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The Gift Economy
March 25, 2017
The gift economy
The Kula Ring is a ceremonial exchange system practiced in the island communities of Papua New Guinea. Participants exchange red-shell necklaces that are traded to the north, and white-shell armbands that are traded to the south. If the opening gift was an armband, then the closing gift must be a necklace and vice versa. The Kula valuables are traded for purposes of enhancing one’s social status and privilege.
Chase Buckley writes in his extremely insightful article, "The Future Draws Closer: 9 Design Prophecies for 2019":
The Kula Ring is clearly a prophetic view of our own future in the West — one in which consumers care far more about the relationships and experiences gained through transactions than of the actual items and services themselves.
Users flock to AirBnB and CouchSurfing not merely to fulfill the basic need of shelter, but to establish meaningful and enduring relationships along the way. The same can be said for RelayRides and Liquid and the host of borrowing apps that allow neighbors to share their goods with one another — not for profit but for interpersonal gain. And its especially evident in Peer to Peer marketplaces like Zaarly and Quirky and Etsy, where the items being purchased are obviously worthless, yet still maintain value by virtue of the relationships they help to create and maintain.
Designers of the future will be wise to acknowledge the implicit values of connection over utility, of interpersonal relationships over profit, and of enriching interactions over pragmatic exchanges. We’re on a trajectory towards the Kula Ring — where the ultimate goal of our transactions is not to come out on top, but to come out together, instead.
Principles of the gift economy
French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, author of "The Gift", writes that in the Kula Exchange, "the act of giving is a display of the greatness of the giver".
The gift economy is built upon the idea of reciprocity and relationships.
There will be a shift from a commodity-exchange based economy to a gift-exchange based economy. In his book "Gifts and Commodities", Chris Gregory contrasts the two:
People will value meaning more than money. Interactions will become more than mere business transactions, but exchanges of goodwill.
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