by Ed Phillips
It’s free, it’s out here, but you’re going to have to dig for it. You are going to have to give something away in order to receive something back. You have to participate for it to be real: a gift economy.
The Internet is still a “gift economy”, where the philanthropic gestures of large institutions compete for attention with a blizzard of more idiosyncratic and independent movements. Those more idiosyncratic and independent movements, fueled by obsession, frustration, or love, are where life on the nets resides.
You wouldn’t know anything was happening unless you were hooked in, unless you were participating, offering something yourself. It would be overwhelming or meaningless if you weren’t oriented by informal networks, links, and email. As far as most are concerned, there is a blizzard, a white-out, of information on the nets. All but the most intrepid are numbed by this blizzard of information. You won’t even go out into the blizzard unless you fancy yourself some kind of Admiral Perry or unless you have cohorts or maps, unless you are a native.
Professionalism hasn’t come to the nets just yet, much to the chagrin of the institutions and the entrepreneurs. The New Philanthropists, the would-be commercial presences, are the missionaries of the nets. The incorrigible natives are now accepting well-crafted hand-outs from the missionaries. The missionaries are hoping that the natives will learn the value of their brands, hoping that the natives will begin to participate in a money economy of sorts. Professionalism will follow charity.
These natives of the nets are particularly incorrigible because they “tribalized” the nets in an attempt to escape the emptiness of their own advanced money economies. We know the story only too well, never mind the catchwords we use to describe “the context of no context.” Instead of replaying the over familiar story of plebeianized, rationalized, and now completely tautologous, advanced money economies and their media, I just want to touch on the possibility that thoughtful writing on the nets is a gift economy. A difference.
June 2, 1997