{"id":320,"date":"2006-04-04T16:41:16","date_gmt":"2006-04-04T22:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=320"},"modified":"2006-04-04T16:41:16","modified_gmt":"2006-04-04T22:41:16","slug":"generous_to_a_f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=320","title":{"rendered":"Generous to a fault"},"content":{"rendered":"

Manicured, moisturized and sheathed in a kid glove, the invisible hand is turning into a helping hand. Or so Doc Searls would have us believe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He senses that, thanks to the internet, business may be shifting from a “morality of self-interest” to a “morality of generosity.” He singles out Flickr as an example. The popular photo-sharing site lets other companies freely tap into its data and software to create their own businesses. Not because it wants anything in return – it’s not about “transactions” – but out of the innate human goodness of its creators. “It’s wide open,” writes Searls. “Free-range. Most of all, however, it is a ‘good citizen’. It is generous where it counts. Nurturing.” And that, apparently, is the model for our new post-Adam Smith age of air-kiss capitalism:<\/p>\n

\n

We give. We are open. We love without expectation of reward, or even accounting. (In fact, when you bring in accounting, you compromise it.) Think about how we give to our spouses, our children, without strings. It pays off, too. But that’s fundamentally not what it’s about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not everyone is buying it. “I find it difficult to make sense of these arguments,” responds Kevin Farnham. “Or to accept that they apply to anyone except for the privileged few.” Even Tim O’Reilly is taken aback: “I find the idea that Web 2.0 is about a different kind of morality to completely miss the point,” he says. “It’s ultimately about the internet as platform. And any network-oriented platform follows network scaling rules, in which ‘generosity’ is better survival behavior.”<\/p>\n

What bothers me about Searls’s position, though, is not how elitist or sentimental it seems, but how cavalier. To Searls, the old “morality of self-interest” is worthy only of contempt: “This gives us ‘owning’, ‘domination’, etc. The Old School. Industrial Age shit. Still prevails in many business plans that are just for killing other companies.” Industrial Age shit? You mean the kind of self-interested shit that created the middle class, that pulled millions out of poverty and squalor, that provided a foundation for democracy, that made an incredible array of goods cheap enough to be purchased and enjoyed by the masses? Yeah, good riddance to that horrible, mercantilist, transactional, competitive shit.<\/p>\n

I agree that there appears to be some kind of basic economic shift going on. It certainly seems to have something to do with “scalable platforms,” and it may well have something to do with generosity, if by that we mean giving away stuff that you used to have to charge for. In the Industrial Age, things didn’t scale that easily – you had to give lots of people jobs if you wanted to expand your operation. And you had to charge a decent price for your products so you could afford to pay your workers and also make a profit for yourself. Generosity, as a commercial strategy, would have done no one any good. Now, given the unusual economics of software running on a network, you can create vast businesses with hardly any employees, and because you can operate so leanly, you can afford to give tons of stuff away and still make an enormous amount of money for yourself. In the process you get to destroy those Old School labor-intensive dinosaurs – or at least take out their pension plans and a large portion of their work forces.<\/p>\n

There will always be an accounting. Even generosity has a price.<\/p>\n

We’re seeing what looks like the erosion of the American middle class and the rise of a new aristocracy, as a very thin slice of the population reaps an ever larger share of the bounties of Information Age capitalism. Generosity sounds lovely as an economic principle, and I suppose it can be lovely in reality, too – so long as you’re one of the chosen few who can afford to exchange precious gifts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Manicured, moisturized and sheathed in a kid glove, the invisible hand is turning into a helping hand. Or so Doc Searls would have us believe. He senses that, thanks to the internet, business may be shifting from a “morality of self-interest” to a “morality of generosity.” He singles out Flickr as an example. The popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}