Message 00647 [Homepage] [Navigation]
Thread: oxenT00616 Message: 28/44 L2 [In index]
[First in Thread] [Last in Thread] [Date Next] [Date Prev]
[Next in Thread] [Prev in Thread] [Next Thread] [Prev Thread]

Re: Gifts? (was: Re: [ox-en] Richard Barbrook article)



Hi,

Coming to Richard's defence (but with no idea if he'll agree with this
or not)

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Stefan Merten wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Hi Richard, Graham, list!

Last week (7 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 02:18:37 +0100
From: richard barbrook <richard hrc.wmin.ac.uk>

Below is a short piece which I wrote for 'Passages' - a Swiss art mag.


A very good text IMHO. It could have been written in Oekonux - but
then it would have been in German I guess ;-) .

The only thing I don't like is the word "gift" in gift economy. Of
course the motivation of wanting to make a gift to someone / the world
may be a motivation for some people, but actually I doubt this
motivation is the biggest motor for what we see in the Internet / Free
Software.

You're right that the usual meaning of 'gift' in this society is a
permanent transfer of property without payment, so that for the giver
there is only a meritorious feeling of altruism combined with  
self-sacrifice..  And that has nothing to do with free software (as
far as I can see).

But there are other traditions and associations with gifts, linked with
anthropology, literature and art rather than software and left politics.
The best book I know about this is 'The Gift' by Lewis Hyde,  published
in 1979. In this, a true gift is one which circulates, whether as itself
(something which is not consumed) or as a replacement after consumption;
and ideally, one which improves during circulation. So it implies no
obligation to return anything to the original giver, and a society which
is based on gifts is one in which everyone puts something in - but 
everyone takes out more than they put in (like Rishab Ghosh's cooking 
pot).

I think in many ways the ideas in this book are complementary to those of
Oekonux - the gift is just another way of analysing selbstentfaltung, but
with more emphasis on the psychology involved, and more emphasis on where
it has been common in the past and where it has survived in this society.

I believe ESR's analysis of the gift society in the Cathedral & the Bazaar
come from here but rather watered down and distorted - one noticeable 
point is that old gift-based societies were either simply destroyed
or literally went mad when they met capitalism - the potlatches
of British Columbia, which turned into mass destruction of machine made
goods since they simply couldn't circulate that amount of product as
gifts, or the cargo cults of the pacific. I asked ESR about his use
of the potlatch as his only example of a gift society once, and he said
something like 'I know there are better examples, but this was the only 
one I could pick that Americans would have heard of'. :-(

But just because ESR uses the idea, and most people on here are not great
fans of ESR, IMO is no reason to drop it.

I'm not saying I'm already fully understanding what is happening, but
to me when I'm making a gift, this is a rather personal thing. At
least I must have the vision of a real person the gift is directed to.

Yes - one of the limitations of what Hyde talks about (which he keeps
pointing out) is that all the examples he has are of small-scale societies
where people know one another (he does use science as a counter-example). 
That is one thing that has changed completely with the internet.
A reson to write 'The Gift (part 2)' rather than to drop it, I think :-)

For example I put some (small pieces of) Free Software to the Internet
and got (next to) no response. Actually against popular believe I
think most Free Software authors experience that.

After doing this a few times I realised that if there really is a good
reason for something to be used or developed more, you also actually
have to advertise it (ie. not just Freshmeat ;-)

After all I can see
some download numbers from my personal site and so I can conclude that
there must be people who at least download my work.

However, from this I don't feel I made a gift to someone. Again: To me
a gift is a rather personal thing and often it is linked to some kind
of personal obligation. Did you know that in German the word "Gift"
means poison? I read somewhere that this is not by chance but instead
a result of the obligation part of the gift.

According to Hyde (again!) it has no deep meaning - German 'gift' is
a loan translation from Greek 'dosis' which meant originally 'gift'
but later also 'dose' (of medicine or poison).


In this sense a gift is part of an exchange - but this is not what is
happening on the Internet in any useful sense of the word. There is a
big flow of information but the typical tit-for-tat of exchange is the
opposite of what is happening in the Internet / Free Software.

Gifts in a social sense don't need to involve exchange, just circulation 
:-)


So why am I putting Free Software to the Internet after all? Well, to
me over time it became a kind of obligation I feel. I'm using Free
Software day by day and some of my work may help others. This is also
the reason why I started to send patches to the authors I found useful
/ making things work.

An additional special explanation in my case that I wanted to
experience myself what it means to contribute Free Software.

However, this has really nothing to do with gifts in any sense of the
word I can think of. To me this looks far more like a social standard
which is slowly emerging from the practice of Free Software. May be it
can be stuffed into the notion of gift but I feel this is wrong.

Another example where I make freely accessible contributions is of
course Oekonux. Things are quite different here because of course
Oekonux lives from responses. As a result I see my contributions to
the project as anything but gifts. To me this is a collective effort
to achieve something - in this case to understand the opportunities
embedded in the principles of Free Software for a new society which
causes less pain than the one we have. I can't see any other way to
have that and the openness to me is for many reasons an important part
of Oekonux. Indeed the Internet may the only sociotope where this is
possible.

Well, may be this is enough of a challenge to the word "gift" in gift
economy ;-) .


I'd definitely recommend the Hyde book as a counter-challenge. The first
half, at any rate (the second half is an analysis of Whitman and Ezra 
Pound, which is supposed to illustrate the theory but I felt had
disconcertingly little to do with it - maybe just prior prejudice against
Pound on my part...)

Graham

 
						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

PS: Richard: If you respond please keep the `list-en oekonux.org' in
the `Cc:'. Thanks.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3in
Charset: noconv
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7, an Emacs/PGP interface

iQCVAwUBPaoA3QnTZgC3zSk5AQHCPwP9Fpxf7lvuJhOcTSywMfweeaHRUOIqtW9U
rOZH//wGTCqibLCgDZed20fYOKL9LcbNSrMqhUW6AW1mWGrSzW5wTdKEsrth2wuk
xGtPNgpuF4mf/eEQdpsTtmtMy1M5sp/mXJhtOzIhKc/Hsgs7eGlHqWd7+8J/LEil
68HB9W2hB6k=
=Owcn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/


_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/


Thread: oxenT00616 Message: 28/44 L2 [In index]
Message 00647 [Homepage] [Navigation]