David Graeber, gift economies, and open source projects

Summary

This episode of Oddly Influenced uses the anthropological work of David Graeber to critically examine Eric Raymond’s famous analogy comparing open-source culture to a gift economy, specifically the Kwakiutl potlatch. The host argues that Raymond’s model is flawed, oversimplified, and based on a misunderstanding of the societies he references.

The critique focuses on several key points: the potlatch was a practice of a ‘heroic society’ in crisis, not a steady-state culture, and it was fundamentally competitive and hierarchical, akin to ‘fighting with food.’ The motivations of ‘big men’ or project leaders in such societies do not align with the collaborative, positive-sum nature of many open-source projects. The episode suggests alternative models, like the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea, where gifts circulate to extend one’s influence, or everyday neighborly gift exchanges that build social bonds without precise accounting.

The discussion extends to the role of ‘commoners’ in open source—the many users and small contributors—arguing that a focus on project leaders’ motivations misses the broader social ecosystem that sustains projects. The host emphasizes that reputation in open source is not a single, quantifiable currency but a complex web of different reputations for different things. The episode concludes by previewing a future discussion on Graeber’s three types of economies that constitute all societies, suggesting this framework could offer deeper insights into software teams and projects.

Recommendations

Books

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value — David Graeber’s first book, cited as a primary source. Described as a work by an anthropologist for anthropologists, less prone to the oversimplification of his later popular works.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years — David Graeber’s later book, specifically chapter five is used as a source. Noted as being somewhat controversial but drawn upon for its anthropological insights.
Homesteading the Noosphere — Eric Raymond’s essay used as a jumping-off point for critique. The host recommends reading it even if skeptical, as an example of an insider explaining his own society.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific — Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 book that first described the Kula Ring. Mentioned as the starting point for a century of debate about gift economies.

People

David Graeber — An anthropologist and left anarchist whose theories on value, debt, and gift economies form the core analytical framework for the episode.
Eric Raymond — Author of ‘Homesteading the Noosphere,’ whose analogy between open-source culture and the Kwakiutl potlatch is critically examined throughout the episode.

Topic Timeline

00:00:00 — Introduction to the episode and David Graeber’s work — The host introduces the podcast’s theme of applying external ideas to software and names the primary sources: David Graeber’s ‘Towan an Anthropological Theory of Value’ and ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’. He provides context on Graeber’s background as an anthropologist and left anarchist, noting the controversies around his later popular works but defending the rigor of his early anthropological writing.
00:01:51 — Critiquing Eric Raymond’s ‘Homesteading the Noosphere’ — The host uses Eric Raymond’s essay as a jumping-off point for critique. He quotes Graeber on the difficulty insiders have in explaining their own societies. Raymond is quoted describing open-source as a ‘gift economy’ where participants compete for prestige by giving away creativity, using the Kwakiutl potlatch as an exemplar. The host immediately states, ‘This is mostly wrong.’
00:05:23 — The flaws in the potlatch analogy: heroic societies and crisis — The host explains that the Kwakiutl society was a ‘heroic society’ with command economies, comparing it to Odysseus or Roman patrons and clients. He argues gift-giving in such cultures is akin to war, not a positive-sum game. A major error is that the potlatch was observed during a societal crisis due to disease and colonization, which distorted its practice. The reports focus solely on aristocratic behavior, ignoring commoners.
00:09:53 — Shifting focus from ‘big men’ to common contributors — The host argues that Raymond errs by focusing on the motivations of project owners (‘big men’). Successful open-source relies on ‘commoners’ who adopt and contribute. He suggests encouraging many small contributions (like pull requests) might be more important than focusing on major contributors, citing José Valim’s skill in showing gratitude for small improvements as a counter-example to ‘big man’ behavior.
00:10:46 — Introducing the Kula Ring as an alternative model — The host presents the Kula Ring of Papua New Guinea as a potentially better analogy for open-source. He describes how valuable shell necklaces and armbands travel in opposite directions around a ring of islands, creating obligations and extending the giver’s ‘influence or potency’ in the world. This model fits the idea of distributing one’s reputation and having contributions circulate back as usable tools.
00:14:00 — Modesty in gift-giving and the concept of ownership — Contrasting with the boastful potlatch, Kula gift-givers downplay their gifts, a common trait in many gift cultures. The host also notes the concept of a ‘permanent owner’ in the Kula Ring, akin to how a project like Clojure belongs to Rich Hickey even while its source is widely distributed. He reiterates that both potlatch and Kula are aristocratic practices, while most open-source participants are not aristocracy.
00:16:58 — Everyday gift economies and the logic of obligation — The host explores more common, semi-gift cultures. He shares an anecdote where a saved life creates a brotherly bond, leading to a request for a gift from the richer ‘brother.’ This logic is compared to open-source dynamics where users make demands on creators after receiving a ‘gift’ of software. The host refrains from judgment, noting it’s a part of human nature.
00:18:59 — Gifts with delayed reciprocity that build social structure — The final example is the most common gift culture: delayed, inexact reciprocity that sustains social relationships, like helping a neighbor. A detailed example from the Tiv people of Nigeria illustrates an endless circle of small, approximate gift exchanges that define the social role of ‘neighbor.’ The host suggests this model might be useful for understanding how open-source projects function as societies sustained by everyone’s gifts.
00:21:27 — Conclusion: Reputation is not a single quantity — The host concludes by arguing against the notion of a single, quantifiable ‘reputation’ in open source, modeled after money. Instead, people have different reputations for different things. He previews the next episode, which will cover Graeber’s three types of economies that make up all societies and how they might help understand or change software teams.

