Erik W. Davis:  The Gift – Mauss, Bataille, Hyde, and Derrida. (2006.)

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Source: Deathpower.

Mauss

In his classic essay The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mauss attacked the long-held notion that among so-called primitive peoples, gift-giving was a clandestine form of rational economic exchange. This was a thunderbolt of an argument, the full ramifications of which are barely absorbed, even in anthropology. Essentially, Mauss was arguing that White people have been assuming, on the basis of their own economic forms of barter and currency-exchange, that this was primary. Instead, Mauss argues that gift-giving was instead the primary form of exchange, of which barter and currency-exchange are secondary distortions which deny the collective good guaranteed by gift economies (cf. general reciprocity).

There were three major points that I take from Mauss in addition to the general structure of the argument (above).

Ran Prieur: Breaking Out Of The System Loop: How To Drop Out. (2004.)

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Source: Master New Media.

Here is a mental exercise in reading, and in maintaining a flexible viewpoint about reality and your future.

If you are happy with business in general, with your work and salary and with the way we should conduct our lives is portrayed by most media, independent or not, around you, then this essay may be positive overkill and a disturbing intrusion for which you have no real need for.

Eberhard Arnold: Big and Small Obstacles to Living in Community. (1933.)

Source: Plough Publishing House.

If everybody wants to be in the right, or even if only one person wants to be in the right, it is impossible to live in community. That is egotism or self-love. Touchiness, like opinionatedness, is another form of self-love.

We must seek what brings us together, what is the same for us all. We must think of others with hearts filled with love. If only we could come to the point where we recognize ourselves as being all in the same situation, all in the same state! The actual equality of all men, the similarity of their situations, is quite amazing. When that is clear to us, much of our opinionatedness, our wanting to be in the right, and our touchiness falls away. But that is not yet all. That does not remove the obstacles.

Andrew Swenson: The Economy of Collaboration 3.0. (2010.)

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Source: Wordpost.

Recently, Carlos Miceli argued that the future of collaboration is not in win-win transactions, but in a pay-it-forward type of interaction where one gives for the sake of giving and not for the sake of winning. Miceli states:

    “The future of collaboration is ego-less….The real test comes when you have the opportunity to help someone with the previous knowledge that that person won’t be able to reciprocate. Paradoxically, the only way to do this consistently is to forget about the economic way of thinking.”

Seeing Collaboration 3.0 in Economic Terms

In economic terms, there are typically two types of exchange (Lapavistas, 2004):

   1. Market exchange, often equated with “rationality,” is a system in which commodities are exchanged for the purpose of material gain.

Michel Bauwens:  The Digital Commons : interviewed by Tiziana Terranova. (2010.)

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Source: P2P Foundation.

TIZIANA TERRANOVA: Michel, you started the Foundation for P2P alternatives some years ago to create a ‘pluralist network to document, research, and promote peer to peer alternatives.’ How would you define such peer alternatives? How do you reconstruct the emergence and the various meanings given to p2p?

MICHEL BAUWENS: The key moment for me, I was then an internet entrepreneur and strategist for a large corporation, where the few months after the dotcom bust in April 2001. What seemed very clear to me then (and I have since read the moment was also pivotal for Clay Shirky in setting him up to writing Here Comes Everybody), was that internet innovation, instead of slowing down after the exit of capital, was instead speeding up.

Dave Pollard: Integrating Six Models of a Better Way to Live. (2010.)

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Source: How to save the world.

Since I’ve retired I’ve been spending more time meeting with people in, and learning more about, six movements that are proposing, and working to implement, models of a better way to live. My motivation for this is simple: I believe our industrial civilization is going to collapse (in cascading spasms) in this century, and I want my grandchildren to have the tools and knowledge to deal with the crash and, if they survive it, to create a more sustainable society in its aftermath.

The six movements are: