This is not new at all. It’s a way of achieving what the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called social capital, meaning
“the resources at one’s service as a result of one’s ability to network.”According to Bourdieu, social capital can be exchanged for monetary currency in varying ways. Generally, Bourdieu claims that a strong network can be converted into financial gain, if only one is skilled enough.
It appears to be relatively simple. We all recognize the businessman whose network has placed him in the upper bracket of society, or how one may find a better paid job through one’s network. But the aspect of Bourdieu’s work relevant here, is the thought that something which is free easily can provide a healthy bottom line, and do some good for society at the same time.
Chris Anderson and the other advocates of the gift economy are convinced that “freeconomy,” as these thinkers also call it, is the fundamental economic factor in the network society because it helps the benefactor earn social capital.
Which, by the way, shouldn’t be confused with the concept of social currency that was discussed in chapter five. In other words, if you give something away for seemingly altruistic reasons, you get respect and recognition – but you also get attention and popularity. This builds relations between people, and connects the dots of the network. According to this theory, it is the gifts which connect the points in the network society, and allow Homo Conexus to more easily form relationships with others.
The Australian analyst Kylie Veale, who holds a Ph.D. in Internet Studies, concluded this in an article as early as 2003:
“The Internet today is a mix of ‘the free and the fee’, though it still remains in part a gift economy.”
And if that goes for the internet, it goes for humans, too – which is one of the premises of this book, right?For companies it can
often be profitable to give things away just to acquire a certain image. Many IT journalists are trying to tell stories of how Google has become a giant corporation the size of Microsoft and
therefore should be treated with the same degree of skepticism.
But the popularity and identity of Google is still linked with change, revolution from the roots up, and not least, free gifts in the form of one clever service after another. That is why Google’s social currency is such a giant resource. But I claim that it isn’t the “save-a-buck” element of the gift giving which had brought Google so much social currency.
Google gives away internet tools (financed by advertisements) in the hope of letting the individual user evolve and be productive.
This is a kind of productivity which the thinkers Lessig, Anderson and Stallman believe should be reciprocal. In order for the gift economy to work, whatever is being produced using these “gifts,”
should also be returned in the form of gifts.
Sharing is a central part of the network society, as we discussed in Chapter Five. The believers in the gift economy often cling to a concept they call “the circle of giving.” It is inspired by the poet Lewis Hyde, who has inspired nearly everyone who seriously discusses gift economy today, in his book The Gift, in which he writes:
“…when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.”
This sounds exactly like Homo Conexus: Decentralization, power of cohesion, and internal relations. Right?
Except it also sounds like Karl Marx.
Like it or not, there’s a political slant to the free software
movement. The new wave of gift economy thinking started as a left wing project of Richard Stallman, and more than 20 years later it still bears the same Marxist resemblance coming from Lawrence Lessig as well as Chris Anderson.
As Christian Fuchs puts it in his book Internet and Society:
Social Theory in the Information Age:
“Lawrence Lessig employs the term free culture for the idea that technology “could enable a whole generation to create… and then through the infrastructure of the Internet, share that creativity with others.”
Marx perceived freedom as a gift economy, a world of freedom characterized by cultivated individuality, collective activities, plenty, bringing down the level of hard work through
technological innovation, the letting go of the principle of performance, free production and the distribution of goods...
Based on this concept of freedom, free culture not only means that digital knowledge can be used freely, but that no exchange of money is taking place – things are free. The exchange economy replaced by the gift economy. A free culture based on a wide concept of freedom. It is a non-capitalistic culture. Marx, extreme leftism and communism lurk in the shadows, with many of the believers in the gift economy who think that the relations and social currency of the network society is created by “free-ness.” It is no wonder that one of the names the anti-copyright movement goes by is the copy-left movement.
It’s not just wordplay. Thankfully, most of the movement, which tries to discuss e.g. old copyright thoughts in the context of the new age, is pretty serious and moderate about it. But minority factions within the group have also seen it as means of
leveraging an extreme left wing agenda which would even go so far as ending copyright. You can even find people with these views in Silicon Valley, which bases a lot its revenue on intellectual property.
Copyright is essentially a form of property rights and is considered a Human Right by the UN. Ending property rights does sound a little like North Korea…right?