Especially in these times, honoring our ancestors is investing in and trusting alternatives that are based in dignity, health and livelihoods for all of us. 

In the early 1960s, my grandma was a secretary at the Caymanas Sugar Estate in Portmore, Jamaica. She helped the cane cutters who worked on the estate’s land create a credit union. At that time, workers were acknowledging the problematics of who owned the capital and resources on their island. In 1962, Jamaica gained independence from the British, with the hopes of more national equity and securing workers rights. My grandmother understood that helping the cane cutters pool their money to create a credit union was one step closer to liberation from the confines of colonialism and capitalism. At the time she thought of it as a necessity—as the right thing to do—rather than an alternative economy.

Throughout the Caribbean and Africa, the sharing of resources and money is not new. Sou sous and other types of community banking are age-old practices. These traditions even emigrated overseas to places like the U.K. and Canada along with Jamaicans who realized they would not receive the queen’s royalties they learned of during their schooling.

Like Jamaican cane cutters and emigrants realizing they lacked access to the things they needed, we also now find ourselves similarly situated in the current pandemic. As we recognize that people need immediate access to resources, we are realizing that the most effective tools are local economies, regional manufacturing systems, and community banking. 

As people succumb to fear, individuals are hoarding the resources we need to protect ourselves against the COVID-19 virus, children are missing meals since schools are shut down, city governments are realizing housing should be a human right as we are called to Shelter in Place, and the federal government is finally acknowledging that freezing student loans will actually bolster the economy. It is clear the systems that currently shape our societies do not work towards human continuity or resilience. In fact, it is this way of life that has resulted in the crises that we are currently in: the health crisis, climate crisis and spiritual crisis. 

The pervasiveness of capitalism has overshadowed other types of economies so that we don’t think any other way is possible. Rather than many economies we are told there is one economy, and that one is capitalist. The dominant globalized economy has become so embedded into everyday life that investing in and finding accessible alternatives is a barrier for many of us. In the U.S., buying local clothing or food is a luxury. It is more expensive to buy locally made products than buying fashion or produce from thousands of miles away. 

If we are going to make it to the other side of this pandemic and this deteriorating world, then just as others before us have recognized, we have to rely on community interdependence, cultural equity, and alternative economies as a basis moving forward.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait for a SciFi future to participate in alternatives that support a better life for all of us. My grandmother knew this more than half a century ago. Around the world, communities are participating in and building other economies. I honor the work she did by investing in and participating in these communities. I am grateful to be part of an alternative circular economy with a council of womxn. I hope my experience can shed light on some of the current possibilities. 

I joined a gifting economy: a Mandala circle. Along with several other amazing womxn, we each gift whichever womxn is in the center of the circle at the time we decide to join. Eventually it’ll be our turn in the center of the circle to receive gifts. We have calls three times a week to discuss our dreams, intentions, challenges and proudest moments. We support one another and share resources. We share what we’d like to do and want to do if money was not an issue. We talk about our work and all that we are currently doing. We laugh and build sisterhood. 

The gifts the womxn in the center of the circle receives are monetary. However, giving the gift is not transactional, based in ownership or capital. It is based in love, trust, and the belief that we all deserve to live how we want without having to compete with each other. We gift this womxn knowing that she is free to do whatever she’d like with the money. The womxn in the center is not expected to pay it back and does not have to use it for professional purposes—although she can. We do not put barriers or burdens on the gifts, and trust she will make the right decision with her gifts. When it’s each womxn’s turn in the center, she receives the same agency and trust. We are investing in each other rather than stocks that are attached to extractive, exploitive enterprises. 

There are several of these Mandala circles. Some circles gift different amounts of money, and you can start out in a fractal Mandala circle in order to amass enough money to participate in the larger one. The Mandala circle splits so that it can multiply once the womxn in the center has received eight gifts. It is precisely this multiplication factor that allows this form of investment to be soundly sustainable, allowing more womxn to join the movement. At no point in the Mandala circle do you have to beg anyone for money, go to a bank, worry about interest, report on what you’re doing with the money, exploit anyone to get the money…you just have to be engaged in community with others. 

In my particular Mandala, each womxn will receive several thousand dollars without strings attached after gifting a little over a thousand dollars to whomever is in the center of the circle when she joins. We do not advertise on social media or do marketing. We do not hold space for those who only want to join for the money. Our circle is not about consumption, trends or not having enough. It is about rejuvenation, healing, and abundance. There is enough in the world, it’s just not distributed fairly. When we have money, we usually spend it on companies that are greedy and do not care about us. This is primarily because these companies are constantly in our face with advertising and usually widely accessible. In our Mandala, we put our money where our values are when we can—whether we have a little of it or a lot.   

We are linked in our shared values that thriving livelihoods and collective economics is a way forward. We are connected in our understanding that the ways of our ancestors can get us to the other side of this unsustainable violent system. We are bound by the belief that interdependence and supporting one another is the only way we will all survive. We believe in reciprocity and concentric circles, rather than greed and hierarchies. We believe that sometimes it is your turn to give and sometimes it is your turn to receive. Sometimes it is your turn to lead and sometimes it is your turn to follow. We know that everyone in the circle is deserving and worthy.  We know that giving a gift is both selfish and selfless: because you feel good when you do it and the person who gets it feels good when they receive it. 

The cane cutters’ credit union in 1960s Jamaica my grandma helped to start and the Mandala circle I’m a part of today are examples of alternatives to the current mainstream economic model. The current economic model really only benefits a wealthy few. The “economy” does not have to feel competitive, exclusive and exhausting. An economy can feel refreshing, collective and inclusive. These are the economies we need to support and build to combat this pandemic, to stop the climate crises, and to transform current ideological backwardness. These are the economies we need to trust. We need each other. The Mandala circle I am in—and other alternative economies—start from this premise. 

The time is now, we can’t go back to “normal”— and why would we want to anyways. As Arundhati Roy  aptly wrote last week in the Financial Times: 

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Here are a few alternatives to check out:

• For Streaming: enjoy videos & films on this worker-owned post-capitalist streaming service
• For Food in the Bay Area (co-ops): Mandela Grocery Store and Rainbow Grocery
• For Health in the Bay Area: Berkeley Free Clinic
• For Indigenous Solidarity: contribute to the Shuumi Land Tax, supporting an indigenous women-led land trust
• For Land & Food Justice for POC in California: donate to the Minnow Project
• For Solar Power & Renewable Energy in the Bay Area: worker-owned  Sun Light & Power can provide affordable, clean energy for your affordable housing unit or non-profit organization
• For Supplemental / Alternative Education for Black People: 400 + 1 collective centers Black liberation and prosperity (*specifically for Black communities)
• For Banking & Money: Black-owned Credit Union of Atlanta (*you don’t have to be Black to put your money in this credit union)
• For more information on the Mandala circle I’m in send me a direct message, although many circles are all womxn the Mandala Movement is open to all

Lead image: mandala by xavo_rob 

The post Pandemic Priorities: supporting alternatives now is promoting a sustainable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This week I was asked why one of my stories was locked behind a paywall, so I wanted to report on the progress of my income-generating experiments, and explore the ethical considerations of these different options.

Pondering becoming @Medium member: I want to read more @RichDecibels – wondering if he knows his writing is now stuck behind a paywall? :-/ (BTW I already fund the media I want to see by routinely financially supporting LOTS of great projects see https://t.co/cO6pX2cH5k) pic.twitter.com/Dp3iECnwW0

— Josef Davies-Coates (@jdaviescoates) May 23, 2018

In the year since writing that post, I’ve written another 15,000 words of my mostly-finished first book, published on LeanPub as a work-in-progress-for-sale. I’ve published another 20,000 words in 21 articles, receiving 40,000 pageviews on Medium. In addition to Medium, I usually publish on my website for convenient reproduction, and on Scuttlebutt to guarantee permanent storage in the commons (Scuttlebutt is the peer-to-peer future of the Internet that I’m most excited about). I use creative commons licensing to encourage syndication of my stories, so I’m delighted when I’m republished on blogs like C4SS or P2P Foundation.

