First part of a commentary on Adam’s essay, from which we published three excerpts earlier.

Here a typology of 3 forms of economic activity arising out of the emergence of peer production: the sharing model, the commons model, the co-creation/crowdsourcing model.

Text:

One, the sharing economy, which is primarily about sharing one’s creative expression, not geared to the production of common value directly. Such individuals or groups generally produce for their own use value and enjoyment, for the alternative recognition systems that you mention (knowledge, relationship, reputational value). Expected monetary returns are marginal to the main motivation. In this scenario, I believe that the individuals have weak links to each other, and they are happy to accept that the platforms that enable such sharing are created by others, presently by the Web 2.0 proprietary platforms. These in turn, use the aggregated attention to fund and profit from these platforms. In my opinion, it is governed by a social contract which says, from the point of view of the users: it is fine that you provide such a platform, and that you profit from it, provided our freedom to share is respected as well. Such netarchical platforms are then driven to the contradictory positioning of having to stimulate community and freedom (let’s call it the dolphin type of behavior, based on the notion of the abundance of sharing), with the fight for marketshare with other attention aggregators (let’s call it the shark type of behavior). The tendency to protect the turf through closure, as against the total freedom of movement of the users, has to be kept in balance with the kind of freedom demanded by the users, who could move away to another platform.

Two, the commons economy. Here there is a much more conscious collective construction of common value, think of Linux or Wikipedia. Such construction is only possible by forging stronger links, driven for example by the need for consensus on Wikipedia pages. Such more strongly linked communities often have their own infrastructure. Nevertheless, such communities, and the individuals involved, also tend to appreciate, under certain conditions, the involvement of commercial entities, which can strengthen the project. Such companies create derivate business strategies, based on creating relative scarcities around the common pool, in return for some kind of support for the common efforts. This is in my view the underlying social contract of this second form, i.e. the need for the profiting parties to create some kind of return flow to the commons and their communities.

Third, the crowdsourcing economy (more generally, the co-creation economy whereby for-profit entities integrate the demand and opportunity participation in their own business models and value chains). Given that both the sharing and commons oriented value creating models show that innovation is becoming social, it is normal that existing institutions, in particular the for-profit business companies, seek to integrate such social innovation in their own value chains.

What does it mean that innovation is becoming social? It means that innovation is less and less an internal affair, paid for by corporate funds and their R & D departments. It means that it is more and more an emerging quality of the networks itself, arising from the multitude of interactions within and between individuals and communities. It means that it can arise without the intervention of capital or the state, or for that matter, academia. It means, amongst other things, that the capital needed for starting an internet company has decreased by 80% in 8 years. The role of capital therefore shift to being an a priori enabler of such social innovation, such is the role and strategy of crowdsourcing, and of a posteriori captation of value, as is the case with the sharing and the commons models. Dare we say that capital is more parasitical in such context. To return to the crowdsourcing model, this is the most direct model of trying to integrate these innovation processes right in the value chain of the corporations, but it is also the one were the underlying social contract is the shakiest, because the ‘exploitation’ is the most visible. It is in this context that the value creators, the participating public, most clearly sees that the value they are creating is being used with the most little return.

We must also note that monetary value that is being realized by the capital players, is – in many if not most of the cases, not of the same order as the value created by the social innovation processes. The user-producers-participants are creating direct use value, videos in YouTube, knowledge and software in the case of commons-oriented projects. This use value is put in common pool, freely usable, and therefore, does not consist of scarce products for which pricing can be demanded. The sharing platforms live from selling the derivative attention created, not the use value itself. In the commons model, the abundant commons can also not be directly marketed, without the creation of additional ‘scarcities’. Finally, as Adam Arvidsson shows, even in crowdsourcing, the value may often not be in the product design themselves, but in other forms of value, such as branding, etc…

Here is a third excerpt from Adam Arvidsson’s essay:

” The advantages of such peer based measurement systems are that they are emergent. They are not imposed by managers, NGOs or other organizations who might have little knowledge of the actual productive realities of particular practice, and who tend to impose ‘codes of conduct’ which easily degenerate into mere bureaucratic exercises. Instead they are generated by the community itself, and hence tend to give a more realistic estimate of the social impact of a product, organization or person. And we can envision that such peer-based valuation systems will become more efficient with technological development. With a mobile internet and developed RFID tagging it could be possible to sweep one’s mobile phone over a sweater or another piece of garment to instantly acquire a quantitative estimate of what several thousand people, placed all along the production and distribution chain say about its environmental impact, respect for worker’s rights, adherence to particular religious practices, or what have you. It might also be possible to use your cell phone to easily acquire products with alternative currencies, like units of credit earned writing for a blog or hosting someone on your couch.

