Christmas is the one day of the year when all the mercenary rules of profit and loss are suspended and we exist in a nearly perfect gift economy. I'm not talking about the Christian holiday, obviously. I mean the other one. The end-of-the-year gig when kids of whatever persuasion get deluged with cool, useless shit out their merry little Santa-worshipin' asses. Ho! Ho! Ho!
If kids had their way, every day would be that Christmas. Tomorrow, and the next day, and next Wednesday, too. We'd be talking all-gifts, all-the-time. And is that so horrible? All the self-righteous MBAs and money-grubbers aside, everyone knows making a living in the whore bazaar we are currently mired in is soul-sucking at worst, a mixed blessing at best. Wouldn't it be nicer if our lives were based more on giving and less on gain? If social status and success were based on what you gave to others and not on your conspicuous accumulation of things others had "given" to you?
Sure, gift-giving can be a pain in the ass, something people often resent having to do. That's certainly true for people who marry into my family. Seven kids my mother raised, some of us more fecund than the most backward of undeveloped countries. How many nephews and nieces do I have? Who knows. Lots and lots, at last count. Years ago, one sister-in-law sent around a pre-holiday letter begging to be relieved of the obligation of buying gifts for all the subadults in the family. Joyless? Perhaps, but sensible.
Gift-giving isn't an unlimited good with unlimited applicability. Still, it probably has more applicability to everyday life — life beyond the holidays — than most of us think.
The truth is, the gift economy hasn't been confined to holidays for a long, long time. It's always been out there. I'm not just talking about those obscure rituals that starry-eyed anthropologists dig up as examples of unselfish social practices — potlatch, for instance, in which a tribal chief throws a huge giveaway to enhance his reputation. I'm talking about things going on right here, right now, that are demonstrably at odds with everything you were taught about economics.
Don't believe me? Two words: open source. As in, the software.
Open source software (sometimes called "shareware") is "open" in the sense that its source code is not protected by copyright. It is not "private property" in the way that Microsoft software is. Techies working on Linux, perhaps the most famous open source project, are both freelance "hackers" and members of a vast network connected primarily via the Internet. They can use the software for whatever task they see fit and try to make it fit whatever task they have — which is why it's finding a home in more and more IT departments.
Open source systems are becoming popular enough, for example, that a lot of local governments now use them to support IT infrastructure. Largo provides an example from our own neighborhood — About 850 Largo employees use an open source office suite made up of such components as Xgome (an open source desktop) and Evolution (an open source e-mail program similar to Outlook). Although many open source products have been combined with "value-added" proprietary products that cost money, Largo has limited itself to the unbundled, free open source projects, according to Harold Schomaker, Largo's CIO.
Why would gifted (excuse the pun) programmers work on a project that doesn't offer them intellectual property rights? The answers commonly offered range from prestige (by way of comparison, think of academics who float their ideas, more or less freely, in order to enhance their standing among their peers) to a variation of self-interest — members of the open source community know that the thing they are feeding into and off of will cease to exist without the continued efforts of people similarly motivated. The end result will be something of greater benefit to everyone, themselves included, than anything they could construct on their own.
While it is easy to overhype the potential for a gift economy, it is just as easy to play the reactionary and dismiss it out of hand — to maintain, against growing evidence to the contrary, that greed is the fount of all human motivation and should be the basis for all our social organizations.
That would be the Grinch economy — and we all know how well that works.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2004.