Experiment #1: Patreon

My ideal goal with Patreon is to eventually crowdsource a stable living wage from voluntary recurring donations. When someone makes a recurring pledge on my Patreon I take that to mean something like, “I think your writing is important, here’s a few dollars a month to encourage you to keep going”. This community of support feels to me like an ever-present low-pressure sense of responsibility to keep publishing. So far, I really love this. Every single new patron is extremely encouraging for me.

I feel like I am in relationship with these people in a much deeper way than say, a passing reader or commenter. I don’t feel like I have to give my patrons anything more than gratitude, so I don’t have to lock any of my stories behind a paywall. I have the option to give patrons early-access to new stories, or to give them free access to a book that I’m selling elsewhere.

Results so far

I signed up in May 2017. Most of my stories end with a link to my Patreon page, but I haven’t promoted it any more than that. Over the year, I’ve gained 44 patrons, and lost 5. Currently this earns me US$196/month. Patreon takes 5% for their service, and about another 5% is lost to transaction fees (boo PayPal). Total income for the year, after fees and VAT, before paying income tax: $1566.94. This is a lot less than a full salary, but also a lot more than spare change.

Ethical considerations

This represents the “gift economy” solution to the writers’ dilemma: my writing is a gift to the world, and some of my readers gift me some money in gratitude. This gives me nice warm feelings and makes me feel like I’ve outsmarted capitalism.

To earn a full salary from Patreon, I would need many more supporters, requiring a marketing effort that starts to feel like begging. The gift economy is lovely in theory, especially because there’s no coercion: contributions are voluntary, and there is no punishment for readers who choose to not contribute. But when I interrogate these dynamics at a deeper level, I’m less satisifed.

In my point of view, social capital is subject to the same accumulative and alienating dynamics as financial capital. It’s even more dangerous in some senses, as the transactions are impossible to track, so it is much harder to redistribute accumulations of wealth.

Personally I redistribute 10% of my income to other Patreon creators who I think are doing more important and less fundable work than me: street poet David Merritt and anarchist authors William Gillis and Emmi Bevensee. At least this is a gesture to remind myself that the social capitalist is no more woke than the financial capitalist.

Frankly, as a producer, the clean transaction of buyer and seller just feels better to me. It feels good to produce something of value and have that value acknowledged by somebody purchasing it.

Experiment #2: Medium Partner Program

I happily signed up to pay $5/month for Medium membership as soon as it became an option.

As a reader, I want to support a sustainable and ethical citizen media ecosystem. You know the expression who pays the piper calls the tune? That explains in a nutshell why I prefer participating in a business model where the customers are readers, not advertisers. Reader-supported publishing incentivises high quality writing; advertising-supported media incentivises high quality data mining and manipulation.

In addition to being a paying Medium reader, I recently joined the Medium Partner Program, which means I am now on both sides of the Medium marketplace. With this scheme, when I write stories I can choose to mark them as members-only, or leave them free for all. This creates a semi-permeable paywall: readers who are paying the Medium membership fee have unlimited access to members-only stories; free users can read up to 3 of these stories per month. In return, I get paid based on the level of reader engagement with each story.

Results so far

I’ve only just joined the program and published 2 stories. The payout algorithm considers page views, readers and fans. I was surprised at the low level of engagement with my first locked post. In the first month it got 140 views, 59% reader completion, 11 fans. I would have expected maybe 5 times that amount if I had published a similar story without the paywall. So I was disappointed with the small audience, but then I was pleasantly surprised by the high payout: $4.27 for the first month. Considering I regularly write stories that get 10-50 times more engagement than this one, that’s a promising sign that the paywall could deliver a reasonable chunk of revenue if I use it for my really high quality stories that have a big audience and a long shelf-life. Estimating audience size is an inexact science so I intend to publish a few more locked stories to get more data.

Ethical considerations

The main obstacle to me embracing the Medium Partner Program is the audience perception. Simply: people don’t like paywalls. In particular, a significant portion of the people I write for have values that are explicitly against anything that looks like an enclosure of the commons. My people are advocates of free culture/ creative commons/ platform coops/ social enterprise/ and decentralisation. Some of them have a knee-jerk reaction against Medium because it doesn’t tick those boxes.

I’m happy to debate on this topic, but for what its worth, so long as Medium respects my right to license my own content, I feel pretty stable on my moral high horse. I could choose to release some of my work to a paying audience first, if that proves to be a viable funding model, but all my writing will maintain its commons license. I expressly don’t put limits on reproductions or derivatives of my articles, because I want to encourage distribution and engagement.

As a writer, I feel like I’m renting audience-discovery services from Medium. When I publish on Medium, most of the audience-discovery is done by algorithms, augmented by human curators. When I publish on C4SS or P2P Foundation, the audience-discovery is done entirely by humans, painstakingly cultivating a community of readers and writers. There are pros and cons to each method, but either way there’s valuable work being done which I think is worth paying for.

Experiment #3: LeanPub

I’ve spent most of the summer in Aotearoa New Zealand writing a short practical book about decentralised organising. I write using Markdown, which is a text formatting syntax designed for portability. As I completed the first draft, I started researching the technicalities of publishing: how will I convert these text files on my computer into an ebook in various formats?

My research lead me to LeanPub, which at first was interesting to me purely as a technical solution. You can write in Markdown on your computer, use Git or Dropbox to sync the files to LeanPub, and with one click generate html, pdf, epub and mobi formats.

The “lean” in “LeanPub” comes from “lean manufacturing” or “lean startup”, i.e. an approach to product development combining rapid iterations and ample user feedback. So LeanPub has created a marketplace for selling in-progress ebooks. I came for the publishing toolchain, stayed for the marketplace.

Results so far

I published the first version of the book when it was about 75% complete. LeanPub allows variable pricing, so I set the minimum price at $4.99, with a suggested price of $14.99. I gave free access to all my Patreon supporters, and sent out one Tweet to announce the publication.

I published my book! Now I just need to finish it…https://t.co/Hh83QNHd5w

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) April 20, 2018

I was quite stunned with the positive response from such a small amount of publicity: 21 purchases in the first month, totalling $302.36 in total revenue, 80% of which comes to me.

The best part is the audience interaction. Readers are invited to join this Loomio discussion group to give feedback. I’ve already had detailed, page-by-page feedback from two readers, which is immensely valuable. They’ve pointed out weak or awkward parts, and provided a tonne of encouragement that this work is worth doing. I’ve got a really clear list of homework to do next time I get into writing mode.

While my articles are published with no rights reserved, for now at least the book is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. That means anyone can reproduce or modify the work, if they meet 3 conditions:

• BY = they must credit me as the author
• NC = non-commercial (they’re not doing it for profit)
• SA = share-alike (derivative works must use the same license)

I’ve chosen this as an interim measure, to keep my options open while I figure out the best balance between free and paid sharing.

Ethical considerations

Because this is a straightforward commercial transaction, it’s pretty easy to analyse the ethics of this approach. On the plus side, buyers can freely choose to pay at least $4.99 if they want to read my work. On the down side, this excludes people who don’t have money.

I don’t want to exclude people who are broke, but I also don’t want to make it overly easy for freeloaders either. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll ride this balance yet. I could tell people to contact me if they want a free copy, or just drop the minimum price to $0 after some period of time. I’m not totally certain of my choice to use CC-BY-NC-SA, so perhaps I’ll switch to CC0 (no rights reserved) too.

Next steps

So, the trickle of income from Patreon feels nice, but I don’t want to self-promote more than I already am. Medium’s paywall is a promising income stream, but I risk losing the audience I care most about. So far it feels like publishing on LeanPub hits the sweet spot between revenue and ethics. So I’m considering that my next experiment could be to package up my existing blog posts into a kind of “best of” ebook that people can buy if they want to support my writing.