The perspective for the immediate future is that the monetary capitalist economy will continue to loose its monopoly over the measurement, and hence also the organization of productive processes. This is natural, since that monopoly has essentially been founded on a monopoly over the means of organization. It has only been possible to govern complex productive networks like the modern corporation, by means of efficient information processing machines like the bureaucracy. Likewise, the central bank with its large affiliated research institutions was the only organ capable of determining the price of money with any accuracy. Today such information monopolies are challenged. Central banks have but a minimal influence over the price of money, Most is determined by financial markets, which are in essence mediated real time interaction systems, not very different from Second Life (Zaloom, 2006).

In the form of Information and Communication technologies the means of organization have been socialized to the extent that alternative coordination and measurement systems can and do arise beyond the direct control of corporate capital.

The outcomes of this are twofold.

On the one hand, such new peer based measurement systems can be integrated into the value dynamics of corporate capitalism. This is already happening: the proliferation of non- financial performance metrics is a (generally inefficient) step in that direction. There are also a number of consultancies that provide advice on performing such integration, like Namaste economics, offering to ‘integrate economics with social values’ or the Karmainitative, providing ‘trust metrics in the market place’.

On the other hand we can predict that corporate capitalism and the institutions at its control will resist and repress attempts at constructing alternative valuation and measurement media. Again this is already happening. We can understand Intellectual Property legislation and Digital Rights Management systems as attempts not only to enforce property claims, but also to restrict the circulation of such property to circuits in which measurable values are created.”

Clay Shirky has written a response to Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur. Part of that response deals with the part of truth of that book, which is that any change also has negative consequences. This passage is worth reading and pondering.

Clay Shirky:

“Keen is correct in seeing that the internet is not an improvement to modern society; it is a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible, or, put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are significantly important, and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is epochal. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without radical alteration.

This change will create three kinds of loss.

First, people whose jobs relied on solving a hard problem will lose those jobs when the hard problems disappear. Creating is hard, filtering is hard, but the basic fact of making acceptable copies of information, previously the basis of the aforementioned music and newspaper industries, is a solved problem, and we should regard with suspicion anyone who tries to return copying to its previously difficult state.

Similarly, Andrew describes a firm running a $50K campaign soliciting user-generated ads, and notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on something like $300,000 dollars of fees. Its possible to regard this as a hardship for the ad guys, but its also possible to wonder whether they were really worth the $300K in the first place if an amateur, working in their spare time with consumer-grade equipment, can create something the client is satisfied with. This loss is real, but it is not general. Video tools are sad for ad guys in the same way movable type was sad for scribes, but as they say in show biz, the world doesn’t owe you a living.

The second kind of loss will come from institutional structures that we like as a society, but which are becoming unsupportable. Online ads offer better value for money, but as a result, they are not going to generate enough cash to stand up the equivalent of the NY Times’ 15-person Baghdad bureau. Josh Wolf has argued that journalistic privilege should be extended to bloggers, but the irony is that Wolf’s very position as a videoblogger makes that view untenable — journalistic privilege is a special exemption to a general requirement for citizens to aid the police. We can’t have a general exception to that case.

The old model of defining a journalist by tying their professional identity to employment by people who own a media outlet is broken. Wolf himself has helped transform journalism from a profession to an activity; now we need a litmus test for when to offer source confidentiality for acts of journalism. This will in some ways be a worse compromise than the one we have now, not least because it will take a long time to unfold, but we can’t have mass amateurization of journalism and keep the social mechanisms that regard journalists as a special minority.

The third kind of loss is the serious kind. Some of these Andrew mentions in his book: the rise of spam, the dramatically enlarged market for identity theft. Other examples he doesn’t: terrorist organizations being more resilient as a result of better communications tools, pro-anorexic girls forming self-help groups to help them remain anorexic. These things are not side-effects of the current increase in freedom, they are effects of that increase. Spam is not just a plague in open, low-entry-cost systems; it is a result of those systems. We can no longer limit things like who gets to form self-help groups through social controls (the church will rent its basement to AA but not to the pro-ana kids), because no one needs help or permission to form such a group anymore.

