Nearchos

gift-economics

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

Great conversation starter for a channel called gift economics!

What are gift economics? Well, read the article in this cast and you'll find out.

Then pop into the replies and share your thoughts.

I think this is the real missing piece to putting a dent into this "creator economy" extraction loop we keep repeating. No solutions yet, but we're coming at the problem space from a different angle to see what a different side of the elephant looks like!

ht @abundance

Solving public goods value capture. | /impact | book.abundance.id

I have a feeling we'll be quoting and returning to this article frequently in the channel because it's so densely packed with insights that take awhile to digest. 

Looking forward to collectively checking out a different side of the elephant!