Reading back through this post, I’m not feeling certain about any of the ethical choices. I’m publishing this in the hope that some of you clever loving people challenge my thinking and enhance my ethics. I’d also love to hear from other authors who feel like they’ve solved the dilemma between the paywall and the commons.

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

Photo by mrhandley

The post Paywalls vs Creative Commons: Experiments with Patreon, Medium and LeanPub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1. Radical Inclusion. 
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

2. Gifting. 
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

3. Decommodification. 
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

4. Radical Self-reliance. 
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

5. Radical Self-expression. 
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

6. Communal Effort. 
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

7. Civic Responsibility. 
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

8. Leaving No Trace. 
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

9. Participation. 
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

10. Immediacy. 
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by stuart updegrave

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Ten Principles of Burning Man appeared first on P2P Foundation.

None of these involve monetary exchange. We do not use the term “sharing” to refer to an interaction like this: “I’ll give you some food if you pay me.” We call that buying. We don’t use it in this situation either: “I’ll let you temporarily use my toy if you pay me.” We call that renting. And in the third example, while the farmers may have come together initially to purchase a common resource, they don’t pay for subsequent access to it.

In light of this, we should call out Uber for what it is: a company in control of a platform that originally facilitated peer-to-peer renting, not sharing, and that eventually transformed into the de facto boss of an army of self-employed employees. And even as “self-employed employee” might sound like a contradiction, that’s the dark genius of the Uber enterprise. It took the traditional corporation, with its senior managers responsible for controlling workers and machines, and cut it in two — creating a management structure that need not deal with the political demands of workers.

So, how exactly did we get to the point where business executives at conferences can talk about Uber as a “sharing economy” platform with straight faces? How is it that they don’t feel a deep sense of inauthenticity? To understand this, we must return to the roots of the actual sharing economy. It is the only way we can wrest it back from those who have hijacked it.

Monetary exchange takes the form of, “If you give me money, I will give you a service.” There’s always potential for rejection in market offers, which creates uncertainty, and some people fare better than others. Those who undertake the heaviest burden of production don’t necessarily get rewarded commensurately. Individual competition appears to be — at least at first glance — the defining mark of monetary exchange.

There are, however, three major but inconvenient truths that seem to get glossed over when we talk about the market economy. The first is that market systems feed off an extensive, underlying gift economy in which people transfer ideas, goods, services, and emotional support to each other without requesting money. Unpaid childcare is one example. If your mother watches your two children while you’re at a job, that’s the gift economy in action. In fact, without friends and family it’s unlikely that you could even maintain the desire to go to work. Even in professional settings we share common resources with business colleagues. Companies rely upon this internal collaboration to produce the very products they then competitively exchange in markets.

The second inconvenient truth about the market economy is that its products are not really desirable unless we can use them within non-market systems. What’s the point of all this stuff getting produced if we can’t share it, compare it, gloat about it, or enjoy it with others? Friends, family, and various community systems make having material goods meaningful.

And third, many commercial market exchanges are actually hybridized with non-commercial elements that add richness. Take, for example, flirting with a bartender as they serve you drinks, or having a discussion about politics with the stylist you’re paying to cut your hair. Not only do market systems rely on non-market influences in order to work, but their products feel pointless and empty without them. Recognition of this, however, is uneven.

In small community settings it’s often easy to see a balance between market and gift economies. The shop owner gives a spontaneous discount to a retiree, or allows friends to lounge in a coffee shop long after they’ve finished drinking. Commercial exchange is but one element in a broader set of relationships, and this means the exchange takes longer. Economists call this inefficient; we call it enjoying life.

Meanwhile, in megacities such as London or New York there’s a tendency to strip all non-commercial elements from market interactions. This is the hallmark of what we refer to as commercialization. The large-scale mall and corporation are designed to maximize exchange while offering only a shallow appearance of sociability. The McDonald’s employee is forced by contract to smile at you, but prohibited from taking time to have a true conversation.

This phenomenon is even more acute in faceless internet commerce, where clinical, transactional precision dominates. While hyper-efficient exchanges play into our short-term impulses — initially feeling exciting, convenient, and modern — they gradually begin to feel empty. Sure, it’s frictionless commerce, but it’s also textureless.

When detached from a community foundation, markets can bring out people’s most anxious, petty, arrogant, and narcissistic sides, encouraging them to fixate on their individual strands of the overall economic picture, as if it were the whole. The defining qualities of a market economy — like uncertainty and unequal monetary reward — get exalted, and in this frame, everyone else is either a stranger to do battle with or a temporary ally to assist in your personal gain. Socializing becomes “networking.” Non-commercial ties such as friendship, sex, love, and family are either rendered invisible, or presented as kitsch advertisements designed to promote more commercial exchange.

It was in this context that the original sharing economy platforms emerged. Amid the competitive, individualistic rhetoric of the corporate state, people looked to use technology to foreground sharing, gifting, and community activities that were otherwise overshadowed.

One aim was to extend activities between trusted friends to strangers. Friends have long crashed on each other’s couches, but the Couchsurfing site wanted it to happen among strangers. Freecycle allowed you to give gifts to people you didn’t know, while Streetbank let you lend items to strangers in your neighborhood. These platforms encouraged sharing between people who might otherwise be isolated from each other.

All of this was built using the infrastructure of the internet. The ubiquity of interconnected computers and smartphones in the hands of ordinary people allowed them to cheaply advertise their locations and showcase offers. To catalyze a digital platform, all someone needed to do was set up a website as a central hub for aggregating and displaying offers for others to accept. It makes sense to centralize similar information, rather than having it scattered in fragmented locations. This, in turn, builds network effects, meaning that the platform becomes more useful — and thus more valuable — as more people use it.

Attempting to introduce sharing principles into networks of strangers isn’t easy. Our lives are built around large-scale market economies, and many people have internalized the principles of monetary exchange. In the context of huge global supply chains, the rural idyll of community production is long gone, and attempts to reverse-engineer authentic sharing relationships between people we don’t know can feel stilted.

While we might be willing to let a friend borrow our car for the day, we generally don’t trust strangers enough to share our most crucial possessions with them. We may, however, be game to share things that we don’t often use, like a basement that’s only half full or the backseat of a car that could have someone in it while we’re driving to work anyway.

We’ll probably be even more willing to offer this idle capacity to a stranger if there is some third-party assurance that they are legitimate, or will experience some consequences if they behave badly. Likewise, we may be more open to accepting gifts from strangers if such assurances are in place. This is, in effect, why sharing economy platforms developed identity and reputation-scoring systems, adding layers of formality and quantification into non-monetary gifting.

Herein lies one source of corruption, as the very act of earning quantified reputation for gifting adds a feeling of market exchange. But it was building technology to identify and quantify spare capacity that really set the stage for undermining the sharing economy. “Why not get the stranger to pay for the gift as a service?” was a question that couldn’t be far off.

The move from sharing spare, underutilized assets to selling them can be subtle. In hitchhiker culture, a person offering lifts might reasonably expect a fuel money contribution from someone getting a ride — and if the hitchhiker leaves the car without offering it, the driver may be a little irritated. The money though, is never a condition, and until they explicitly say, “If you give me fuel money, I will drive you,” it’s not a commercial relationship. Note, though, how easily the phrase—once uttered—can become generalized into, “If you pay me, I will drive you.”

A new wave of “sharing economy” startups bet on just this concept, as their businesses came to be characterized not by sharing, but by showcasing spare capacity for rent, with the platform taking a cut as broker. So, too, began a hollowing out around the language of sharing. New entrepreneurs feebly hung onto the sharing story with the claim that market mechanisms could re-engineer the very community ties that the markets themselves had eroded. In reality, they were doing nothing more than marketizing things that previously hadn’t been on the market. If anything, this only undermined existing gift economies. A friend calls to ask if she can stay with you, but gets told, “Sorry, we have Airbnb guests this weekend!”