The hard question contained in Cult of the Amateur is “What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?” Our side has generally advocated having as few limits as possible (when we even admit that there are downsides), but we’ve been short on particular cases. It’s easy to tell the newspaper people to quit whining, because the writing has been on the wall since Brad Templeton founded Clarinet. It’s harder to say what we should be doing about the pro-ana kids, or the newly robust terror networks.

Those cases are going to shift us from prevention to reaction (a shift that parallels the current model of publishing first, then filtering later), but so much of the conversation about the social effects of the internet has been so upbeat that even when there is an obvious catastrophe (as with the essjay crisis on Wikipedia), we talk about it amongst ourselves, but not in public.

What Wikipedia (and Digg and eBay and craigslist) have shown us is that mature systems have more controls than immature ones, as the number of bad cases is identified and dealt with, and as these systems become more critical and more populous, the number of bad cases (and therefore the granularity and sophistication of the controls) will continue to increase.

We are creating a governance model for the world that will coalesce after the pre-internet institutions suffer whatever damage or decay they are going to suffer. The conversation about those governance models, what they look like and why we need them, is going to move out into the general public with CotA, and we should be ready for it. My fear, though, is that we will instead get a game of “Did not!”, “Did so!”, and miss the opportunity to say something much more important.”

Here is our second excerpt of the remarkable essay by Adam Arvidsson:

This absence of a measure points towards a power vacuum within the information economy. There is no common measure simply because nobody has been strong enough to impose a common measure, or to put in more Nietzschian terms, to decide what the values should be. Indeed, the issue is not so much ontological as it is sociological. It is not that you cannot measure ‘ethical things’ like love or respect, there are systems that do this as we will show below. It is rather that the ethical economy presents a problem of measure for the capitalist monetary economy because it largely unfolds largely beyond its direct control. The situation was similar, two centuries ago. The way in which industrial capitalism established itself was by imposing its own measure of value as the societal standard, as against the moral economy of peasant tradition Modern management, emerged (with Taylorist scientific management) as an attempt to break down the complex networks of craft production into simple units of worker-machine interaction that cold be measured in terms of labour time. (And modern consumerism was largely shaped by the need to impose a different conception of the value of time: that it was better spent productively to acquire more goods than idly in rest once one had accumulated enough, cf..) Consequently, productivity could be defined as output per unit of labour time. Although this kind of measure originated with the situation of material factory production it has since been extended to various forms of immaterial labour, like the taylorized production of services at McDonalds restaurants, call-centers and increasingly, British universities. So the problem of measure is not about the nature of immaterial production. It is rather about its sociological relation to ‘the (capitalist) machine’ that mediates productive interaction within the factory or organization. Indeed, the further we move from the original situation in which this philosophy of measurement developed, the less the quantum of time spent interacting with a machine that also acts as a disciplining device (whether a material machine or an immaterial, organizational one), and the more emergent factors like networks, tacit knowledge and social organization- what Marx called ‘General Intellect’- matters, the less valid this form of measurement becomes. And we can argue that the main productive contribution of information- and communication technologies is unleashing of such General Intellect on a societal scale, which is difficult to control and measure. (And the reason why the relation between investments in ICTs and productivity growth is tenuous is precisely that productive contribution of this General Intellect largely unfolds outside of the monetary economy.) The result is a ‘crisis of value’: a lot of the actual wealth produced cannot be measured, or can only be measured with great difficulty. And what cannot be measured can hardly be managed.

In many ways the contemporary proliferation of Non Financial Performance Metrics can be read as a response to the crisis of value that confronts contemporary capitalism. Sometimes these metrics originate with NGOs or other actors who want to make their particular value agenda prevail. They are then welcomed by corporations, in part because they offer new and complimentary ways to estimate their social value. Often such metrics are developed by consultancies as a way to legitimized increasingly blatant discrepancies between the market values of companies and their ‘book values’, captured by antiquated accounting systems designed to capture the material realties of industrial production. Most such systems, like brand valuation for example, are not developed to measure the empirical performance of a brand, but to provide an explanation for what is chiefly an accounting problem. The point is that these measurements have no common origin, but emerge out of a multitude of agendas and concerns, most of which are not primarily preoccupied with actual measurement.”

Adam Arvidsson has just sent me his latest essay, and I have no hesitation to call it a landmark essay because it is the very first really cogent analysis of the emerging Crisis of Value which is affecting the present market economy model.

