Why I Take Gifts Seriously

The digital economy is built on the unpaid labor of the gifted. What can we do to protect them?

Today I’m sharing something very near and dear to me.

All my work as a writer and public gadfly is built on a small number of core values. These guide me the way a compass guides a sailor.

Some critics would call this their theory. And they would tell you that all critics need a theory.

I’m not so sure about that.

But I do believe that good critics require guiding principles. These exist at a deeper level than theory. You don’t just think them—you feel them in your heart and soul.

You live by them. Or at least you try to.

Ah, but these key principles are often hidden from view. They guide my writing, but are rarely the subject of it.

On a few occasions, however, I address them directly.

I did that a few years back in an essay for Image Journal. And now, with the permission of editor Mary Kenagy Mitchell, I’m sharing a revised and updated version of it with you.

It tells you how I view creative people and their work. It talks about gifts and the gifted. And it looks with apprehension and skepticism at how those gifts are threatened right now

When I finally get around to publishing a collection of my essays, this one will be one of foundational texts. But today I share it freely on The Honest Broker.

Consider it as my gift to you.

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The Gift

By Ted Gioia

Once upon a time, I encountered an economist in a most unlikely setting. I had traveled to Assisi in the Umbria region of Italy to attend a global summit devoted to “Love and Forgiveness.” The last thing I expected here was an education in economics.

But that’s what I got.

The location was a perfect place to make me think about compassion, caring, and connectedness—not debits and credits. Assisi was, after all, the same place where Saint Francis had launched a mini-revolution drawing on those virtues some eight hundred years ago.

In Assisi, St. Francis had actually renounced all worldly goods—even the clothes he wore. Now that is something they don’t teach in Econ 101. Giotto depicted the scene in a famous fresco, painted in 1295. You can still see it in Assisi today.

Saint Francis gives up all worldly goods—including his clothes.

I played a small role in the love-and-forgiveness agenda, called upon to offer a few cogent observations on how musicians can help their communities. But, frankly, I viewed my attendance in Assisi more as a break from the here-and-now—a chance to focus on something larger than myself and my everyday concerns.

We had gathered together at the end of the first day, and I was grooving on the mood in the room. It was surprisingly serene, a kind of kumbaya-on-steroids vibe rare in any setting, but especially in large gatherings of professionals from diverse fields. That’s when a young woman introduced herself, and told me that she was an economist specializing in gratuitous actions.

I am rarely left speechless, but I didn’t know quite how to respond to this introduction. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I must have made that clear from my vague, stumbling response.

She tried to help out with a brief description, but her words were more a dictionary definition than a real explanation. (“Gratuitous actions are those undertaken without any expectation of financial gain or other advantage, perhaps out of kindness or compassion or charity….”)

Well sure, I knew that already. The real mystery was what an economist could possibly study in these actions.

Weren’t acts of kindness and compassion the exact opposite of economic behavior. Or, putting it more bluntly, didn’t they start at the very place where economics comes to a screeching halt?

Was there really room in the dismal science for random acts of kindness?

But I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Back when I was a grad student, I’d discovered sociologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 book The Gift, which looked at communities where gift exchanges serve as a robust supplement to economic transactions. Mauss saw that these acts of seemingly disinterested generosity provide a social glue that bonds people together.

Marcel Mauss was the first great theorist of gifting, and he published his study Le Don [The Gift] in L’Annee Sociologique a hundred years ago

Gifts might be less efficient than market-driven transactions—where everything gets measured and quantified down to the second decimal point. But they play a similar function in society. Or maybe even a better function.

After all, gifts really are exchanges of value, in their own quirky way—although no money is involved. They made cash-free dealing possible long before the invention of debit cards. And they have an advantage over paying with paper or plastic, because they create goodwill and a sense of responsibility toward others in a way that economic transactions can never match.

All of us have seen this in our own lives. If your neighbor asks for a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, you don’t calculate the price. You give without asking for payment, and do so wisely, because you may need to ask a favor in return someday. The same is true of holiday gift-giving, which has a much larger signification than can be measured in dollars.

By the same token, if your spouse forgets to give you a gift on your birthday, the financial impact is probably the least of your concerns. The absence of a gift can be very destructive—and sometimes hurts more than a physical injury.