Ah, but there’s another twist. Far from merely facilitating the renting of spare capacity, these platforms grew to such a size that sellers of “normal” capacity started using them—as in, people running professional bed-and-breakfasts migrated to the Airbnb platform, and so on. The irresistible lock-in of network effects dragged the old market into the new, and voilà, the platform corporation emerged.

Let’s be unequivocal here: A platform corporation really only owns two things. It owns algorithms hosted on servers, and it owns network effects—or people’s dependence. While the old corporation had to get financing, invest in physical assets, hire workers to run those assets, and take on risk in the process, a corporation like Uber outsources its risk to independent workers who must self-finance the purchase of their cars, while also absorbing losses from their cars’ depreciation or the failure of their operations. This not only separates corporate managers from ground-level workers, it places the major burden of financing and risk on the workers.

This is a venture capitalist’s wet dream. Give a startup minimal capital to hire developers and run media campaigns, and then watch as the network effects ripple over the infrastructure of the internet. If it works, you’re suddenly in control of a corporation built with digital tools, but extracting value from real-world, physical assets like cars and buildings. The entity holds itself together not via employment contracts, but rather by self-employed workers’ dependence on it to access the market they rely on for their survival.

So, now here you are, staring at your Uber app with irritated sighs because the driver is two minutes late. This is a market transaction. To the driver, you’re just another customer. There is no sharing. You’re as isolated as you ever were.

We have a hard time seeing systems. We find it easier to see what’s tangible and in front of us. We see the app, and we see the driver’s car icon moving along the streets on their way to pick us up. What we can’t see is the deep web of power relations that underpins the system. Instead, we are encouraged to fixate on the flat and friendly interface, the shallow surface layer of immediate experience.

If you’re a driver, that interface doubles as your boss. It doesn’t shout at you like the jerk boss of old corporations. In fact, it shows no emotion at all. It’s the human-readable incarnation of a robotic algorithm that calculates the optimal profit-path for Uber, Inc. As a driver, you have no colleagues and no union. There’s no upward mobility. Uber wants you to leave as soon as you build any expectations of progress. You and thousands more eke out enough to survive, if you’re lucky. This all while the owners of the platform get richer and richer, no matter what.

Of course, if you want to put a positive spin on this kind of work, you can call it flexible, decentralized micro-entrepreneurship. But pan out, and it looks more like feudalism, with thousands of small subsistence farmers paying tribute to a baron that grants them access to land they don’t own.

So, what is to be done? For one, let’s first understand the problem. Innovation and change are pointless unless they’re coming from a real analysis of what’s gone wrong—especially when we’re being made to believe we’ve actually gained an asset. Only then can we rebalance the power.

If we are going to turn ourselves into a sprawling network of micro-entrepreneurs, micro-contracting via a feudalistic platform, let’s at least cooperatively own the platform. In doing this, we might even retain one definition of sharing — the common usage of a shared resource pool, like the farmers who collectively manage a reservoir.

This is the origin of the platform cooperativism movement, one possible counterforce to the rise of platform capitalism. In principle, it’s not that complicated. Spread the ownership of the common infrastructure among the users of that infrastructure, give them a say in how it’s run and a cut of the profits that emerge from it.

The platform cooperativism movement is a new one, with many of its proposals still on paper and yet to be released into the wild. Many have seen the potential to use blockchain technology, whose original promise was to provide a means for strangers to collectively run a platform that keeps track of their situation relative to each other without relying upon a central party. Some, like the blockchain-based ride-sharing platform La’Zooz, have already released apps and are iterating away in the background. Others, like the blockchain-based proposal for an Uber-killer called Commune, are still in their conceptual stages. Arcade City, another attempt at an Uber alternative, has been dogged with controversy—and a split in the team has led to the creation of Swarm City.

Meanwhile, big corporates have increasingly encroached on blockchain technology with an eye toward using a pacified version of it within closed and controlled settings. There are, of course, plenty of talented and idealistic blockchain developers looking for opportunities beyond corporate life.

Either way, fancy technology isn’t a magical recipe. The equally important work involves building a community willing to back new platforms. A Dutch proposal for an Airbnb alternative called FairBnB is making a start as a Meetup group, and food couriers are organizing gatherings to discuss how they can set up cooperative alternatives to Deliveroo.

In the face of massive commercial platforms, aggressively backed by venture capital money, these initial attempts might seem idealistic. But as digital serfdom only expands, we have little choice but to start small with underdog pilot projects that galvanize action.

It’s a new mentality that needs building. In a world where we’re told to be grateful receivers of products and the opportunity to work on them from heroic, demigod CEOs allegedly “democratizing” the workscape, we need to see straighter and expect more. The entrepreneur is still nothing without the underlying people who make their enterprise work; and in this case, their wealth comes directly from skimming money off vast collectives. Let’s fuse the two forces into one, and build collectives with actual sharing in mind.

This post was commissioned by Medium.com for its magazine series, How We Get To Next,  published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 .

Image credit: Darren Garrett

The post Reversing the Lies of the Sharing Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Once we recognise that capitalism itself is diverse, however, we may find that there are some forms of it, suitably regulated, that make a positive contribution overall to our well-being. Given this possibility, we can no longer simply dismiss all capitalism on the grounds of Marx’s spurious theory of exploitation. Instead of applying the formulaic dogma of Marx’s labour theory of value, we need to evaluate forms of capitalism by identifying their real tendencies and assessing their actual effects against explicitly stated and justified ethical standards.

Excerpted from Dave Elder-Vass:

“We could change our economy by progressively altering the mix of economic forms, steadily reducing the more harmful forms of capitalism and building more human forms of economy alongside. Indeed, it is only if we do build alternatives alongside capitalism that viable alternative economic futures can be developed, and we should welcome the work of thinkers like Erik Olin Wright and Yochai Benkler who are examining some of the ways in which this could occur.

On the other hand, however, this optimism must be qualified. As we have seen, alternative appropriative practices can themselves be entangled in capitalist forms, and ultimately the viability of alternative forms will depend not only on growing them within our existing economy but also on finding ways to criticise and curtail the role of capitalist appropriative practices. Capitalism, despite being only part of our contemporary economy, is still capable of generating massive harms – notably extreme exploitation, alienation, inequality, massive distortions in the use of resources, environmental damage and support for oppressive political regimes. It is still backed by enormous political and discursive power, and it constantly tends to subvert alternatives to its thirst for profit.

Once we recognise that capitalism itself is diverse, however, we may find that there are some forms of it, suitably regulated, that make a positive contribution overall to our well-being. Given this possibility, we can no longer simply dismiss all capitalism on the grounds of Marx’s spurious theory of exploitation. Instead of applying the formulaic dogma of Marx’s labour theory of value, we need to evaluate forms of capitalism by identifying their real tendencies and assessing their actual effects against explicitly stated and justified ethical standards. When we do so I believe we will find, for example, that forms of capitalism that rest on the provision of free content by users are considerably less harmful than those that rest on the extraction of minerals by slave labourers in Africa (Fuchs, 2014, pp. 172–81) and those that rest on the creation of unstable financial assets. These forms can be separated. They are not all parts of one monolith, and they should be treated differently: lightly regulated, heavily regulated or abolished entirely depending upon their impact on human flourishing.

Alongside the less harmful remnants of the capitalist economy, we need to support the development of other forms. The state has an important continuing role to play in the provision of essential services that are made available to all irrespective of their ability to afford them, and in the provision of public goods that we all benefit from. Non-capitalist commodity forms should also continue to be important: family businesses and co-operatives, for example. But the gift economy, particularly if we include large parts of the household economy, is already as important as these, and the digital gift economy is particularly promising. As we have seen, the gift economy is particularly suited to the distribution of digital goods, with their trivial marginal costs, and innovative forms of collaborative production have flourished there, with benefits not only for the users but also for the creators of the content that they share.

Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to restrain claims for the potential of the digital gift economy. One limitation arises from the same factors that give the digital gift economy its advantages: virtually costless distribution of gifts that entails no sacrifice by the donor is only a characteristic of digital information goods. There is little reason to believe that similar economic processes might roll back the non-digital market economy in the way that the open-source movement has generated a tendency for the decommodification of software. Indeed, the digital gift economy itself clearly depends on other sectors of the economy that are currently dominated by the market: for example, the hardware and networks that make the digital gift economy possible are themselves physical products created in the commercial economy, and independent programmers that contribute to open-source software must have other sources of income to support them, which are often derived from the commercial economy (Barbrook, 2005).

Certain elements of the digital gift economy also face attempts at outright suppression by government, acting in the interests of pre-digital media corporations. Most notably, governments have been persuaded by lobbyists for these corporations to extend copyright protection in an attempt to prevent the free distribution of vast amounts of digital media products (Gillespie, 2007, chapter 4; Lessig, 2004). Open-source software seems likely to escape this, partly because of some clever work on copyleft licensing, but perhaps more so, ironically, because of the many ways in which it has become embedded in commercial business. Many IT businesses have found ways to make money out of open-source software, and at least some major open-source software products are predominantly developed at the expense of such companies (Elder-Vass, 2015c). But this is only half of the picture: we must also recognise that commercial companies are amongst the largest beneficiaries of the financial savings that arise from using free open-source software – these savings are a major reason for the massive ‘market’ shares of products like Linux and Apache.

Such entanglements warrant scepticism towards suggestions in the literature that phenomena like open-source software herald the replacement of capitalism (Berry, 2008, p. 98). But once we recognise the diversity of the economy, we no longer need all-or-nothing alternatives to capitalism. The issue we face is not a choice between a gift economy and a commodity economy; the issues are how much of the economy will take a gift form, what kinds of gift form, how much will take a commodity form and what kinds of commodity form.

Let me end… by asking what role a book like this can play in advancing such changes. Books alone do not change the world; any impact they might have depends upon influencing people, and movements of people, but where are the movements that might back a progressive shift towards a gift economy? Part of the problem we confront is what David Harvey calls a ‘double blockage’: ‘the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative’ (D. Harvey, 2011, p. 227). As Harvey rightly says, the solution to this double blockage is inevitably iterative: the relation between these two absences ‘has to be turned into a spiral’ (D. Harvey, 2011, p. 227).

That spiral is already in progress, though its overall direction is uncertain. There are already movements working towards aims compatible with the ideas expressed in this book, for example Green parties, the Occupy movement, many of the groups that combine in the World Social Forum, and the movements against austerity policies in Europe. And there are already huge numbers of people participating in gift forms of economy. Though many of them do not even recognise that they are forms of economy, these are people who could be persuaded to back further growth of these forms. There are already, too, writers expressing ideas that complement those in this book, for example those who have contributed to the Convivialist Manifesto (Clarke, 2014), and those whose work is collected in The Human Economy (Hart et al., 2010). This book and the political economy of practices that it advocates are, at best, another turn of the spiral, one that encourages a more open but more realistic alternative vision of a future that could enable more of us to flourish rather than being subjected to a logic of pointless accumulation that ultimately benefits no-one.

We cannot know exactly what kind of economy and what kind of society this will lead us to, not least because there is no end point and no single overriding logic to social development but rather a continuing process of change in a fundamentally open system. The mix of economic forms within that system will inevitably develop in response to emerging possibilities but it is up to us, collectively, to find ways to encourage those forms that seem most beneficial for all human beings in the light of ethical debate. We will only be able to engage productively in such a process by abandoning monolithic visions of nirvana and working instead towards multiple partial real utopias. This is not a step backwards but a step forwards for progressive politics: we must reject the dogmas of both of the old political economies and instead engage creatively with our diverse economy and its open future.”

[This post reproduces text from pages 228-232 of Elder-Vass, D. (2016) Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.]

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What happens to the money after you donate it can actually be quite complicated. Particularly, if product or service provider accepts payments across tax jurisdictions. Without an crowd of accountants and tax attorneys, it would be impossible to satisfy every jurisdiction’s laws.

Distributing the money you donate becomes increasingly complicated when the product or service provider is, in fact, a group of volunteers. Who receives pay for their contribution?

Graitpay exists to help solve these problems. It is a work in progress, but is making a path forward into the gift economy.

Extracted from: https://gratipay.com/Gratipay/

Our mission is to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. To that end, we provide payments and payroll† for open work through gratipay.com.

Extracted from: http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/mission

The “open company,” as an entity (an abstraction), freely gives and freely receives. The constituents of that entity mediate their relationship with the entity by determining, each for themself, what labor and resources they put in, and what money they take out. By giving the individual control over both variables and making the result public, the locus of negotiation is shifted from between the entity and the individual in competition with other individuals, to a negotiation internal to each individual in collaboration with the other individuals.

Extracted from: http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/brand/

Gratipay is an open company rooted in the open-source cultural tradition. These brand guidelines articulate our collective self-identity, and act as a guide when we hash out identity-formative decisions. In managing the Gratipay brand together, our goal is to care more about our mission than about numbers and growth, and to care more about people than about our mission.

Photo by bartvanpoll

Extracted from:http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/product

What product are we building to further our mission according to our values for our customers? Our product offers payments and payroll for open work. Companies and organizations apply to join Gratipay as a “team,” and then they can use Gratipay to collect voluntary payments from their customers, and distribute payments to their team members. We process payments every Thursday.

Extracted from: https://gratipay.com/about/

“Open work” means that your company or organization makes it easy for any individual to do your work for you without asking you first, and as a result to share in any revenue you generate. Basically you need to have a public issue tracker with documentation for self-onboarding, and be willing to use our payroll feature once we bring it back.

Extracted from: https://gratipay.com/about/features/payroll

We’ve invented a system called “Team takes” to solve the problem of compensating voluntary labor. Essentially, in our solution, everyone sets their own compensation. Our first version of this system worked great! Now we are revamping it to better fit with existing tax and labor law.

Extracted from: https://gratipay.news/gratipay-year-four-95863e3f0b64#.82oymtnv0

We built relationships in the security and the collaborative economy communities. And, of course, we collected $60,562.84 from 726 participants, and sent out $113,065.37 to 1,090 people and teams.

That’s not nothing.

Our own team is stronger than ever. We have people managing customer support and security triage. We have folks working on product development and accounting. Perhaps most encouraging, we quietly passed a milestone two weeks ago when we completed our first payments cycle with founder Chad Whitacre offline (attending OuiShare Fest in Paris!). We’ve rotated this responsibility among three people for several months now, but this was the first time that Chad was completely unavailable.

Photo by The hills are alive*

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“For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on alternative ways of understanding the economy. Although that work has focused on the digital economy, many of the principles that emerge from it may also apply much more widely. One part of the argument I’ve been developing (in a book called Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, due to appear in 2016), is that conventional ways of understanding the economy – including critical approaches – are deeply flawed, and we need an alternative approach: a political economy of practices.

For mainstream economics, the economy is little more than a collection of markets, and the paradigmatic form of economic transfer is the sale/purchase of commodities ‘in the market’. Its practitioners rarely recognise other economic forms. (The major exception is state provision of goods, but this is often treated as little more than an obstacle to the economic efficiency that could be achieved if the state’s activities were transferred to the market.) Meanwhile critical approaches to the economy have long been dominated by Marxist political economy, which has a very different attitude to markets but largely shares the idea that our contemporary economy is overwhelmingly a commodity economy or market economy.