In short, a new second economy is arising, which he calls the Ethical Economy, which does not run according to monetary exchange, and can only be very partially monetized and controlled by the market. There is a crisis of value he says, because this new economy cannot be measured, either because the right metrics are not yet in place, but perhaps more fundamentally, because it is largely beyond measure, and even what can be measured of it, cannot be directly related to the monetary economy.

This essay is as yet unpublished, but I want to publish some key excerpts, followed by my own response.

Excerpt: the impending crisis of value

“It is becoming ever more obvious, even the mainstream business press is acknowledging this, that the information economy is split in two; we have two economies rather than one (or three, if we include the growing criminal or informal economy which we will not treat in this paper). On the one hand, there is the traditional capitalist economy that works with monetary incentives. This economy still handles the main part of material production: the production of cars, shoes, computer chips, as well as the transportation and maintenance of these goods. But immaterial production- the production of the ideas, innovations, experiences and other intangibles that virtually everybody agrees to be the most important source of value and development- is increasingly performed by another economy that does not primarily move according to monetary incentives. Most people who participate in creating the enormous wealth of content that give MySpace or YouTube their market values are not in it for the money. Instead they want to build networks, make friends, show off, be cool or what have you. The same thing goes for the users who participate in the multitude of smaller, less famous sites that make up the new productive developments known as Web 2.0. Neither are the people who participate in the many business initiated user-led innovation initiatives that now proliferate, like the Nokia Concept Lounge (450.000 visitors, 4.500 Ideas submitted) or user generated advertising campaigns like Heinz tv-challenge, primarily there for the money. Indeed the very business sense behind such initiatives is that they give access to an enormous resevoir of free creativity that needs not be paid for (to be deployed either in the actual design of products or advertisements, or, more importantly perhaps, in brand building, von Hippel, 2006).

The importance of such non-monetary production is however not limited to the world of on-line initiatives or web 2.0. Within companies it has long been recognized that the prime source of productivity is not what people get paid for, but what is more difficult to include in a job description: their ability to network, share knowledge and support each other, to co-create a good working environment, a marketable service or a flexible organization. Managers recognize that the best way to foster such forms of cooperation is not through monetary incentives, but rather by fostering a solid corporate culture with strong values, a strong sense of solidarity or commitment, a particular ‘mood’ or ‘vibe’ (cf. Brian & Joyce, 2006). Similarly marketers have discovered that the autonomous cooperation among consumers is an important source of brand value (Holt. 2002, Arvidsson, 2006). Finally, the ‘creative economy’ of the urban music, arts and fashion scenes, which is growing in importance as a productive externality for the creative industries proper, is not primarily motivated by monetary incentives. Most members of the ‘creative class’ do not live off their creative labour, but rather accept poor or precarious economic conditions as a (temporary, they hope) trade off for the ability to realize themselves or pursue their dreams (Florida, 2002, cf. Arvidsson, 2007).

We have chosen to call this emerging non-monetary economy an ‘ethical’ economy. Not because we necessarily believe that it is inherently better or nicer than the mainstream corporate economy. Instead, our choice of the term ‘ethical’ refers to the fact that this economy is largely coordinated by respect, peer-status, networks, friendships and other forms of inter-personal recognition. It is geared towards the accumulation of such forms of interpersonal recognition, what sociologists would call ‘social capital’. “

Namahn is a planet of self aware artificial intelligences that are striving for mystical consciousness, featured in David Zindell’s Neverness trilogy.

It’s also the name of a human computer interaction design company, led by Joannes Vandermeulen in Brussels, which applies progressive management techniques such as open accounting, and they regularly publish podcasts with HCI experts.

But once, they interviewed me around the concept of a participatory civilisation.

Here is the series page, with the individual interview, which is also available at iTunes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Zak Greant’s Polymorph Blog has an amazing, and thought provoking post about his plans to help organize an Open Business Model.

This is a rough draft model, but it has many of the core qualities that we’ve defined at Open Business Model, and some interesting new ones. Particularly the “Methods” section:

Methods
=======
Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:
* Consensus-based decision making.
* Corporate transparency – any information or process that can be made open,
should be made open.
* Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our
partners and society at large.
* Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
* Don’t try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths.
Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
* Prefer to work with people who share our values.
* Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.

Monty’s amendments:
* Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
* Be a virtual company, networking with others.
* The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are
unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.

I’ve copied this model to Open Business Models Wiki Hive:FooAssociatesModel in the hopes that people in that community might offer some useful feedback.