Episode Info

Podcast: Oddly Influenced
Author: Brian Marick
Category: Technology Education
Published: 2022-10-17T13:09:00Z
Duration: 00:23:11

References

URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/1b477990-ec42-013a-da23-0acc26574db2/episode/a34ff635-b15f-475d-82ea-ed7927bbd292/
Episode UUID: a34ff635-b15f-475d-82ea-ed7927bbd292

Podcast Info

Name: Oddly Influenced
Type: episodic
Site: http://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev
UUID: 1b477990-ec42-013a-da23-0acc26574db2

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Oddly Influenced, a podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software

[00:00:08] to software. Episode 13, David Graeber and Gift Economies, or yeah, open source culture ain’t that

[00:00:16] simple. I have two primary sources for this episode. The first is anthropologist David

[00:00:25] Graeber’s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. The second is chapter five of his later

[00:00:31] book, Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Graeber’s Debt and his later The Dawn of Everything with

[00:00:38] David Wengro were somewhat controversial. He’s been accused of drawing conclusions that go beyond

[00:00:44] the evidence and some sloppy use of citations. However, those accusations seem to be about him

[00:00:50] dipping into other fields, like the history of the Enlightenment. I’m not aware of him being

[00:00:55] slammed with the idea that he was a genius, but I’m not aware of him being slammed with the idea

[00:00:55] when speaking about his field of expertise, anthropology. In particular, his first book

[00:01:01] predates his time as a public intellectual, which was the role he’d consciously assumed for Debt

[00:01:06] and Dawn. That first book was a book by an anthropologist, mostly four other anthropologists,

[00:01:13] so less prone to oversimplification. Another thing about him you might want to know is that

[00:01:19] he was a left anarchist of the sort that protested the 1999 World Trade Organization

[00:01:25] meeting in Seattle. He was also one of the leading figures of the Occupy Wall Street movement

[00:01:30] of 2011. So you might guess that he was not a fan of what’s sometimes called the neoliberal

[00:01:37] consensus and its underlying worldview that humanity is best seen as utility-maximizing

[00:01:43] individuals. I’m going to adopt his point of view as I cover his work. You’ve been warned.

[00:01:51] I’m going to use Eric Raymond’s essay, Homesteading the New,

[00:01:54] as a jumping-off point. Although I’m going to criticize it, I do recommend you read it.

[00:02:01] Even if you’re as skeptical of his conclusions as I am, it has some value as, and I hope this

[00:02:06] isn’t seen as too insulting, an example of an insider explaining his own society.

[00:02:13] As Graeber remarks in both of his books, people who do that typically do an inadequate job.

