of their gift increases (for both giver and receiver) through that open-hearted act of exchange." [...]

"But the real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges." [...]

"These businesses deliberately blur the boundaries between gift exchange and economic transactions. They have... constructed their platforms to lure the gifted into a faux gift exchange communities—built entirely on creative people who get paid as little as possible for their contributions."

"You might even say that the digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day." [...]

"No, you’re not forced to participate in the digital age, but good luck trying to find another way to survive as a gifted or creative person."

The essay is worth reading in full (and will likely be quoted in the /gift-economics channel frequently), but these quotes point to a thorny problem that rarely gets enough airtime: businesses that extract gift value and labor from creative people by masquerading as gift communities.

What can be done to protect the gifted from this kind of structural extraction?

Welcome to /gift-economics! Excited to get our discussions started off on the right foot.

The subtitle of Ted Gioia's excellent essay, Why I Take Gifts Seriously, poses a challenging and important question:

"The digital economy is built on the unpaid labor of the gifted. What can we do to protect them?"

Gioia has an interesting take:

"We have now entered into the crux of the dilemma facing gifted people in our cultural ecosystem, one that has grown into a huge crisis in the digital age. All creative people grasp, if only subconsciously, that their gifts were meant for giving. Even more to the point, the value of their gift increases (for both giver and receiver) through that open-hearted act of exchange." [...]

"But the real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges." [...]

"These businesses deliberately blur the boundaries between gift exchange and economic transactions. They have... constructed their platforms to lure the gifted into a faux gift exchange communities—built entirely on creative people who get paid as little as possible for their contributions."

"You might even say that the digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day." [...]

"No, you’re not forced to participate in the digital age, but good luck trying to find another way to survive as a gifted or creative person."

The essay is worth reading in full (and will likely be quoted in the /gift-economics channel frequently), but these quotes point to a thorny problem that rarely gets enough airtime: businesses that extract gift value and labor from creative people by masquerading as gift communities.

What can be done to protect the gifted from this kind of structural extraction?

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-i-take-gifts-seriously

Word-Slinger-in-Chief + Senior Editor /slowcore-hq + /gift-economics | GenX eldergoth | dark ambient music nerd | contemplative animist 🏳‍🌈

Ethereum

Love your comment, Trigs. I completely agree about the article as a perfect start for the channel. The timing of its publication, just as we were gearing up to launch this channel, feels like serendipity.

Gioia gets right to the heart of it. Some writers gloss over or otherwise fail to reckon with the structural problems that continue to drive these sub-par outcomes for creative people regardless of intent.

Anyway, yes, "gifts increase in value when given away" is a powerful dynamic that deserves further unpacking, and I agree that the context is key in terms of value creation.

There's a quote from David Bollier's article "Commoning and Changemaking" that I return to often:   

"Lewis Hyde explains how the circulation of gifts generates increases of value: “Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not *earn* profit, they *give increase*. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange, the increase stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit.” So treating the value generated by gift economies objectifies the surplus as money, removes it from circulation for private control, and in effect renders it dead (except as a future source for capital)."

I really appreciate Bollier's explanation of Hyde's distinction between "earning profit" and "giving increase." In terms of "creator economy" (market economy) norms, creative people give their gifts unto the world and the value decreases (gets extracted). But in gift economy terms, the very same work "gives increase" and continues to do so as long as it "stays in motion." 

How might this insight be fruitfully applied in Farcaster contexts for those of us who want to experiment with gift economics in our group chats and cozy corners? In some ways Farcaster seems like a hybrid gift + market economy already, yet the gift aspect is too often overshadowed by the dominance of the market.

I have plenty more I could say in response to your comment, but this is long enough for a single reply... lol. It's the ongoing conversation that matters most.

Love your comment, Trigs. I completely agree about the article as a perfect start for the channel. The timing of its publication, just as we were gearing up to launch this channel, feels like serendipity.

Gioia gets right to the heart of it. Some writers gloss over or otherwise fail to reckon with the structural problems that continue to drive these sub-par outcomes for creative people regardless of intent.

Anyway, yes, "gifts increase in value when given away" is a powerful dynamic that deserves further unpacking, and I agree that the context is key in terms of value creation.

There's a quote from David Bollier's article "Commoning and Changemaking" that I return to often:   

"Lewis Hyde explains how the circulation of gifts generates increases of value: “Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not *earn* profit, they *give increase*. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange, the increase stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit.” So treating the value generated by gift economies objectifies the surplus as money, removes it from circulation for private control, and in effect renders it dead (except as a future source for capital)."

I really appreciate Bollier's explanation of Hyde's distinction between "earning profit" and "giving increase." In terms of "creator economy" (market economy) norms, creative people give their gifts unto the world and the value decreases (gets extracted). But in gift economy terms, the very same work "gives increase" and continues to do so as long as it "stays in motion." 

How might this insight be fruitfully applied in Farcaster contexts for those of us who want to experiment with gift economics in our group chats and cozy corners? In some ways Farcaster seems like a hybrid gift + market economy already, yet the gift aspect is too often overshadowed by the dominance of the market.

I have plenty more I could say in response to your comment, but this is long enough for a single reply... lol. It's the ongoing conversation that matters most.

https://metapolis.net/project/commoning-and-changemaking/

I don't know that there could be a more perfect article to kick off this channel!

I love the intro. Pointing out how gifts actually power all of the most important relationships in our lives, even in a capitalistic world... very powerful perspective that I hadn't looked at so clearly before.

This segued nicely into the point of the article, taken from Lewis Hyde's book "The Gift":

"gifts increase in value when given away"

I thought this was really powerful to think about in terms of blockchains and the attempts to create 'creator economies' by quantifying everything with a token or nft. I think they are a new evolution of the web2 businesses that tricked us into thinking they were gift exchanges.

Now we have platforms built on protocols tricking us into thinking they are gift exchanges, just like FTX tricked people into thinking it was a decentralized exchange.

I don't have solutions, but I'm really fascinated by this idea of something increasing in value when it's given away. I feel like the context of that gift is what imparts the value creation, and in order for this 'meta data' to reflect the true provenance of that context, we have to have actual digital sovereignty over our digital activity. It's the 'trust' in trustless systems. We don't want to have to trust middlemen to execute transactions, so we build smart contracts to do that for us. But the human-to-human part has to be imbued somehow into the tx as well, instead of abstracted away.

Pointing out biz mistakes & solving them, Positioning nerd making products Unignorable, also bringing 📬 /buildbetter, 🎙️ /web3magic and /artistspotlight

Which is very easily generalizable examination of any economic system - there’s always someone winning more for some period of time until system (aka people) readjusts 

But I like the angle of socials and will read the whole thing 🤓 thanks for it 🙏

Thanks for the appreciative words. 

There's plenty in Ted Gioia's article that's worth pondering. We'll likely be quoting it frequently in this channel, because it's densely packed with insights that take awhile to sink in.

You're right that not everyone is doing gift labor, but that's part of the point Gioia's article is making: we need to examine the power dynamics in order to understand what's happening beneath the surface with the gift labor. 

Whose time, attention, and labor are being appropriated and poorly paid? Who or what is extracting the value they create? Et cetera.

as always, Danica, fascinating kick-off 👏 

Love this angle, it's worth pondering about ... 
"You might even say that the digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day." [...]

Def not everyone gifted is giving their labor for free, certainly not those folks building digital economy tools and networks. But more looking forward to reading more on these topics 🤩