I’ve also added a comment there that I think it ConsensusPolling could be a useful application in the Foo Associates model. It’s proven process that grew from actual use in decision making over spendingmoney in the Omidyar Net community.

“Don’t try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.” this really caught my eye. It addresses some core realities about human nature, mainly that you cannot force people to change.

This social element is sorely missing from traditional business models, and forcing people (employees and customers) is a key reason why many businesses fail.

Zak Greant states that he will be posting the model to his blog as it evolves, please offer feedback on this if you’re interested.

An interesting feminist take on the difference between exchanging and gifting, which I found here.

Our own wiki entry with definitions and citations are here.

Genevieve Vaughan:

“One particularly important loop in the thread of gift giving is the double gift: giving in order to receive a return gift – what we call ‘exchange’. Exchange requires quantification and measurement, an equation between what is given and what is received to the satisfaction of both parties. Our present economic system is based upon exchange.

Exchange is at odds with gift giving. The competition which is characteristic of Capitalism pushes the exchange way against the gift way. In fact two paradigms or worldviews are formed, one based on exchange and the other on gift giving.

One of the ways the exchange paradigm wins its competition with the gift paradigm is by defining everything in terms of its own aspects of categorization, competition, quantification and measurement, at the same time hiding the activity of the gift paradigm. This concealment is an important factor in degrading gift giving and making it inaccessible, both as a continuing activity and as an interpretative key for the understanding of other aspects of life.

Because exchange is so much a part of our lives we use it as a strong metaphor for understanding everything. For example, we may consider an interaction to be a loving exchange when instead it is taking turns in giving and receiving. We are not usually conscious of the fundamental distinction between giving in order to receive and giving in order to satisfy the need of the other.

Giving in order to receive – exchange – is ego-oriented. It is the satisfaction of one’s own need that is the purpose of the transaction. Giving to satisfy another’s need is other-oriented. These two motivations constitute the basis of two logics, one of which is intransitive (exchange), the other of which is transitive (gift giving).

Exchange creates and requires scarcity. If everyone were giving to everyone else, there would be no need to exchange. The market needs scarcity to maintain the level of prices. In fact when there is an abundance of products scarcity is often created on purpose. An example of this is the plowing under of ‘overabundant’ crops (which may happen even when people are standing by who are hungry). On a larger scale scarcity is created 1. by the channeling of wealth into the hands of the few who then have power over the many; 2. by spending on armaments and monuments which have no nurturing value but only serve for destruction and display of power; and 3. by privatizing or depleting the environment so that the gifts of nature are unavailable to the many. The exchange paradigm is a belief system which validates this kind of behavior. Individuals who espouse it are functional to the economic system of which they are a part. Exchange is adversarial, each person tries to give less and get more, an attitude which creates antagonism and distance among the players. Gift giving creates and requires abundance. In fact, in scarcity gift giving is difficult and even self sacrificial while in abundance it is satisfying and even delightful.

Language is based on gift giving. This hypothesis breaks through the taboo against using nurturing (gift giving) as the model for other kinds of human activity and it has important consequences. If language is based on nurturing and if thinking is at least partially based on language then thinking is at least partially based on nurturing. However thinking can also be based directly on non linguistic nurturing. Sending and receiving messages, which is a commonplace way of describing chemical and hormonal interactions in the body, can also be viewed in terms of less intentional giving and receiving. If we view language as gift giving transposed onto a verbal level, and if we accept the idea that it was language that made humans evolve, we could come to the conclusion that it was the gift giving aspect of language, not just the capacity for abstraction that caused the leap forward. This conclusion could lead us to think that gift giving and receiving could be the way forward for humanity to evolve beyond its present danger and distress. Indeed we could begin to take nurturing as the creative norm and recognize exchange as the distortion which is causing a de evolution and a danger to the human species as well as all other species on the planet.

The gift paradigm has the advantage of restoring mothering to its rightful place in the constitution of the human. What has been wrongly proposed in the construction of gender, with devastating effects such as the promotion of the values of dominance, competition and hierarchy (which are non nurturing values), can be countered by re introducing gift giving as a social value and interpretative key. Both male and female human beings are basically nurturers. One gender is not the binary opposite of the other. If we reintroduce the gift paradigm into our interpretation of the world, we will find our ‘gift giver within’ which will then be validated. Women, as those who have been socially designated as the nurturers, will be rightfully restored to their place as the norm, and men can be reinterpreted in this light as those who have been socially dispossessed of that norm-al behavior but who can re acquire it by espousing nurturing values. Institutions are usually organized around the exchange and dominance paradigm, but they can be reorganized to satisfy needs. The rewards which accompany dominance can be eliminated and gift giving can be affirmed and promoted.

