gift-economics
A Farcaster-native small-scale gift economics lab and roundtable.
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The Studio Slowcore team is excited to introduce the new Gift Economics channel: a Farcaster-native small-scale gift economics lab and roundtable. Stewarded and moderated by Danica Swanson, @trigs.eth, and @y0b, the channel was kindly gifted to us by @ted. We plan to host thoughtful deep-dive conversations that cater to long-form readers and systems thinkers. In particular, the channel will encourage open and earnest discussions about structural factors that influence how writers, artists, and other creative professionals are (and aren't) paid. There's a lot of secrecy about compensation in the arts, for all kinds of reasons. Our stewards help facilitate more clarity about where things stand. Gift Economics Channel FAQ Q: What is a gift economy? In its simplest form, a gift economy is an "arrangement for the transfer of goods or services without an agreed method of quid pro quo."* Q: Who's behind Studio Slowcore? - Danica Swanson (founder, co-steward, channel owner, word-slinger-in-chief) - @trigs.eth (co-steward, channel mod, wordsmith, community call host) - @y0b (co-steward, channel mod, wordsmith, gift economics consultant) All of us also have other professional commitments. Our intention for phase one of our launch is to experiment with hybrid gift + market economic models to sustain our two channels (/gift-economics and /slowcore-hq) long-term — without tokenizing our community and turning it into the product. If we succeed, we will shift more of our time and attention to Studio Slowcore matters. Q: Why is the studio launching exclusively on Farcaster? The simplest answer: we decided to build what we wanted to see in the world, and we believe Farcaster is the best place to do that. The slightly longer answer: it's Farcaster all the way down for us. The seeds of our studio were sown when the Farcaster community seized on the concept of "slowcore" and turned it into a movement. Since then, everything that led up to our launch has been deeply influenced by Farcaster and its unique social economy. Every studio contributor is an active daily user of the purple app who cares about its future. Creative people have gifts, and we believe those gifts come with a responsibility to use them well. Toward that end, we need structures that facilitate the giving of gifts (and routing them to the right places) instead of defaulting to extractive economic patterns. We think Farcaster's social economy is the right place to build such structures, since it's already a type of hybrid gift + market economy of the sort we've never seen anywhere else. We also prefer to keep the studio small. We don't need (or even want) to chase maximum reach; it would only add a tax on our valuable time and attention. We may write an even longer deep-dive answer to this question in phase two of our launch. Q: Why are you starting with channels? We think channels are directionally correct as cozy corners (not hashtags), and can work well for our invite-only communities if they're well-stewarded. A new form factor may be needed if channels are to thrive long-term, but in the meantime we'll give it our best as co-stewards. It helps that we use @cura for channel maintenance! Q: How does the Gift Economics channel work? Anyone can follow the channel. Membership is invite-only. We don't have an application process; our mods send out invites at their discretion. The best way to increase your chances of an invite is to respond thoughtfully and kindly to casts in the channel, and make it clear (through your behavior) that you've read the rules. Read more in our channel guidelines. Q: I'd like to learn more about gift economics. Where should I start? We're working on a reading list! In the meantime you could start with "Sacred Economics" by Charles Eisenstein, which is available in full online. Q: Why aren't you launching a token? The short answer: we're starting with gift economics experiments, so we don't need one. The longer answer: we want to help build a social economy that can sustain creative people long-term. We think the overwhelming majority of the "creator economy" in crypto as it stands (what @abundance has called the "Tokenized Attention Creator Economy") is failing to meaningfully deliver on the value prop of rewarding creative people appropriately for their work. Tokenizing in exchange value terms risks reducing the gift value of our communities. Our thesis is that economic models to sustain long-term creative work and community-building begin (but do not end) with gift culture. The standard ways of monetizing creative work extract gift value, convert it into profit, and route the lion's share of it away from creative people. We want to go in the other direction: restore and preserve gift value flows, return more value to those who actually create it, and convert profit into gift. It's a challenging systems design problem! But if there's anywhere it can be done, it's on Farcaster. Q: How can I help with the gift economy experiment? Consider following and contributing to our roundtable discussions in the comments on our casts in the channel, or just talk about gift economics on Farcaster in general. Gifts of crypto sent to the studio's multisig (slowcore.eth) will be gratefully accepted. We will route them toward retro-rewards for the gift labor done to bootstrap our channels. Gifts can also help free up more time for us to steward the channels responsibly in the future. Please do not gift any funds that are needed for your own support. We'd also love to see more Farcasters start their own gift circles and micro-gift-economy experiments. NOTE: We will NOT be launching a coin. Not for our studio. Not for ourselves as individuals. Not for our channels. *(Thanks to ServiceSpace for the gift economy definition).