The literature on gift economies might seem to offer a promising alternative. It began as a critique of market fundamentalism, above all in the hands of Marcel Mauss, who almost a hundred years ago looked at the work of his fellow anthropologists and used it to argue that in ‘pre-modern’ societies economies operated largely without markets, and therefore that economies in general need not be run on a market basis. Instead, he said, these societies depended on cycles of gift-giving to distribute their products. There were strong normative obligations to give gifts, to receive them, and later to return something else of equivalent or greater value. The enormous influence of Mauss has led to scholars continuing to frame giving as universally governed by these obligations, and in particular the obligation to reciprocate.

As I have argued in a recent paper in the European Journal of Social Theory, one effect of Mauss’s dominance has been that many or most social scientists interested in giving have continued to identify it with the obligation to reciprocate, and often to insist that even contemporary giving always and necessarily entails reciprocity. Mary Douglas, for example, in her introduction to the English translation of Mauss’s book The Gift, insists that there can be no such thing as a ‘free gift’. No doubt reciprocity was crucial to the societies that Mauss was looking at, and of course some contemporary gifts are still reciprocated, but to insist that all gifts take this form is a massive error. Charitable giving, volunteering, bringing up our children, and the provision of a vast range of material for anyone to use on the Internet are just some of the examples of modern gifts that do NOT entail reciprocity. Bizarrely, some social scientists have sought to deal with this by extending the meaning of reciprocity in ways that bear no relation to either common usage or Mauss’s original intentions: these gifts are now labelled elements in a system of ‘generalized reciprocity’ where reciprocity comes to mean just that people who receive gifts also give other gifts to other people. But, as David Graeber points out in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (fn 21, p 405), this twists the word ‘reciprocity’ to the point of meaninglessness. If those further gifts are not given back to the original donor, this is not reciprocity! And if they do not arise from an obligation created by the original gift, this is not reciprocity!

Another side-effect of Mauss’s argument has been that scholars have often seen giving as a pre-modern alternative to the market, which becomes economically irrelevant once the market takes its place. Modern giving comes to be seen as a somewhat marginal activity – the exchange of birthday and other ritual presents, the odd coin tossed to a beggar – that occurs outside the economy rather than as part of it. And of course, this is also the natural consequence of thinking of the economy as being defined by the market relation.

But this market-centrism and the narrow view of the gift that it leads to must be rejected. Perhaps the most striking reason to reject it is the sheer diversity of existing economic activity. Of course, if one defines the economy as a market economy all other forms of economic activity become invisible, but a wide range of heterodox economists have argued instead that we should define the economy instead as provisioning activity: activity that meets people’s needs. Once we look at the economy in this way we begin to see that, for example, caring work in the household, subsistence agriculture, state provision of services, charity and volunteering for example are all part of the economy.

As the two feminist geographers writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham showed brilliantly in their book The End of Capitalism, these non-market forms of economy tend to be concealed by hegemonic discourses of the economy. , not least by the constant focus of media and politicians on notions of ‘Gross Domestic Product’. GDP measures only that which is exchanged in the market and by measuring the economy in this way we make growing market exchange the central focus of state policy towards the economy. Marxists, despite their generally critical stance, have tended to bolster this understanding of the nature of the economy by presenting the contemporary economy as thoroughly capitalist and capitalism as utterly based on the production of commodities for sale in the market by labour power purchased in the market.

Once we reject that discourse, we necessarily open up a range of questions that neither mainstream economics nor Marxist political economy has adequate answers to. Mainstream economics has no tools for analysing other forms of economy than the market, and although Marxists do recognise multiple modes of production, their analysis of the contemporary economy is equally focused on market forms and in particular on the extraction of surplus value from wage labour. But we need other kinds of explanation to make sense of economic activities that do not take a market form.

In Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy I argue that the solution to this problem is a political economy of practices: an analysis of each alternative form of economy as an interacting complex of economic practices. This not only allows us to start developing accounts of non-market and non-capitalist economic forms, but also to analyse the diversity of forms taken by capitalism itself. One of the striking features of the digital economy is that it includes both gift forms, like Wikipedia and peer to peer file sharing, and capitalist forms that work in very different ways from the canonical industrial form theorised by Marx, such as Google and Facebook. In future posts I will look at how we might begin to analyse some of these cases from the perspective of a political economy of practices.”

Photo by Craftsman Court Ceramics

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A friend recently asked me a question I get a lot: “How do you manage payment for your time and workshops?” by which she also meant, “How can I do that in a way that works practically and feels right too?” I would like to answer that question publicly, both to puncture the misperception that I am some kind of pure, selfless being who doesn’t sully his hands with money, and also to sober those who, invoking my name in association with simplistic ideals of what “living in the gift” is, adopt unrealistic practices that are doomed to fail.

Most of the people who ask such a question are doing healing work, art, music, or something else that is sacred to them. For various reasons, they don’t want to charge a fee for their services. For one thing, they are not fundamentally doing it for the money, and don’t want to withhold service to someone who needs it simply because they don’t have the ability to pay. Even for those who can pay, boxing the work into conventional categories of fee-for-service seems to cheapen and reduce it. After all, what is the right price for something sacred? Any amount is both too much and too little.

Many of these people also feel frustrated with the limitations that money imposes over the free exercise of their work. They just want to do their work; they don’t want to have to be bothered with money.

Please, don’t diagnose the situation as, “She is reluctant to charge what her services are worth because she feels unworthy, believes she is undeserving, has difficulty in opening to receive, is in scarcity mentality, etc. etc.” It isn’t like we who are grappling with this issue haven’t looked at that, and indeed sometimes it is true. We who do edgy work might internalize society’s implicit devaluing of that work, which often doesn’t fit into existing professional categories. More often than not, though, the difficulty is not psychological, but systemic. After all, many people who are drawn to explore gift-based business models are people who have been successful in the old model and have grown uncomfortable with it.

The systemic dimension to the problem is highlighted by the fact that so many of these artists, healers, permaculturists, etc. have not been successful in the old model. One interpretation of why is that, sorry, their offerings are either second-rate or not useful to society That is why no one wants to pay for them. That could be – sometimes, when the world seems to reject your gifts, it is a message that it is time to develop them further, to be more sensitive to what is actually needed, or to transition into something else. We must also recognize, however, that the relative valuing of services depends on the context of social values; second-rate could actually mean, “Doesn’t conform to what society has institutionalized as valuable.” If you go through medical school and get a degree in psychiatry, you earn rewards of hundreds of dollars an hour, because on some level society has decided that this is more valuable than the services of someone who has gone through four years of training in energy healing or soil regeneration. But that doesn’t mean that these latter services are actually less valuable.

In general, those vocations that society rewards most highly are those that contribute to the world as we have known it, for it is from this world that the institutions that define value have arisen. It is no surprise that activities that contribute to the world-devouring machine – that grease its wheels or camouflage its ugliness – are rewarded by that machine, of which the money system is a key component. Therefore, any work that defies it, that contributes to the healing of the planet and the reclaiming of sovereignty over our lives, or that disrupts systems of exploitation, is unlikely to be highly paid or valued as a professional service. There are of course many exceptions to this, but not enough exceptions to accommodate everyone who wishes to do such work – a paucity built into the system on a deep level.

Thus it is that the aspiring edge-worker is in the same boat as the person who had been successful in the old model and is looking for a different way. Simplistically ascribing their difficulties to their own psychology neglects larger sociological issues and bypasses serious concrete issues that need to be addressed. Practically speaking, what are the alternatives to the customary fee-for-services or for-profit business model?

Rather than describe these alternatives, I would like to explain the motivating paradigm that they come from. If the motivation is partially grounded in the values of what I sometimes call the old story, the results will reveal hidden inconsistencies that will take the form of it “not working.”

As I describe some of these “shadow motivations,” please do not feel ashamed if you notice any of them operating within yourself. They’re just an old programming that is everywhere in the dominant culture. Besides, I myself am able to describe them only because I have personal experience with each and every one!