[00:02:19] Quote, Bordeaux has long drawn attention to the fact,

[00:02:24] always a matter of frustration to anthropologists, that a truly artful social actor is almost

[00:02:30] guaranteed not to be able to offer a clear explanation of the principles underlying her

[00:02:36] whole artistry. Or, a longer quote, feudalism was a notoriously messy and complicated business,

[00:02:44] but whenever medieval thinkers generalized about it, they reduced all its ranks and orders into

[00:02:50] one simple formula, in which each order contributed,

[00:02:54] its share. Some pray, some fight, still others work. Even hierarchy was seen as ultimately

[00:03:01] reciprocal, despite this formula having virtually nothing to do with how real relations between

[00:03:08] priests, knights, and peasants operated on the ground. Anthropologists are familiar with the

[00:03:14] phenomenon. It’s only when people who have never had occasion to really think about their society

[00:03:20] or culture as a whole, who probably weren’t even aware,

[00:03:24] were living inside something other people considered a society or a culture, are asked

[00:03:30] to explain how everything works, that they say things like, this is how we repay our mothers

[00:03:35] for the pain of having raised us, or puzzle over conceptual diagrams in which clan A gives

[00:03:41] their women in marriage to clan B, who gives theirs to clan C, who gives theirs back to A again,

[00:03:47] but which never seem to quite correspond to what real people actually do.

[00:03:54] In any case, Raymond describes open-source culture as being one where, quote,

[00:03:58] participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away. He describes that as

[00:04:06] a gift economy, using as an exemplar the potlatches observed in the Kwakutl society

[00:04:12] in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when individuals competed for what Raymond calls

[00:04:18] reputation in elaborate feasts where aristocrats competed to see,

[00:04:23] who could give away the most stuff. He describes gift cultures this way, quote,

[00:04:53] especially in show business and among the very wealthy, and, quote,

[00:05:00] abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost

[00:05:06] pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control,

[00:05:12] but by what you give away. Thus, the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality

[00:05:19] open-source code. This is mostly wrong.

[00:05:23] While the Pacific Northwest was an extraordinarily abundant ecosystem,

[00:05:29] gift cultures are much more widespread than that. And the Kwakutl society most definitely

[00:05:34] had command economies. It was, in fact, what Graeber calls a heroic society,

[00:05:40] one in which a, quote, big man, someone wealthy and powerful, is surrounded by flunkies,

[00:05:46] sycophants, poets he gives money to, dinner guests who just won’t go away, and so on.

[00:05:52] One example of this is the Kwakutl society, which was a heroic society, and, quote,

[00:05:53] leaps to my mind is Odysseus of the Odyssey. He was, not to put too fine a point on it,

[00:06:00] a complete asshole by today’s standards. But as a leader in a heroic society,

[00:06:05] his role was to accumulate stuff, give it away to followers, and be extremely boastful while doing

[00:06:12] so. In return, though that’s not actually the right phrase, we’ll get to that in the next

[00:06:18] episode. In return, the followers were tools Odysseus could use however he wanted.

[00:06:23] Another example would be rich, end-of-republic Romans whose day started off receiving clients.

[00:06:31] Patrons would give followers money or grant favors. The more enterprising citizens would

[00:06:36] have multiple patrons and rush from patron to patron to collect as much as possible in a

[00:06:41] morning. In return, the clients, among other things, escorted the patron to the forum.

[00:06:47] The bigger the crowd of clients, the more important the patron. Especially in the later

[00:06:53] years, the more powerful the patron became. The more powerful the patron became, the more

[00:06:56] powerful the patron became. In the constant jockeying for power and virtus that made up

[00:07:01] the life of the Roman aristocracy. Virtus is a particular Roman virtue that combines

[00:07:08] attributes like valor, manliness, excellence, courage, character, and worth. Another issue

[00:07:15] in Raymond’s analogy to the potlatch is the relationship between aristocrats. In open

[00:07:21] source, Rich Hickey’s reputation was that the aristocrats were the ones who were the

[00:07:23] is entirely, or almost entirely, independent of José Valines. Open source is mostly a positive-sum

[00:07:31] game. That’s not actually how heroic cultures work. To them, gift-giving is akin to war.

