<nettime> Re: Potlatch (was: The GHI of Tactical Media) [Beaubien,Carrico]

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Table of Contents:

   Re: Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media)      
     Beatrice Beaubien <i2eye@mac.com>                                               

   Re: Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media)      
     Jim Carrico <jim@at.org>                                                        



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Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2001 02:38:39 -0400
From: Beatrice Beaubien <i2eye@mac.com>
Subject: Re: Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media)

Richard's well-spotted comments on potlatch touched on a number of important points. Just a couple of small expansions:

>
>* The potlatch was designed to *prevent* abundance not facilitate it.
>Tribal societies were threatened by the accumulation of wealth by their
>leaders turning into fixed class divisions. The potlatch hindered this
>process by encouraging the giving away (or destroying) of surpluses...
>

/snip

>From my reading of Curtis and others' reports of the practices of Pacific Northwest Coast cultures in the 1800's, potlatches were held to distribute excess to "friends". These "redistributions" would include slaves and other accumulated resources. They bound houses together, solidified allegiances and rewarded those close to the benefactors. The concept that they were to eliminate abundance is interesting, however the potlatch gifts were not indiscriminate; they would go to heads of allied houses.

>
>* The Situationists popularised potlatch as a political concept because it
>showed that societies could flourish without any money (or tokens).
>However, social relationships inside tribes were formed between people who
>knew each other and were usually related. In contrast, we live in societies
>where most of our social relationships are with strangers who we'll never
>meet.

Potlatch was/is a seasonal ceremony with the divvying up of the wealth undertaken by the head of the clan, not a day-to-day practice. Before the European traders introduced their own negotiables, these cultures used their equivalent of money, "coppers", for trading outside the clan. Thus they indeed used their own currency, and this was separate from the clans' yearly potlatch events.

Confusing potlatch with the use of currency is based on a misunderstanding of the former's original role, and to assume its function was a charitable elimination of wealth is to to ignore the reality of those cultures that practised it.

Best,

Biti


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Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2001 01:00:12 -0700
From: Jim Carrico <jim@at.org>
Subject: Re: Potlatch (was: Re: <nettime> Garcia/Lovink: The GHI of Tactical Media)

>The potlatch was designed to *prevent* abundance not facilitate it. Tribal
>societies were threatened by the accumulation of wealth by their leaders
>turning into fixed class divisions. The potlatch hindered this process by
>encouraging the giving away (or destroying) of surpluses. Being good
>liberals, the English colonialists were - not surprisingly - outraged by
>such "irrational" behaviour...


my perspective is that the potlatch was a result not a cause of 
abundance, and that we may take inspiration from the custom to 
imagine a new economic form which makes sense in an age of 
super-abundant digital products (historical accuracy is pretty much 
moot - it's a question of adapting anything we can use - and fast!) 
either that or legislate abundance out of existance, which seems like 
throwing out the baby with bathwater to me.



>It is not universally accepted that money regulates the scarcity of
>*things*. This may be the academic orthodoxy, but it is debatable whether
>this is what is actually happening within capitalist societies (see Adam
>Smith and his admirers). What money could be doing is regulating the
>division of labour, i.e. the scarcity of *time*. While it is fun to point
>out that neo-classical price theory implies that cost of digital
>information is zero, this ideology can't explain why the labour used for
>making this information often does have a price.


that's easy - making the first copy can be very expensive, it's only 
after you have one digital image that the marginal cost approaches 
zero.  the point, which Lawrence Lessig makes in this rebutal to a 
DMCA apologist - 
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filter/lessig-sklyarov.html - is that we 
*don't know* what the consequences of this might be. It's not very 
sound reasoning to assume that a single unprotected copy inevitably 
leads to bankruptcy for the copyright holder.


The token system advocated by potlatch.net seems very much like another
>form of money to me.


and this is in fact the most troubling aspect for me.  I'm trying to 
re-formulate the fundamental law of historical gift economies 
(gleaned from my admittedly superficial research) - that gifts were 
very much 'strings attached' - in accepting a gift one accepts an 
obligation to reciprocate. Strangely, it is often people who 
otherwise affect a righteous pragmatism who object most strenously 
that a "gift" must be made with an entirely "pure" and altruistic 
motive.  a real gift economy is more of a game - a non-zero-sum game, 
in which there could be many "winners" (or the "winner" was the 
"loser" etc.)

anyway the point is that without accountability and incentives to 
cooperate, any system will collapse.
Emergent large-scale phenomena grow out of systems in which the 
small-scale behaviour is sufficient and complete unto itself. It 
seems probable that any new economic system must have some 
intersection with the existing system, to aid in both ease of 
understanding, and ease of use.