One of the shadow motives for doing work by gift is a desire for exculpation from the crimes that a money-driven society has perpetrated on human beings and the planet. No longer can anyone accuse you, nor need you accuse yourself, of greed, profiteering, or exploiting others. You get to be blameless. Unfortunately, guilt avoidance is not real generosity; it is a kind of narcissism that motivates only the trivial levels of action sufficient to alleviate one’s personal guilt. Moreover, it expresses a kind of scarcity thinking: a conditionality of self-acceptance. It leaves a subtle stink of self-righteousness, and it results in the gift business model not working, since the goal of guilt absolution is best served by being the innocent martyr.

Now, I am not saying that such a motive dominates anyone who is attracted to gift-based business practices. It is rather a shadow to take note of, endemic to our society due to the near-ubiquity of the “struggle to be good.” It provides relief from the discomfort both of oppressor guilt and of the devastating conditioning to see ourselves as fundamentally sinful, selfish, or self-interested. If a gift-based practice is “not working,” it might be because that shadow is present in the background.

Another shadow motivation is the desire to simply wash one’s hands of the whole fuss-and-bother around money, to avoid the complicated and uncomfortable issues that come up when it is confronted. We are all familiar with the discomfort that arises when the time comes to “talk about the money”; we have all noticed how the cost for various events or products is kept hidden until the last moment or hidden on the bottom of the page. How nice it would be not to have to deal with it at all! Unfortunately, by doing this we sweep under the rug thorny issues that do not thereby go away. Money can be a means for the negotiation of social relationships, for the defining of roles and boundaries. It comprises, in fact, some of the chief rituals of our culture. To discard it without a substitute leaves both parties in a state of limbo, not understanding what their relationship is supposed to be. Perhaps that is why a homeopathic doctor friend of mine struggled to find clients when she was operating without fees, and why those patients she did have were not compliant, not really seeing her as a doctor. The situation improved when she started charging professional fees. On the other hand, the disappearance of normal means of negotiating role and relationship can be quite fertile, inviting the deconstruction and rethinking of those roles, but eventually some other means must emerge. To let go of conventional money arrangements (such as a set fee for service) is not an exit from the messiness of that negotiation; it is an entry into a new one.

These two shadows emanate from the same basic impulse: to rise above the world, to disengage from full participation in it. Thus, some associate abstinence from commerce with spirituality, and the money realm with the mundane. But I hardly need say that we are evolving away from a spirituality that is unworldly, seeking no longer to transcend the world, but to participate in it differently; no longer to rise above the human drama, but to rewrite its roles. It is this motivation that will inform a successful transition into gift culture.

While I would not dismiss the value in many situations of “just giving it away for free,” the result, if that practice is sourced in any of the shadow motivations I’ve described, is sure to be disappointing. Even if the motivation is pure, all kinds of buried social inequities and personal conflicts rise to the surface when existing money structures are removed, for these encode many of the rules that guide behavior and thought.

Marie Goodwin’s account of the Free Store of Media, Pennsylvania comes to mind as an example. Ordinarily, if you have a lot of money, you can take anything home from a store that you want; if you have no money, you can’t take anything, under threat of force of law. What happens when this deep conditioning is suddenly removed? What do you do? How do you limit yourself in taking? What is the right amount to take if you haven’t given something? Money normally encodes a set of socially reinforced answers to those questions. They may not be ideal answers – indeed they constitute an unjust and ecocidal system – but they are at least a frame of reference, a practical and even moral guide. So, the Free Store inspires a lot of reflection, questioning, and sometimes bewilderment. It also triggers rabid criticism from those who feel threatened by its flouting of convention. And, it exposes social wounds that otherwise remain hidden; to wit, the woman who came in daily, took everything of value, and sold it to sustain her drug habit. This invited impassioned discussion among those running the store. Should they set a boundary(“you can take only if you donate”) to replace the old boundary of “you can take only if you pay”? Should they resist judging the woman and her needs?

These questions exemplify the issues that arise when one alters the rules around money. Let’s add a few more. What happens if you give something away, and the recipient doesn’t value it? Wouldn’t you rather give it to someone who did? What if no one gives to me despite my generous giving? If not money, how else can we decide who wants and needs a thing most? In ancient gift cultures that wasn’t much of a problem, because the needs and desires of all were plain to everyone in the community.

Related to money’s function as an instrument of negotiating social roles, is its function as an implement of ritual. I’ve heard more than a few complaints from healers and artists operating in the gift that when there is no price, the recipients don’t value what they receive. For this reason, I am usually reluctant to offer “free” events, because I find people don’t take them as seriously. They show up late, they schedule something else for part of the day, and they arrive with an attitude of low expectations. Making a payment is a ritual act (involving a prescribed manipulation of symbols in the belief that it will affect reality – that’s a ritual) that signals the subconscious mind, “This is for real. This is valuable.” Absent that ritual, the workshop usually isn’t as powerful – unless there is some other ritual to replace it, some other form of “payment” in a broad sense.

What does this “other ritual” look like? Sometimes it does involve money. For instance, we’ll have a registration process beforehand in which people put down a small deposit, which they can add to or subtract from on the day of the event. Or we might sell tickets at “you choose the price” (which can be zero) for an evening talk. I’ve tried lots of things and I can’t say any of them are without problems; they are an exploration of what is, for many of us, new territory.

I am also interested in exploring payment rituals that don’t involve giving money to me, or don’t involve money at all. Filling out a demanding application form, procuring some natural object, performing a service, taking an emotional risk… all could be ways to construct entry rituals into a space of heightened expectations.

I often cringe a little when someone writes to me and says, “Thanks to your ideas about the gift economy, Charles, I have stopped charging for my healing sessions and have opened up to the abundance of the universe.” I cringe first because they probably have a lot of messiness ahead of them (for which they might blame me), and second because this is not a formula that I advocate. I hasten to add that it is not something I don’t advocate either. For some people, especially those who are free of the aforementioned shadow motives, it could be a perfect step. I receive many stories from people who have done just that – given away their money, quit their salaried jobs, etc. – who have gone on to experience lives that are much richer in every important way. Sometimes they even end up with more money coming to them through unimagined channels. But this is not a guaranteed result. In fact, if one uses giving as a means of obtaining a certain return from other people or the universe itself, that isn’t true generosity, and the results are likely to reflect that.

What I am offering here is not a formula at all, it is an orientation: to understand that to give is a deep purpose of one’s life and work, to contribute to something beautiful to you. The means, the strategies, the models all flow from that, as do the return gifts. For my doctor friend, to charge a traditional fee-for-service was in alignment to her giving. The navigating principle is not really a principle at all, nor an ethics; it is to follow what feels generous, right, and alive.

Tuning into that feeling is no trivial matter, because our cultural programming obscures and distorts it nearly beyond recognition. It isn’t only the shadow motivations; our very language steers us away from it. Consider my friend’s original query, which used the words “pay you for your time.” Implicit here are several toxic assumptions: (1) That some amount of money could ever be equivalent in value to time; that the infinitely precious can be reduced to a finite sum; (2) That I would rather be spending my time doing something else; therefore, I need to be compensated for spending it on you; and, relatedly, (3) that work is something fundamentally objectionable; that it is the contrary to play and to leisure. This tiny little phrase reveals a deep-set oppositionality in our world view, reflecting a narrative of separate selves whose default state is competition.

To truly live in the gift requires that we stand in a different story. Of course, to some extent the story of Separation is built into our language so integrally that it is impossible to escape it, but often we can use different words to give voice to a different posture. I avoid words like “compensation” for that reason; on the other hand, if it is a fee then let’s call it a fee, and avoid the devolution into euphemisms that occurs when we are trying to avoid the plain truth.

