I've been corresponding with Dave McCaughan of McCann Erickson Japan.  We have been talking about the "gift economy." 

As I understand it, the "gift economy" ideas says that we are moving away from direct exchange to something more circular. 

Instead of trading "exactly this" for "exactly that," we now release things into the world (blog posts like this one, tweets, music, Youtube videos) with the hope that something will return to us someday in the form of some kind of value (revenue, reputation, social capital, cultural capital.)  In other words, we gift the world with our efforts, and we do so without expectation or guarantee of a return.  Adam Smith would be horrified. 

I like this idea and what's more I believe in it.  But it's not without its problems. 

Take the case of Jimmy Pantino.  He's spending his summer working at Denny's as a short order cook.  He would much rather have spent it shooting and editing shorts for YouTube.  He's got pretty good at it.  The trouble is YouTube doesn't pay him anything.  Nor do any of the 120,238 people who have seen his work on line.  In point of fact, at least from Jimmy's point of view, this is not a gift economy. It's a grab economy, which is to say, no economy at all.

The problem is not that people don't want to pay Jimmy and free him from his Denny's bondage.  They just don't want to pay him in the usual domination.  In our economy, in most circumstances, the smallest useful unit of payment is a dollar.  And we don't want to pay Jimmy a dollar.  It's just too much.  But we are prepared to pay him a nickle.  And at a nickle a hit, Jimmy's YouTube audience would have paid him around $6000.  This is not a princely sum.  No, as an alternative to working this summer at Denny's, it's actually much richer than that.

The further problem is that there isn't any financial architecture that makes it possible for us to pay Jimmy his nickle.  Certainly, there's no way to do it easily and swiftly.  Not only do we not want to pay Jimmy a dollar.  We really don't want to make a big production of it.  Unless it happens in the blink of an eye, we can't be bothered.  Which is to say, we want to spend as little in time as we do in money.  (What is the temporal equivalent of a nickle?  Two seconds, probably.  Click of a mouse.)

What we need is a financial system capable of delivering fractional amounts in a frictionless way.  When looking at one of Jimmy's videos we that they can just hit a button and keep going.  No signing in or keeping track.  Jimmy gets a nickle.  We fill up our virtual wallet every quarter or so, distributing fractional amounts til it's gone. 

The company that creates this system gets to be a hero to the kids.  (Expect abject worship from Jimmy in particular.)  It gets to be a participant in the new social networks and the plenitude of contemporary culture.  It gets to be a patron of the new society and culture now in the works.  Most simply, it gets to escape its status as an old order corporation and become a new order one.  Tactically, this is a seat at the most important table.  Strategically, its a chance to own some part of the future instead of tagging witlessly along behind it.  

The person who does it gets to be the next Jeff Bezos or Jimmy Wales. You will be interviewed by Wired Magazine.  You will be showered with honorary degrees.  Most important: You will get way better seats at basketball games. 

Building a system like this must be complicated.  Otherwise we would have one by now.  But surely it's not more complicated than Facebook.  It just has to be a little more secure.  Ok, a lot more secure.  (I would love to hear from someone who has an idea of what this sort of system would require from a technical point of view.)

My plea: let's put the gift back into the gift economy, and for that matter, the economy in the economy.  I mean, imagine what Jimmy Pantino could do for our culture if he was working with more than his free time and that crappy old computer his parents refuse to replace. 

Economies create great things.  Let's turn this one loose.

References

Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Reissue. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Aldine Transaction.

I had the good fortune to participate in a call organized yesterday by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn.  This is an open discussion, the Yi-Tan, they hold by phone, addressing the big issues, intellectual and otherwise, that vex and test the tech community.

These are two sublimely smart guys, but it was clear they weren’t sure exactly what to ask me.  Join the club.  I mean, what, finally, does an anthropologist bring to the party?  No one is exactly sure, not even the anthropologist. 

Ethnography, that’s the easy answer.  This is the method of anthropology, so, hey, if you need an ethnographer, you probably need an anthropologist, and now that A.G. Lafley, M.S.I. Kodak, IBM, and Campbell Soup use ethnography, anthropology has a place in the world.

But what else?  Is there something to anthropology beyond ethnography?

Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data.  My clients get this about me.  They used to ask me to find the solution.  More and more, they ask me to find the problem.  How, they ask, should we be thinking about this?  Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.

Jerry and Pip were kind enough to ask if I would join in the call.  Please them for this confidence.  And here are the notes I scratched out for myself.  You may determine for yourself whether they identify a problem worth thinking about.

If we look at culture and commerce from a pattern-seeking, assumption-hunting point of view, we see two things:

First, a clarity is giving way to a fluidity.  I grew up in a world that for all of its modernist momentum had a certain order.  It was like something defined by a mechanical engineer: parts and wholes, relationships and processes, outcomes and feedbacks, all of these were relatively clear. 

This clarity is now at issue.  What are the parts?  What is the whole?  What are the relationships and processes?  Can we predict outcomes?  Are there feedbacks? 

What, for instance, is a corporation, now that it contains so many different moving parts, now that it changes so much and so often, now that it has, often, many objectives instead of one.  Does it have a boundary?  Or is just more porous?  And if it is porous, has it found a way to manage its new fluidity.

A friend and I were talking yesterday how much the corporation has changed inside, swapping personnel in and out, refashioning the employment contract now that "one size" no longer fits all.

What is a "brand" now that consumer are let into the moment of creation, now that the corporation spends so much more time out and about, sensing and responding to the world "out there?"

What is a "self," now that each of us is so crowded with diverse interests and the ability to negotiate the complexities of a dynamic world?

Each of these things has in a sense "gone global," embracing more heterogeneity in a more dynamic mix, trading clarity for fluidity.   

Fifty years ago, the specs for each was pretty clear.  Intellectuals were unhappy with some of the design particulars but the rest of the world just got down to business and got on with life.  Now, it looks as if someone had a Starbucks accident.  Blueprints drip with coffee from Sumatra, not to mention that latte and cinnamon.  Boxes and arrows run and blur.  Fluidity, to be sure. 

Second, it’s not clear that we have come up with a better way of thinking about a world like this, despite the fact that we have been on notice since the work of the Tofflers in the 1960s.  There are small inklings here and there, the Long Now Project, the complex adaptive theory that comes from the Santa Fe institute, the call for dynamism that comes from gurus like Tom Peters.  A big tech company recently asked me to rethink the B to B relationship.  But these are all mere inklings, and nothing like a formal shift. 

As I say, not everyone sees this as the anthropological "value add."  And that’s a shame.  Because the world is getting complicated in ways that anthropologists know how to reckon with.  As people survey the fizzing, teeming confusion of the contemporary world, they ought to be saying, "where can I find an anthropologist to help me think about this. "