Back when I first studied gift exchange, I dismissed its economic importance—after all, it reflects only a tiny portion of our transactions. Perhaps it might interest an anthropologist, but only as a kind of curiosity item, a refreshing but impractical alternative to the real substance of economic life. But as I see it now, the gift economy is much larger than I realized.

In fact, I now believe that gifts are the most important part of our shared life.

For a start, gifting is almost as large as the transaction-based economy. I’ve seen its predominance in my own life. I never charge my children for their meals. The many hours spent by my wife and me fulfilling the responsibilities of household life never show up on a payroll. We are gifting constantly in our family.

I have many friends involved with elder care or community service or church activities—and a long list of similar endeavors. They operate off-the-grid, so to speak—at least from a conventional economic perspective.

These are gift exchanges, pure and simple, and they are everywhere you look, even in a modern capitalist society. And they are just as essential—maybe even more so—than the transactions that take place in retail stores and Amazon.com.

A gift exchange—painted by Joseph H. Davis (1811 - 1865)

But I’m concerned here with a different class of activities, ones that straddle these two spheres—and are hard to classify for that very reason. I’m talking specifically of artistic or creative pursuits, endeavors that are typically pursued for the intrinsic joy of sharing one’s gifts, but are frequently commoditized and placed on the market.

So let me ask a simple question. Are artistic creations part of the gift economy or the transaction economy?

That’s not an easy question to answer.

It took more than a half century before a major thinker pushed more deeply into the field of study initiated by Marcel Mauss in the 1920s. But when Lewis Hyde published his provocative book The Gift in 1983, he focused his attention primarily on the arts.

He understood that artists are very similar to the tribes and communities studied by Mauss. Creative people themselves are gifted—even the language we use here is revealing—and they feel a strong drive to share their gifts with others. Even more intriguing, their day-to-day lives prove the most incredible claim made by Hyde: namely the seemingly paradoxical assertion that gifts increase in value when given away.

“The increase is the core of the gift,” Hyde asserts confidently. But how can that possibly be true? When measured in dollars and cents, the act of giving destroys value. At best, we break even—assuming I get a gift of comparable value in return.

But is that really so?

Not in the arts. Take, for example, my own vocation in music. As strange as it seems, the more a musician gives, the greater the total value created. The musician who plays alone in the practice room creates very little value, and that’s true whether you measure it in dollars or in the less tangible psychological, emotional and social metrics of gift exchange. But when that same song is performed for a thousand people, its value increases enormously—and the catalyst here isn’t the transaction (the ticket price to a concert, for example), but the song itself, which becomes more powerful through this act of sharing.

In other words, music is what I call an anti-commodity—my name for things that aren’t exhausted when used or given away, but get larger and more valuable, like the fish and loaves in the gospel. In that way, a song is like love or friendship or trust, those other anti-commodities that increase with the giving rather than get depleted.

The same is true of a painting or novel or dramatic production and many other artistic creations. We have now arrived at what, in Hyde’s words, “seems at first to be a paradox of gift exchange: when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost.”

“Music is what I call an anti-commodity—my name for things that aren’t exhausted when used or given away, but get larger and more valuable.”

We have now entered into the crux of the dilemma facing gifted people in our cultural ecosystem, one that has grown into a huge crisis in the digital age. All creative people grasp, if only subconsciously, that their gifts were meant for giving. Even more to the point, the value of their gift increases (for both giver and receiver) through that open-hearted act of exchange.

We even have a special term for it in the digital age; it’s called going viral. And this unrestrained viral gifting may be the most potent force of our digital age. Even the President and the Pope want to give freely on the web in the hopes of going viral. But virality comes at a steep price—for the simple reason that it has no price.

The very act of sharing undermines the financial value of the gift. As Hyde has shown, the power of the gift erodes as soon as you demand payment. You could call this the “paywall dilemma.”

So take your pick—do you give or do you sell? When you embrace one of these strategies, it limits your freedom to pursue the other. In an extreme case, staying true to your gift may undermine the economic basis of your life. Even paying the rent and putting food on the table become acute challenges. On the other hand, when a gifted artist focuses primarily on financial gain, the gift is debased and might disappear completely.