The crucial point isn’t what words we use, it is the thinking that they come from, the story that we stand in. The more we stand in the story of the Gift, the more compelled we are to align our actions to it, and the more clear it becomes when it is, and is not, in alignment. Then there follows a long navigation through the social and psychological hazards, the buried wounds and conflicts, that arise as money conditioning is disrupted and our economic relationships re-constellate. As this happens, a new world emerges into view that feeds us on this journey, as we witness more and more generosity, more and more gratitude towards us and around us. That, at least, is the terrain I’ve seen in my halting journey into gift.

The post Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from Shareable magazine, Marie Goodwin talks about the challenges and rewards of exploring the gift economy.

Maybe this is you: you’ve been working for a while on your own, making a little bit of money, maybe a lot of money. But something doesn’t feel right. When you bill people for your time and expenses, something feels off. You hate that part. There are always the nagging thoughts, “Was it enough? Was it too much?” Maybe you’ve become friends with your client in the process of working with them and now sending an invoice feels uncomfortable to you. It nags at you. You feel apologetic about it. You think that the invoice monetizes a relationship that has become more than just about money. You won’t work for your friends because you’ve always been told that mixing money and friendship doesn’t work and now you are seeing one of the reasons why people say this. In fact, part of you would rather just give it to them as a gift, but you have to make a living. Right?

Or, maybe you are thinking about starting a small business on the side: selling kimchi or pickles or vanilla elixirs at the holiday market in town this year. You have real costs, but your experience tells you that if you are going to be selling these items to your friends and neighbors, what you really want to do is to give it away. What do you do?

Gift economics can help solve these nagging feelings that linger around the corners of for-profit businesses. Butwhat is the gift economy? Gift economics was the basis for exchange practiced by many cultures around the world until the creation of money, even in the West up to the middle ages. (See David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years). The essential idea is that when you have enough of a surplus of something, you give away what you can to friends and neighbors. With everyone practicing this type of exchange, a web of connection is forged. Everyone “owes” everyone else a favor.

In this way, people get their needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and luxuries met. The more generous you are, the more you are held in esteem by your community. Your community esteem matters because, in times of crisis, that web then supports you in turn. Your generosity is your wealth and your security. Receiving gifts from others acknowledges that you wish to be in relationship with them and that you will be there when they need you. It is a very beautiful way to live.

More and more people are turning to doing business “in the gift” as a way to help them feel more authentic in their business relationships and bridge the friend/client divide. Some businesses are better suited to it than others: small, service-based businesses (coaching, consulting, and design for instance) and small, home-based production businesses are most easily adapted, but other larger businesses, or parts of them, can be adapted to gifting as well. There is no road-map for gifting in business; no one way to do it. However, I can offer some things to keep in mind as you consider how to apply gifting to your work in the world.

Gifting Does Not Equal Free

If you are confusing those words, stop! Our culture defines giving a gift as something we do either anonymously or as giving without any return expected. Both of these definitions remove the opportunity for a connection between giver and receiver, and denies the creation of the web of connection that undergirds true community. When you work in the gift, what you are doing is asking the receiver to decide on their own level of gratitude rather than you, the seller/creator, dictating it for them by attaching a price to the transaction. You are also asking them to choose the the timing of the return gift. The idea that gratitude is created in a business exchange is a novel way to view buying and selling but is the very crux of gift economics.

Accepting Money is Not “Gift-washing”

There are gift economy purists out there that think any exchange of money is tainting the gifting relationship. We don’t live in a hunter-gatherer culture, however, and money is needed by most people. It is a useful tool that allows us to give and receive gifts. Changing our relationship to money is a side effect of working in the gift. We move from a relationship where money is seen strictly as an asset to accumulate, to the view that money is just another way of expressing gratitude. Doing business in the gift is a new experiment and there is no right and wrong way. Don’t let people tell you you are doing it wrong because you accept money as a gift.

Be Ready to Explain Gifting to Your Clients

This is a very new way of doing things and most people won’t understand the concept of gift economics. They will hear “gift” and perhaps think “free.” They will get miffed when you ask them to check in with their own gratitude and come up with a number. They are likely to cry out in exasperation, “Just tell me a price already!” People are very used to not having to think deeply about gratitude, and it may cause some frustration. Be prepared with handouts and PDFs, as well as some links to essays and other online resources that explain gift culture and gift-based businesses (see below).

Serve Your Clients Deeply

If you are going to live your business life in the gift, you will need to examine the place from which you are acting and creating. No longer is your motivation necessarily about money. You are serving larger ideals: fostering gratitude, honoring friendship, serving connection to your community, contributing to the dismantling of the economic beast of neo-liberal capitalism. Whatever your motive, that place is what will keep you going when you are feeling doubtful about this whole gift economy experiment—and believe me, you will sit in that place of doubt often.

Be Ready to Turn Some Clients Down

Not every client is going to work out well for you. If you are going to have to work for weeks or months with a person and rely on their ability to grasp and participate in the gift economy with you, you want to make sure that you feel a deep connection with this person and enjoy the mutual project you will be creating together. If you are tabling at your local farmer’s market, be prepared for the fact that some people will not be generous at the moment of sale. So many people have been programmed with scarcity mentality. Some people, no matter what you do, won’t get it.

Let Go of the Idea of Immediate Return and Trust that Gifts Come in Many Guises

There are two main themes in gift economics: the first is service and the second is trust. You will do the work, hand it to your client or customer, and then ask them to assess their feeling of gratitude based upon their means and their satisfaction with the project. This is a vulnerable time, and you as the provider must move into a place of letting go of the outcome and self-talk around the project. It is easy to say to yourself, “Well if I was charging for money I would make X!” Even if the financial return is a disappointment, you never know what will come in the future: recommendations, new clients, food, emergency help, a second or third payment in the future, connections with people important to you, etc. Gift economics is a long game and in the end, in my experience, you come out better than you would if you had charged a set fee in the first place.

Barter is Taxable and Other Concerns

Some gifts may come to you in the way of barter and material goods. That is fine, as long as you can use these return gifts and that they are meaningful to you. Just keep in mind that barter is taxable, as are gifts over a certain amount. Talk that over with your accountant (who will, no doubt, look at you as if you have two heads when you tell him/her what you are doing.) If you are doing a lot of gifting work for one person, keep basic records for your taxes and report it as income.

Be Completely Transparent About Your Needs and Costs

You will have to humble yourself somewhat to work in the gift. If you are working with a client, be very honest about how much time and money you’ve put into the work. They need to know these details to be able to assess their gratitude. You aren’t guilting them, you are providing them with the means by which they can decide on how to gift back to you. Help them see all the ways you need help in your life. For instance, you might want to create a list of expenses that you incur every month: coworking or office space rent, utilities, website hosting, food costs, etc. and offer up these expenses as potential means of gifted payment. You might want to have a “gift” button on your website so that people can appreciate your work in the future, long after the primary work has been done.

Use Social Media or a Blog to Talk About Challenges and Successes

Consider starting a blog to share your experience of working in the gift to others. Perhaps start a Facebook group for your business or join the many Facebook groups that have gifting as a theme. There are many gift-based businesses out there whose owners are talking about the challenges and joys of gifting. I can recommend Adrian Hoppel’s blog about his (and his team’s) experience designing websites in the gift. Another notable example is the work of Brice Royer, who developed a gifting group and is helping people, and himself in the process, in his local area in Western Canada.

Read Up on Gift Economics

You are going to talk about gift economics a lot doing this work. You probably will want to read up on it a little. Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is probably the best known work right now (Eisenstein works as an author and speaker in the gift as well). Other notable resources are the works of Genevieve Vaughn, Riane Eisler’s economic thinking, and, of course, Lewis Hyde’s masterwork from 1983 The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.

Marie Goodwin is Chief Plate Spinner and External Hard Drive for Charles Eisenstein

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Top photo by PhotoAtelier (CC)

The post Marie Goodwin on How to Run a Business in the Gift Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.