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Love this line of thought. When can gifting be of self-interest, according to an expanded view of "self"? In the right contexts of interdependence, I think there need be no contradiction at all between self-interest and the common interest. Gift cultures can further both of these simultaneously. Artists are a good example of this. Typically their work is most valuable when considered in gift terms. Gifting to trusted and talented artists in ways that facilitate their art can be a way of leveraging gift-giving so that the results ultimately serve whole communities of art fans. In volunteer-work communities I've often heard it said that “it isn’t service unless both people are being served.” In other words, the work should give back as much (or more) to the service providers as it takes from them... in whatever form that may be. If it doesn't — if on balance the work leaves the volunteers chronically drained and demoralized, rather than effective and re-energized — there's a problem. Maybe they're doing the wrong type of volunteer work for them, working under inhospitable conditions that operate at cross-purposes, or navigating structures that extract value from their work. Or all of the above.
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This is some really intense technical examination of "creator economic models" being experimented with, like Zora. I recommend reading the whole thread, but this cast really sums it up for me: - everything is predicated on the velocity of speculation. These are systems that are designed to allow creators to capture value from speculation. That's it. And that's novel! There currently isn't any effective tool for creators to do this on any existing platforms. But that's not an economy. That's just a part of a healthy economy. In no world will we ever solve for "funding creators" simply by giving them a tool to capture value from speculation. Giving them these tools is an essential component of a digitally sovereign economy, yes. So I'm glad people are experimenting with these mechanisms. But it's not the be-all-end-all solution. Creation begins with a gift— I hold this to be true. Without this, the incentives will always drive us to the lowest common denominator and the power laws of attention will funnel all of the value to the few rather than the many. I think these speculation mechanisms will empower creators to maintain sovereignty over the value of their creations, but if and only if we solve for creating an economy of giving, rather than investing, as the foundation of our value creation.
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Got a couple of questions about the new /gift-economics channel launched by the Studio Slowcore team a couple of weeks ago, so here's some info about how we set it up. Before launching, we sketched out a basic plan for the channel in a private group chat of about 20 active members who share a common interest in long reads. Many of us in the group chat think the Farcaster community will need to double down on channels-as-cozy-corners if we want slow-burn growth that compounds over time. So we decided to "be the change we wish to see." We wanted a space for slow-paced deep dives in text format. We knew that approach wouldn't be compatible with the short half-life of casts as determined by the algo feeds... but still, it's Farcaster all the way down for us. So we set out to do the best we can on Farcaster with the tools we have. Next we set expectations so that everyone in the group knows: - They're welcome to comment on threads in-channel long after the algo feeds bury them. They can tag any of the mods to make sure their comments get seen. - For our Gift Economics Roundtable initiative, the mods curate a few best-of-channel convos and turn them into @paragraph posts as full conversations. (We edit the convos for clarity, and obtain full permission of all participants before publishing). We just released the first of these posts. - Members get advance notice about some of the articles we've got in our pipeline before we cast about them publicly. So anyone who wants to discuss the articles in-channel can take time to read and gather their thoughts before commenting. - Mods often quote-cast thoughtful comments and invite further contributions to the original threads. This list is our toolkit of work-arounds to encourage long-form evergreen discussions on Farcaster in defiance of the algo that only prioritizes what's newest.
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Great questions from @chriscocreated. My reading of what @trigs.eth wrote ("gift-giving is the necessary precursor to market activity when it comes to creative content") is that if we begin with investment or speculative dynamics when funding creative work, this decision then closes off the paths for a potential increase in GIFT value... ...and that increase in gift value is THE big unlock we need if we really want to sustainably support creative work over time. If we don't *begin* with direct gift-giving to the artists, we'll always end up with business as usual: markets will continue on with extracting most of the value generated by their gifts and turning it into private profit. Just as they do right now. When trying to develop social norms of gifting amongst artists, for example, we quickly run into the structural problem @abundance recently mentioned: "creators benefit the community (or network) but are expected to be rewarded by members of the community." I call this the "artists passing a crumpled $5 bill back and forth amongst ourselves" problem. If we want that increase in gift value to do its thing, then most of the early gifts to fund creative work will probably need to come from entities *outside* artist circles (e.g., philanthropy). In this context I think it's a good idea to consider the many layers of challenges (social, psychological, economic, cultural) involved in getting creative work funded. These are thorny and deeply rooted problems. Gift-giving is an oft-overlooked key, but there's more to the story. Tom Beck's latest piece "Why Artists Can't Get Paid" is my go-to for thinking through the true depth of this problem space; it will be frequently quoted in this channel. (See the comments for further reading).
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Just published on @paragraph: the first of the channel's Gift Economics Roundtable conversations (i.e. the nerds get nerd-sniped, take one). These conversations are an extension of the Return On Attention Roundtable (ROAR) discussions, which began in a private group chat (profiled in the essay "Quality Writing is Systemic") and are now making their way into the public sphere. The Gift Economics Roundtable initiative is an attempt to preserve some of the gift value that's created only in the context of long-term relationships built on reciprocity and trust, and to highlight some of that value for the Farcaster community. Studio Slowcore will continue to turn the best of these in-channel conversations into blog posts. Let us know what questions or topics you'd like to see for future roundtable discussions! Gifts of crypto sent to the studio's multisig (slowcore.eth) will be gratefully accepted and used to fund initiatives for our channels, including the Gift Economics Roundtable. https://paragraph.com/@danicaswanson/gift-economics-channel-roundtable-on-value-creation-and-speculation
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