{"id":7579,"date":"2017-07-05T14:43:15","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T18:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7579"},"modified":"2017-07-05T15:20:19","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T19:20:19","slug":"gift-vs-reputation-in-hacker-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7579","title":{"rendered":"Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A G+ follower pointed me at <a href=\"http:\/\/250bpm.com\/blog:93\"> Note on Homesteading the Noosphere<\/a> by Martin S\u00fastrik. He concludes saying this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn short: Labeling open source communities as gift cultures is not helpful. It just muddles the understanding of what&#8217;s actually going on. However, given that they are not exchange economies either, they probably deserve a name of their own, say, &#8220;reputation culture&#8221;.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to start by saying that I wish I&#8217;d seen a lot more criticism this intelligent.  It <em>bothers<\/em> me that in 20 years nobody seems to have refuted or seriously improved on my theories &#8211; I see this as a problem, both for the study of hacker culture and in the field of anthropology.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I think S\u00fastrik gets a couple things wrong here.  And don&#8217;t want them to obscure the large thing he&#8217;s gotten right.<\/p>\n<p>First (possible) mistake: I have not observed that, as a matter of language, the term &#8220;gift culture&#8221; is as hard-edged and specific as he thinks it is.  There&#8217;s a way we could both be right, though &#8211; it might be that terminology has shifted since I wrote HtN.  Possibly this came about as part as the revival of interest in the concept that I seem to have stimulated.<\/p>\n<p>But: one piece of evidence that anthropologists are still using &#8220;gift culture&#8221; in the inclusive sense S\u00fastrik criticizes me for enmploying is that S\u00fastrik himself feels, at the end of the article, that he needs to <em>propose<\/em> a contrasting term rather than <em>citing one that is already established.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This so far is all about map rather than territory. As a General Semanticist I know better than to get over-invested in it.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the territory issue: S\u00fastrik is not quite right about expectations of direct reciprocal exchange not being a shaping force.  True enough that they aren&#8217;t salient at the macrolevel the way they were among the Kwakaka&#8217;wakwe.  But if I download a piece of open source, and it&#8217;s useful to me, and I find a bug in it, I do indeed feel a reciprocal obligation <em>to the project owner<\/em> (not just an attenuated feeling about the culture in general) to gin up a fix patch if it is at all within my capability to do so &#8211; an obligation that rises in proportion to the value of his\/her gift.<\/p>\n<p>I should also point out that the cultures S\u00fastrik think are paradigmatic for his strict sense of &#8220;gift culture&#8221; are mixed in the other direction.  There is certainly an element of generalized reputation-seeking in the <em>way<\/em> individual Kwakaka&#8217;wakwe discharged their debts.  There, and in the New Guinea Highlands, the &#8220;big man&#8221; is seen to have high status by virtue of his generosity &#8211; he overpays, on the material level, to buy reputation.<\/p>\n<p>In the terms S\u00fastrik wants to use, open-source culture is reputation-driven at both macro-level and microlevel, and also sometimes driven by gift reciprocation in  his strict sense at microlevel.  The macro-level reputation-seeking and micro-level gift reciprocity feed and reinforce each other.<\/p>\n<p>This brings me to the large thing that S\u00fastrik gets right.  I think his distinction between &#8220;gift&#8221; and &#8220;reputation&#8221; cultures is fruitful &#8211; both testable and predictively useful. While I&#8217;m still skeptical about it being in general use among anthropologists, I rather hope I&#8217;m mistaken about that &#8211; better if it were.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, real-world cultures are probably never pure examples of one or the other.  But differentiating the mechanisms &#8211; and observing that the Kwakaka&#8217;wakwe and hacker culture are near opposing ends of the spectrum in how they combine &#8211; that is certainly worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>As a minor point, S\u00fastrik is also quite right about reciprocal licenses being a red herring in this discussion.  But I think he has the reason for their irrelevance mostly wrong.  The important fact is they&#8217;re not mainly intended to regulate in-group behavior; they&#8217;re mainly a lever on the behavior of outsiders coming into contact with the hacker culture.<\/p>\n<p>(It was actually my wife Cathy &#8211; a pretty sharp-eyed observer herself, and not coincidentally a lawyer &#8211; who brought this to my attention.)<\/p>\n<p>Bottom line, however, is that this was high-quality criticism that got its most central point right. In fact, if I were writing HtN today I would use &#8211; and argue for &#8211; S\u00fastrik&#8217;s distinction myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A G+ follower pointed me at Note on Homesteading the Noosphere by Martin S\u00fastrik. He concludes saying this: In short: Labeling open source communities as gift cultures is not helpful. It just muddles the understanding of what&#8217;s actually going on. However, given that they are not exchange economies either, they probably deserve a name of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7579\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7579"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7586,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions\/7586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}