All of us are mothered children. Someone must satisfy our needs unilaterally in order for us to grow up. As time passes we become receivers of ever more complex gifts, and we must creatively receive and use what we are given.

Because we are mothered children we can find gifts everywhere. Even if there is not a mothering intentionality behind some aspect of our environment, we can nevertheless receive it as a gift. Our response to it may be as creative as it would be if it actually were a gift. Since we are in a common creative receivership towards the environment we can attribute this receivership to others and confirm it by receiving their responses as gifts.

Daily life includes many examples of gift giving and receiving. In housework for example, we satisfy the ‘needs’ of our households to be cleaned and maintained, which in turn satisfies the needs of the people living there for a clean, healthy, uncluttered environment. Without this work, the seemingly direct gift character of the home environment would not be available. Cooking satisfies the ‘need’ of the food to be made safe and enjoyable so that it is creatively received by the family, whose physiological and psychological needs it satisfies. Farmers need seeds to plant and the knowledge of how to tend the plants and harvest them. Their work involves many subsidiary needs, such as the need for water, fertile soil etc. (Globalization has recently allowed corporations from the North to privatize and make the free gifts of traditional knowledge, seeds, fertilizer and water into commodities that must be bought and sold, a situation which has particularly depleted the people of the South. This is one example of how free gifts are not respected but are made into the objects of plunder.)

Needs for maintenance and repair accompany almost any human or non human-made useful thing in our environment. At the level of advanced Capitalism there are many interdependent needs, for automobile and road maintenance and repair, for example. These needs are usually satisfied through the exchange economy but may also be satisfied free (by individuals who repair their own cars for example). At the level of fully established capitalism, there are many financial needs – the need for capital itself is one. In this case a low interest loan might be considered a gift. Where jobs are scarce, giving someone a job might be considered a gift. The profit made by the capitalist on the labor of the worker, if it is considered in terms of surplus value (the value of the products over and above the amount necessary for the worker’s livelihood as expressed in his/her salary), can also be considered as a gift the worker is giving to the capitalist. The low price of labor in the so called Third World and the difference between national economies create a flow of gifts from the South to the North also called ‘profit’ by the corporations in the North. By foregrounding needs and their satisfaction instead of exchange, we can acquire a new perspective in which we follow the thread of the gift from its simple unilateral beginnings to the tangle created by exchange, with a re proposal of the gift at a variety of levels and in a variety of measures. We can see the fertile and ‘generative’ capacity of gift giving in the fact that we establish bonds with one another by its means. The recognition and gratitude towards the source of the satisfaction of our needs, and the recognition and care towards the other whose needs we satisfy actually establish the bonds of communication and community which are instead broken by the adversarial logic and process of exchange. Living in a market-based society makes us think of all bonds in terms of exchange, of debt and repayment, however the bonds which are established through gift giving are positive and life- enhancing in contrast to onerous debt and responsibility. Indeed the words co- muni-ty ans co-muni-cation, derive from the latin ‘muni’ which means ‘gifts’.

Language is a transposition of gift giving which co exists with material gift giving proper, but one specific aspect of language has a different structure. Naming and the definition have a structure similar to exchange and perhaps are the original model for it. Money is given and received in place of a product in the same way that the name of something is given and received in its place.

It is not because of a fatal flaw in human nature that we act so inhumanely to one another, but because of a complex tangle of gift-thread logics and strategies which become contradictory and promote adversarial behaviors. The tangle can be unraveled and understood, not within the exchange paradigm itself but by starting over, putting gift giving first as a theme for understanding the world.”

Back in February, play theorist Pat Kane wrote a commentary in The Guardian about the happiness policy debates in the UK, and it was recently republished in the IDC mailing list. Though it has some parts that may require knowledge of the local context, the text makes very interesting general points that are very much worth reading and considering.

It originally appeared here.

Pat Kane:

There was so much that discomforted me about the well-being debate last week – probably because I found myself (using an appropriate mental-health metaphor) feeling like Steve Martin in The Man With Two Brains.