[00:07:39] The Kwakyutl aristocrats, Raymond compares to open source project leaders, refer to potlatches

[00:07:46] as fighting with food. They spoke of themselves as great mountains from which gifts rolled like

[00:07:53] gigantic boulders, and of how conquered rivals were reduced to slaves. I hope that’s not the

[00:08:00] attitude Mr. Hickey and Mr. Valines have toward each other. To my mind, the most grievous error

[00:08:07] of Raymond’s account is that Kwakyutl society was in the middle of a major crisis when the

[00:08:13] reports we rely on were written. Like other native populations in North America, a huge

[00:08:19] percentage of the Kwakyutl died from disease when European

[00:08:23] colonists came in contact with them. One estimate I’ve seen is that around 30% of the native

[00:08:29] population of the Northwest died from disease, though we can never really know. Stop for a

[00:08:35] minute. Suppose one out of three people you know had all of a sudden died. That might have shaken

[00:08:41] how your society worked and how you behaved in it, no? And don’t forget, your country is also

[00:08:47] occupied by impossibly powerful invaders who are intensely against your potlatch,

[00:08:53] custom, and will ban it fairly soon. One bit of chaos was that there were now more

[00:08:58] aristocratic positions than aristocrats. It seems commoners were getting pretty uppity and wanting

[00:09:04] to occupy aristocrat positions. The aristocracy resisted. It was perhaps more able to resist

[00:09:11] because contact with Europeans allowed the already rich to get vastly richer. Beaver pelts

[00:09:17] were involved. So the aristocracy were simultaneously engaged in competing for

[00:09:23] titles with each other and preventing commoners from getting those titles. Things got out of

[00:09:29] hand. Let’s just say we know the reports are not of a culture in a steady state. We do not know how

[00:09:37] these cultures worked before they were disrupted. Even during the disruption, we don’t know what the

[00:09:43] commoners were doing, how they interacted with each other, if they used gifts. It’s all about

[00:09:49] what the aristocrats were doing.

[00:09:53] I think Raymond errs in a very typical way by focusing on the motivations of software project

[00:10:00] owners and the big men. It seems to me open source projects rely on commoners to adopt them

[00:10:07] and contribute to them. Focusing on encouraging many people to produce a few pull requests each

[00:10:14] might, might, be more important than focusing on the major contributors. I’m not sure. In my only

[00:10:21] truly successful open source project, I’ve been able to get a few pull requests each. I’ve been

[00:10:23] able to get a few pull requests each. I’ve been able to get a few pull requests each. I’ve been

[00:10:23] project, I was bad at it. But I see people like Jose Valin being really good at it. One gift he’s

[00:10:30] good at giving is gratitude for things like simple documentation improvements, not the way a big man

[00:10:37] behaves. I don’t think Raymond has picked a great model for open source. Let’s take a look at how

[00:10:46] some other gift economies worked. Another famous gifting culture was the Kula Ring of 18 islands

[00:10:52] in Papua New Guinea. Like the potlatch, this is not a society-wide practice, but is primarily for

[00:10:59] the upper classes. What people do is take canoe trips hundreds of kilometers to exchange gifts.

[00:11:05] As the first description of the Kula Ring asked, quote,

[00:11:09] Why would men risk life and limb to travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away

[00:11:16] what appear to be worthless trinkets? The answer is that the gift’s value is not in what

[00:11:22] they’re good for or how hard they were to make. The most important gifts are red shell disc

[00:11:28] necklaces and white shell armbands. The necklaces travel clockwise around the ring while the

[00:11:34] armbands travel counterclockwise. So I might travel to your island and gift you an armband

[00:11:41] and possibly other things. Some amount of trading, including pure barter, might take place.

[00:11:46] The closing gift would be from you to me and would have to be a necklace. Then I’d go home.

[00:11:52] Neither of us would keep our gifts. After a customary time, you would be obliged to go

[00:11:58] counterclockwise and pass on the armband I gave you to someone else. I would do the same. In this

[00:12:05] way, gifts travel around and around the ring. Once we’d exchanged gifts, we’d have certain

[00:12:11] obligations of hospitality, protection, and assistance to each other. That’s a first-order

[00:12:17] reason to bother trading gifts, but not the only reason.