Unlike Marcel Mauss or Lewis Hyde, I prefer to view gifts as the basis of a transcendental economy—or even a spiritual economy. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them,” Paul asserts in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. He adds that these are given us for the “common good.”

If this is true—and I believe it is—the Internet ought to serve as a reliable platform for sending our gifts out into the world. Certainly there’s no more powerful tool for reaching out to the larger global community. In fact, I believe there might even be a moral imperative for each of us to do this—both as givers and receivers.

But the cruel truth of the web is that the gifted contribute to the digital world (often for free) only to see their gifts quickly appropriated by others who, like the buyers and sellers in the temple, debase everything they touch. The gift gets turned into a commodity, and is used by these merchants for self-serving interests and financial gain.

That’s increasingly true nowadays. The brutal economic underpinnings of the dominant digital platforms serve to punish the giver and destroy the transcendent, disinterested essence of the gift.

This gets us to the heart of artistic alienation in the digital age. Even artists without financial worries—maybe a working spouse or trust fund pays the bills—understand this conflict. If they give their talent away, they feel shortchanged and exploited, but if they attach a price tag to every creative act, they betray the very essence of their gift.

And if a miracle happens, say the artist gets rich on the art, the inevitable accusations of selling out will be voiced—and often from those who were the most loyal fans when the artist was operating in obscurity.

Most other professions lack this obsessive anxiety over transactions, unless they possess some creative or artistic component. Do dentists worry about inauthentic ways of filling cavities? Does a car mechanic who takes a better-paying job in a new auto shop fret about selling out? I don’t think so.

These conflicts in the artistic psyche have always existed, but they take on particular urgency in the Age of the Internet. Lewis Hyde wrote The Gift before the birth of the worldwide web, and never grappled with these trade-offs. Even later, when commenting on the Internet, Hyde didn’t seem to comprehend the crisis it has created for the gifted. In a postscript to the 25^th anniversary edition of his book Hyde actually offered optimistic predictions on how the Internet will serve as glorious platform for gift exchange.

He’s not completely mistaken. There are web platforms built on gratuitous giving. Just consider the many crowdsourcing platforms that help address everything from unpaid medical bills to impoverished artistry. These high tech tools participate in the true essence of the gift.

But the real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges. The shareholders and management of Facebook may act as if their corporate mandates are driven by friendship and goodwill—they even call everyone you know a friend, the same way Soviet commissars addressed everyone as comrade back in the day. But this is a smokescreen for a company built on money-making, not gift exchange. The same is true of Google, Instagram, TikTok, eBay, and almost any other web platform you can name.

“The real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges.”

Sometimes the language is overtly deceptive, but it’s not hard to see through the spin and hype. Silicon Valley may have put the word “pal” into Paypal, but what I’m sending through its payment platform is cold hard cash, not love and forgiveness. YouTube, despite the name, isn’t really about you—it’s about the estimated $40 billion in revenues the platform generates by “giving” away music and other apparent freebies in order to sell ads.

These businesses deliberately blur the boundaries between gift exchange and economic transactions. They have smartly constructed their platforms to lure the gifted into a faux gift exchange communities—built entirely on creative people who get paid as little as possible for their contributions.

You might even say that the digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day.

At first, these platforms did little to harm the cultural ecosystem. After all, nobody was ever forced to participate. A musician, for example, could still operate under the status quo, and sell albums….well, at least for a short period before demand for physical albums collapsed. But when the audience stopped buying—and who can blame them, when the largest companies in the world insist on giving away music for free?—that option disappeared.

No, you’re not forced to participate in the digital age, but good luck trying to find another way to survive as a gifted or creative person.

“The digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day.”

The damage done varies from field to field, but no area of creative work has emerged unscathed from this masquerade—in which transaction-based companies pretend that they are gift exchanges.

Journalists watch as newspaper after newspaper shuts down—more than 2,000 during the last two decades—but many still write their articles, although often with little or no pay. Photographers, videographers, illustrators, and dozens of other creative professionals have felt the same pinch. The gifted give while others prosper.