One brain was delighted that the political argument was shifting away from the old narratives about “work”, “prosperity” and “consumption” as the main goals of British life. The other brain was horrified at the level of behavioural meddling and social prescription that this shift seems to imply. And both brains were dragging me round the room in different directions, at the same time.

I find Richard Layard’s argument more than a little creepy, if you think about his biography. His first claim to fame was as the core adviser to the incoming New Labour government in 1997 on their “welfare to work” scheme – that classic piece of applied Presbyterianism by Gordon Brown, where “them that shall not work, shall not eat” (or in Brown’s words, “no fifth option”).

Layard’s input was to bolster the notion of work – any work – as the essential tool of socialisation. Anything to banish that Brownite spectre of “people sitting around all day, watching television, doing nothing” (a favoure phrase from pre-1997 speeches, and barely changed to this day). This is such a demeaning conception of the human self – that without the compulsion of wage labour, we will simply sink into indolence and passivity.

In that sense, Layard has been entirely consistent as a bureaucrat of bliss: he still thinks the citizen-worker is too weak-minded to know his or her own best interests, and that policy-makers must herd us all to a median state of happiness. It’s the implicit paternalism in the wellbeing debate that constantly rings my alarm bells.

So if the stats say “marriage makes them more contented”, then let’s make divorce harder. If the research says “our media landscape saturates us with perspectives and world views, and leaves us dissatisfied”, then we must control the media (or even, in one submission to this series, enforce a national switch-off of the telly at mealtimes).

Every other day I walk by the Hampstead towers where Beatrice and Sidney Webb planned their giant Fabian schemes to “improve the eugenic stock of the worker”. I often idly imagine their spectres are twirling happily together at the sight of all these social-scientific shepherds, meticulously planning the micro-behaviour (if not eugenically, then at least neuro-psychologically) of the ex-working-class.

And I mean ex-working-class, because they are now the service class, mostly – which is the deepest problem underlying our angst about wellbeing. How can one have a genuinely happy society where one large chunk of it is in the position of servicing the domestic and hedonistic agendas of another large chunk?

This is the great psychological wound, ever more exacerbated since the workfare reforms of 1997, which causes disillusion and alienation and general grumpiness in this country. Among younger generations, who have now grown up nourished and watered by the globalism and diversity of the internet, this servile future induces a particularly acute form of cynicism.

The book was much derided at the time, but Nick Barham’s Dis/connected got something right about youth culture in Britain. Faced with so little real opportunity to realise their cultural and digital sensibilities, many youths are conducting an “exodus” into their own worlds. Which, yes, can include environmental activism as well as gun culture, joyous drug-fuelled raving as well as isolated depression, McWorld as well as Jihad.

The authorities might fret about youth disconnection from the norms of society. But their policy and institutional responses, particularly in education, show no imagination whatsoever. The spectrum of creative life-options that face our energetic millenials, thanks to the dull workfare-ism of Brown and Layard, is pathetic. Add to that the workaholic culture of too many of their parents, neglecting child-care in favour of jobs that seem close to absurdist in their lack of meaning and purpose, and the unhappiness of young people’s existence is all too understandable.

Let’s push on through to the other side of this debate. As some commenters have acutely noted, the wellbeing merchants are often frustrated old collectivists, looking for a new set of research stats to justify the construction of a solidarity and consensus that was left behind with the industrial era. Never mind trying to restore this lost unity (which was a negative, defensive, bruised-and-battered unity at that). Can’t our policy-makers begin to see that their best role is to give us the support and resources to help us navigate our deeply complex societies?

Some great old gurus have been quoted in this debate – Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt – but I’d suggest that we should also be reading Gorz, Rifkin, Negri and Virno. From them, some obvious policy suggestions.

Revive (and destigmatise) social housing, so that we can live well yet cheaply. Make all higher education free at the point of use, in order that the cognitive gap between the “serving” and the “serviced” classes become even more untenable. Strongly regulate capitalism (shorter working weeks, citizen’s incomes, powerful public infrastructures and networks) so that men, women and children can experiment with new mixes of the productive and the emotional in our lives.

In short: support our autonomy, don’t prescribe our happiness.

It’s not well-being our state should be in the business of enabling, but well-becoming – our multitude of life-journeys towards meaning and purposefulness, not some steady-state of managed contentment. The “happ” in happiness comes from the Norse, and it means “luck” or “chance”: this week’s parade of neo-Webbs should remember that. Help us to be strong and capable, so we can live interesting, surprising, memorable lives. Other than that, get your hands off my soul.

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