The following principles (and associated text) were taken from Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book ‘The Gift’. We read through them together; they are the foundation on which our discussion rests.
1. The gift must always move.
‘As it is passed along, the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move.’ (p.29)
‘…unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. Furthermore, when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.’ (p.23)
2. The gift must be consumed.
‘…a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes… Food is one of the most common images for the gift because it is so obviously consumed.’ (p.34)
‘In a gift exchange the transaction itself consumes the object. Now, it is true that something often comes back when a gift is given, but if this were made an explicit condition of the exchange, it wouldn’t be a gift.’ (p.35)
‘In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and seller were both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another.’ (p.36)
3. The gift is given in silence.
‘A man may wonder what will come in return for his gift, but he is not supposed to bring it up. Gift exchange is not a form of barter… Partners in barter talk and talk until they strike a balance, but the gift is given in silence.’ (p.41)
‘When I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere), it is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well.’ (p.43)
’…each donation is an act of social faith.’ (p.43)
Hyde also discusses the Kula gift exchange that takes place in the Trobriands, in Papua New Guinea – in which ceremonial armbands and necklaces are passed in a clockwise circuit around the islands, with nobody giving to the same person from whom they are receiving.
There is a natural comparison here with the gift economies of fandom – which also form a vital social infrastructure. Events such as Big Bangs and Reverse Big Bangs pair writers and artists to be inspired by and create for one another. Fanfiction exchanges resemble the Kula even more closely: participants create gifts for each other in a round-robin or Secret Santa format. Person A writes for Person B and receives from Person C. The gifts go in a circle – but they are not confined to it.
Tisha Turk observes:
‘…gifts within fandom are not simply given by distributed – and potentially, via links and reblogs, redistributed, sometimes well beyond the corner of fandom in which they first appeared. Fandom gifting is not just one-to-one but one-to-many.’ (‘Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy’, 2014.)
In a fandom-adjacent space, there’s artfight.net: a month-long digital event that takes place every July. Participants upload their own original characters to the side, are divided into teams, and win points by drawing each other’s characters. The winning team is not that which has received the most, but that which has given the most.
(n.b. as I write, Art Fight is happening right now. GO TEAM TRAGEDY!)
How might we bring this energy to a computing space? FOSS software could be said to be its own gift economy, with developers freely giving their time and their labour to the community. However, as Henry Zhu mentions on the Maintainers Anonymous podcast, in conversation with Maggie Appleton:
‘You’re using it all the time, it becomes infrastructure. And so you don’t really think about it. And so that causes you to not really need to feel like you’re giving back.’
‘With open source you might not even know who works on the projects that you use… I’ve [given talks] and then people have no idea who I am but they know Babel… everyone has a username, you don’t really know them. It’s just some black box.’ (‘Open Source as a Gift Economy’, Maintainers Anonymous podcast, 2020.)
So some aspects of a gift economy are present – but social relationships are not being built in quite the same way.
Speaking for myself: HDSC naturally feels like a very gift-oriented space, but so much of that is rooted in the physical space we occupy together. So how, then, do we develop a culture of gift computing? Is the answer to create alternative networks, build an internet that is small and local? That would certainly be a good thing to do anyway - but it feels a little like a cop-out to me. I want gifts that travel through deep-sea cables, gifts that can travel great distances, gifts that defy the petty limits of borders and geography. I want to feel closer to you, no matter where you are.
Further Questions
• What gifts have you received that were particularly meaningful? • Does a gift have to be a physical object? • How does it feel to give or receive a gift? • Does a gift come with responsibilities? • Have you received a digital gift? What was it? • What aspects of computing could be gifted? Hyperlinks, server space, domain names, websites, repairs? – What would that look like? – Would it work at a larger scale? • What makes a gift ‘good’ or ‘bad’? • What kind of structures encourage gifting?