The deception is almost as disturbing as the economic impact. The largest companies in the world pretend they aren’t profit-driven enterprises, acting as if they were the Trobriand Islanders described in Mauss’s book The Gift. On the surface, companies like Facebook and Google give things away, and ask you to give stuff in return—which might be something as innocent as a status update about your restaurant meal.

But your gift to the digital platform is often far more problematic, for example private information about your health or finances or some other aspect of your personal life. In the most extreme cases, creative individuals are expected to give away the very basis of their livelihood.

No merchant or trader, no matter how greedy, ever dared do that in the past. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest,” economist Adam Smith once declared in a famous passage. But nowadays Mr. Smith would need to revise his inquiry into the wealth of nations. Mark. Zucherberg does want us to trust in his benevolence, and the same is true of Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai and other tech titans who run these behemoth web businesses.

We ought to withhold our trust. The very fact that these platforms are disguised as gift exchanges should alert us to the danger they represent. We need to be even more suspicious in dealing with them than we are in transacting with the butcher or baker—both because of their masquerade and also because of their enormous power, which is approaching monopolistic levels.

The true antecedents of Zuckerberg and company aren’t Rockefeller and Carnegie—capitalists who later became philanthropists on a grand scale—but rather that sly Dutch trader who purchased the island of Manhattan for 24 dollars of beads and trinkets. I’m fairly certain that the losing side in that transaction thought they were involved in a friendly gift exchange, just like the musicians who upload their songs to social media or the journalists who give free access to their writing via search engines.

The Purchase of Manhattan (painted by Percy Moran in 1917).

The problem isn’t with gift exchange—which is a building block of all societies, and underpins our relationships of love, trust and friendship. The evil only emerges in that gray zone where transaction-driven traders pretend they operate on those compassionate values while counting every penny back in their lavish headquarters.

That gray zone now encompasses a huge portion of our economy, and almost all of our creative world. Of course, money still changes hands, but now it happens indirectly and out-of-sight. Meanwhile, the gifted people who create this value receive little or nothing.

Even those who agree with my claims here may have despaired of any solution. The digital age has arrived, they believe, and it’s pointless to fight it. Who can possibly prevail against the collective might of Google, Facebook, Apple and other tech giants?

But it’s important to remember that these corporations, for all their size and dominance, aren’t authoritarian governments. They really are vulnerable. That’s because they ultimately rely on hundreds of millions of individuals whose active daily participation in their schemes make the abuses possible.

And sometimes the gifted—or other parties—really do push back.

There are plenty of examples from the past of dominant companies exerting too much power, and getting forcibly downsized as a result. I’ve written elsewhere about the East India Company, one of the most evil businesses in history—and I’m sad to report that its economic model is very similar to Alphabet’s.

I could also point to Standard Oil, which once controlled 90% of the petroleum that made America run. But it eventually ran into an even more powerful force, namely the Supreme Court, which broke it up into 34 separate companies, each with a different mission and board of directors. Similar days of judgment arrived for AT&T, Sears and other enterprises who thought they could dictate their own terms.

But what do we do now?

1. First and foremost, we must demand absolute transparency. The charade of inviting artists to participate in a faux gift exchange, while billionaires get rich off their unpaid efforts needs to be called what it is—namely, a tool of economic exploitation.

2. In addition, we should make a public outcry when any business asks a creative professional to work for free. This is a shameful practice, and ought to be treated as such.

3. We also need to respect the intellectual property of the gifted. And we do this even when they act as if their creative efforts are pure gifts. That doesn’t justify their exploitation by others.

4. Finally, we must create true gift exchanges on the web—altruistic enterprises that support those gifted individuals in our midst. Some already exist—such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter. I also commend transaction-driven platforms (Bandcamp, Substack, etc.) when they create business models that reward the gifted more than the gatekeeper.

The Internet is a source of empowerment to all, not just tech titans. When used by those motivated by generosity, compassion and fairness, it can be transformative. It can—and should—be an engine of caring and goodwill.

We should all want to be a part of that.

We are fortunate that the tools are at hand to make this happen. If we take advantage of these technologies, and use them with genuine reciprocity, just maybe it will go viral. That could be our gift to the future.