So, you're right, it is another form of money - or rather many; a 
system in which we can each print our own.


>  Is
>it a digital form of LETS scheme?


possibly - i think it can integrate with a LETS-type barter/ 
time-dollar/ community currency model.


>  These can work where the tokens circulate
>within a smallish group of people, are not transferable into hard currency
>and can't be accumulated.


this seems like speculation - it all comes down to implementation 
details.  I don't see any theoretical limit to group size or whether 
or not people should be able to contribute hours, apples, or US 
greenbacks in order to participate - as long as they contribute 
something that people actually want. And they should be able to get 
anything "out" that anyone else has to offer.



>  Within a global information society, these
>limitations seem to be unenforceable. Wouldn't 'star' musicians (or
>programmers, writers or whatever) be paid too many tokens for them to
>distribute back into your parallel economy. It is much more likely that
>they'll want their success turned into material goods and services from the
>mainstream economy. Sooner or later, people would be selling tokens for
>dollars (or euros, yen, etc.) - and therefore turning the tokens into
>another form of money.


not a problem in my view - i don't want an ideal utopian economy, 
just a real one that works better than the one we have now.  I think 
it needs to have some elements in common with the current system, and 
other elements which are appropriate to the 'new physics' of 
information. zero-marginal cost goods have tangential similarities to 
other types of 'common resources' that classical economics fails to 
consider - clean air, water, the ozone layer etc.  So maybe we can 
broaden our orientation to take these things into account - before 
things deteriorate to the extent that they have scarcity-based 
'market' value...


>The Situationists popularised potlatch as a political concept because it
>showed that societies could flourish without any money (or tokens).
>However, social relationships inside tribes were formed between people who
>knew each other and were usually related. In contrast, we live in societies
>where most of our social relationships are with strangers who we'll never
>meet. Money, states, corporations and other impersonal structures have long
>seemed to be the only methods of regulating such connections. This is why
>the Situationists' potlatch metaphor was dismissed as utopian during the
>1960s. Yet, from our experiences on the Net, it is being slowly realised
>that giving gifts can also create these impersonal relationships. As long
>as we're getting more back in return from others, we don't need payment
>from each and every person who appropriates our labour. Tokens are *not*
>needed to regulate a hi-tech gift economy. Free gifts can remain free!


I guess i'm coming at it from a different perspective. My initial 
project was concieved as a system for soliciting and rewarding 
voluntary contributions to artists for work created and freely 
distributed.  So that, for instance, my favorite musicians who have 
been screwed by their label can afford to keep making music rather 
than deliver mail and drive cabs for a living. It's a question of 
appealing to that subset of the net population that actually *wants* 
to reward creators for making all of our lives better. I don't want 
to try to re-implement enforced or overtly coercive payment for 
"product" - it wouldn't work anyway.  but at the same time, i want to 
play with the concept of reciprocity and the gift cycle, which is the 
way all societies *really* work anyway.  (eg. if your neighbor lends 
you his shovel, you will be prepared to perform a favour of roughly 
equivalent stature if called upon - etc.)



>So does *all* information work need to be paid for? The revival of the
>potlatch metaphor reflects an interesting contemporary phenomenon. Like our
>tribal ancestors, many people are now using their surplus time in an
>"irrational" fashion, i.e. working for free rather than for money. As in
>the past, they're not being entirely unselfish. They also hope to gain
>respect, admiration and even things in return for their efforts. But what
>they're not doing is *directly* buying and selling labour time. A gift is a
>gift even when given for an ulterior motive...


I'm starting to tackle Bataille's 'Accursed Share' - haven't got far 
into it but already the concept of an economy based on *expenditure* 
rather than accumulation seems like crucial conceptual tool. This is 
related to the concept of 'demurrage' currency or inverse-interest 
bearing funds (eg. http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc03.html) 
which encourage spending rather than saving.

anyway, i don't have any illusions about overthrowing the existing 
economic system - at least not by myself! - but I see a lot of 
projects tending toward an alternative economic system, and the 
possibility of putting some pieces together...

getting late over here - thanks for the critical comments,

- -JC


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