[00:12:21] Some items

[00:12:22] have names and histories that are well-known. Possessing such an item enhances the temporary

[00:12:28] possessor’s status. Status isn’t really a great metaphor, though. By owning a valuable kula,

[00:12:36] you attach your name to it. As the kula moves on, your influence or potency,

[00:12:41] your ability to act on the world, moves with it. You have greater control over the world

[00:12:47] because people you’ve never met consider your name important, your actions significant,

[00:12:52] Pause for a moment. This is a different way of thinking of one’s place in the world than the

[00:12:59] one you’re probably used to. Reputation isn’t something you contain. It’s something you

[00:13:05] distribute. The kula ring strikes me as fitting open-source culture maybe a bit better than pot

[00:13:13] latches. One, the idea of extending your influence or potency in the world via the thing you give

[00:13:19] away seems to match open-source rather nicely.

[00:13:22] Two, so does the idea of sending your gift into the world and having its value circulate around

[00:13:30] back to you, increasing because of its possession by other people. And also, the person who gives

[00:13:37] more gets more. Actual concrete gifts, not just reputation. You get to participate in a big,

[00:13:45] open-source ecosystem where your contributions come back to you, not as reputation points,

[00:13:52] but as tools you can use. You cast your seed upon the ground and it comes back to you a hundredfold.

[00:14:00] Three, Raymond describes the modesty of open-source alpha hackers. A potlatch aristocracy

[00:14:07] is very much the opposite of modest. When the aristocrats gave a gift, or, though Raymond

[00:14:14] doesn’t mention this, ostentatiously destroy their possessions, they made sure you knew they

[00:14:19] could do that because of how great they were.

[00:14:22] However, the giver of a hula gift always downplays the actual value of the gift in a very exaggerated

[00:14:28] way. That’s far from unusual in gift cultures. Here’s an example from the Inuit.

[00:14:35] The old man laughed. Some people don’t know much. I am such a poor hunter and my wife a

[00:14:43] terrible cook who ruins everything. I don’t have much, but I think there is a piece of meat outside.

[00:14:49] It might still be there as the

[00:14:52] dog’s

[00:15:16] bit.

[00:15:17] There is a notion of permanent dissoner-ship in the hoola ring.

[00:15:21] There is an action called the hula ring, where a man gives a gift and an agent gives alag.

[00:15:21] For example, if it’s a cugling, they give a 진짜 incision. If it’s a Итакag, you

[00:15:22] person or group of people who owns the item no matter where it happens to be. They can sell it

[00:15:29] or destroy it, presuming they’re the person holding it at the time, I think. This is independent of

[00:15:35] its travels around the ring. However, it appears to affect the people who temporarily possess the

[00:15:41] item. They should take care of it because it belongs to someone else. That might be akin to

[00:15:47] how Clojure belongs to Rich Hickey, even though I can have all its source on my own hard drive.

[00:15:54] All that given, I want to repeat that both the potlatch and Kula Ring gift cultures are about

[00:16:00] the aristocracy. Most of us who use and contribute to open source are not aristocracy, so maybe we

[00:16:08] need some analogies that aren’t all about the motivations of project leaders slash benevolent

[00:16:14] dictators. Another thing that’s worth noting is that there are a lot of people who are

[00:16:17] is that the first book about the Kula Ring was Malinowski’s Argonauts of the South Pacific,

[00:16:23] published in 1922, 100 years ago. There’s been vigorous debate about what gift economies mean

[00:16:31] ever since, and I don’t get the feeling that the topic is settled among anthropologists.

[00:16:37] So it’s the height of presumption for us in software to think we can map

[00:16:41] anthropological understanding, which is contested, onto our own naive internal

[00:16:46] understanding of what we do. But height of presumption is probably part of the definition

[00:16:52] of computer programmer, so let’s continue, this time with a kind of semi-gift culture that’s

[00:16:58] reasonably common. Here’s a quote. A day or two after we reached Vana, we found one of the natives

[00:17:06] very ill with pneumonia. Comer treated him and kept him alive on strong fowl soup. A great deal

[00:17:13] of careful nursing and attention was visited on him, for his house was beside the camp. When we

[00:17:19] were ready to go on our way again, the man was well. To our astonishment, he came and asked us

[00:17:25] for a present, and was as astonished and disgusted as he had made us to be when we declined giving

[00:17:31] it. We suggested that it was his place to bring us a present and to show some gratitude. He said

[00:17:38] to us, well, indeed, you white men have no shame.

[00:17:43] This seems bizarre to us, well, me, but there is a logic behind it, according to Graeber.

[00:17:50] Suppose that saving someone’s life puts you in a relationship like brother to brother. One brother,

[00:17:56] the saved one, then observes that the other brother is enormously rich in comparison.

[00:18:02] So when the rich brother is about to leave forever, is it unreasonable to ask him to give

[00:18:07] you something worth little to him that would be worth so much to you?

[00:18:12] I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

[00:18:13] I’ve been peripherally involved in open-source projects where the dynamic was something like

[00:18:17] that. Aristocrat gives away this wonderful software system. Users indicate it’s great,

[00:18:23] but partly inadequate, and say, this really ought to kind of be fixed with at least a bit

[00:18:30] of an implication of a demand. And the aristocrat goes non-linear in outrage that the result of his

[00:18:37] huge gift would be demands about how he should spend his time. I’m not going to make a judgment

[00:18:43] about it. I’m not going to make a judgment about it. I’m not going to make a judgment about it.

[00:18:43] Who’s right in abstract, logical terms, if that even makes sense? Perhaps in the next episode.

[00:18:49] For now, I just suggest that it seems we have here a part of human nature that won’t be fixed

[00:18:54] by getting mad at it. I want to finish off with an example of what is the most common

[00:18:59] sort of gift culture, I think. Gifts with delayed reciprocations, where the reciprocations

[00:19:05] deliberately don’t close out the relationship. I once helped my neighbor fix his bicycle’s brakes.

[00:19:12] More recently, he mowed our lawn while we were on vacation. Do we maintain internal registers

[00:19:19] where we consider whether his debt to me is now wiped out? Do we know the exchange rate between

[00:19:26] bicycle repair and lawn mowing? No, we do not. In fact, it’s important that we don’t.

[00:19:33] The exchange of gifts is something that creates and recreates social structure.

[00:19:38] In this case, the social role of neighbor in white bread,

[00:19:42] middle-class American culture. Here’s a more exotic example.

[00:19:47] Quote. Laura Bohannon writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria.

[00:19:54] Neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts. Two ears of corn, one vegetable

[00:20:00] marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful of peanuts. Having no idea what was expected of her,

[00:20:07] she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought.

[00:20:12] Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned.

[00:20:18] It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor

[00:20:22] and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring back

[00:20:27] something of approximately the same value. One could even bring money, there was nothing

[00:20:32] inappropriate in that, provided one did so at a discrete interval, and above all, that one did

[00:20:39] not bring the exact cost of the eggs.

[00:20:42] It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast

[00:20:47] oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that

[00:20:53] one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned,

[00:20:59] might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful

[00:21:04] of okra or a tiny bit of change in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over

[00:21:11] the present.

[00:21:12] If it is in fact a good idea to say that there is a way open source projects work,

[00:21:27] and I’m not at all convinced there is, versus descriptions of how this open source project

[00:21:32] works, it seems to me better to focus on the way that a project is a society of sorts,

[00:21:38] and how everyone’s gifts help to sustain it.

[00:21:42] But then I would, as I’m temperamentally allergic to pumping up the visibility of big men at the

[00:21:48] expense of all of the smaller people who keep things running, and I’m especially allergic to

[00:21:54] the notion that status or reputation is a single quantity, one it seems to me modeled after the

[00:22:00] very special but limited role money takes in our larger society. People don’t have reputations that

[00:22:09] are usefully quantifiable.

[00:22:12] They have reputations for things, and they have different reputations for different things.

[00:22:19] There’s no universal medium of exchange here.

[00:22:27] Graeber describes all societies as being made up of a mixture of three different types of economies.

[00:22:33] Different societies use them differently, in different proportions, but always in a way that

[00:22:39] continually recreates the society,

[00:22:41] or,

[00:22:42] sometimes,

[00:22:43] changes it.

[00:22:44] All three economies contain gifts, but in different ways.

[00:22:48] I’ll talk about those three economies next time and muse a little bit about how understanding them

[00:22:53] might affect your understanding of the little society of your software team,

[00:22:59] or help change it.

[00:23:01] Thank you for listening.

Vox

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