Abstract
The economies of the Internet are largely driven by sharing. Much of it is often veiled in a celebratory discourse that emphasizes how sharing artifacts online through gift exchanges removes hierarchies and creates broader access to public knowledge, such as in projects of free culture and open source software development. The article critically interrogates these assumptions and the gift economy of open cultural production more generally. Using a practice called open source animation film making, developed by Blender, an organisation at the core of the largest open source 3D computer graphics community, this paper shows that the discourse surrounding free culture online has largely misunderstood the complexity and ambiguities of the economy below the cultural politics of openness. With the help of classical theories of gift and value I discuss issues of debt, obligation, status, discipline, and social hierarchies created by exchanging online a variety of digital artifacts of different value, such as software, culture, and labor. This article shows that the wealth of open cultural production relies on combining multiple dimensions of gifting with fiscal and hidden forms of capital, producing a culture of secrecy in parallel to that of openness.
Highlights
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The economies of the Internet are largely driven by sharing. Much of it is often veiled in a celebratory discourse that emphasizes how sharing artifacts online through gift exchanges removes hierarchies and creates broader access to public knowledge, such as in projects of free culture and open source software development
Using a practice called open source animation film making, developed by Blender, an organisation at the core of the largest open source 3D computer graphics community, this paper shows that the discourse surrounding free culture online has largely misunderstood the complexity and ambiguities of the economy below the cultural politics of openness
Summary
Gift economies function to a large extent in public. They are much more visible than the marketdriven ones: “Gifts are given in a context of public drama, with nothing secret about them” [7]. Two other types of objects that the Blender Institute shares online are the digital media assets and the open films that it creates Their aim is to make an artistic statement, demonstrate the skill of its creators, and the uniqueness of the technology, the development of which they push forward. One way to challenge the power of such a powerful actor would be to try to make open animation films, software, and tutorials and gift them online, reproducing the model of the Blender Institute but creating a different community and a separate gift economy. Such attempts have so far largely failed, an issue which I discuss later. The bond merely triggers more gift exchanges, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/6944/5627 strengthening the power and prestige of the main donors and expanding the online gift economy
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