6. The Hacker Culture as Gift Economy
To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture, it is
helpful to move from history further into anthropology and economics,
and examine the difference between exchange cultures and
gift cultures.
Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status; it's
wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that history
that ran before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in
small nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals got
the healthiest mates and access to the best food. This drive for
status expresses itself in different ways, depending largely on the
degree of scarcity of survival goods.
Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity and
want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social
status.
The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command
hierarchies, allocation of scarce goods is done by one central
authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale very
poorly ; they become increasingly brutal
and inefficient as they get larger. For this reason, command
hierarchies above the size of an extended family are almost always
parasites on a larger economy of a different type. In command
hierarchies, social status is primarily determined by access to
coercive power.
Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a
sophisticated adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model,
scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done in a
decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation (and in
fact, the dominating effect of competitive desire is to produce
cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social status is
primarily determined by having control of things (not necessarily
material things) to use or trade.
Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above, and how
they interact with each other. Government, the military, and
organized crime (for example) are command hierarchies parasitic on the
broader exchange economy we call `the free market'. There's a third
model, however, that is radically different from either and not
generally recognized except by anthropologists; the gift
culture.
Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance.
They arise in populations that do not have significant
material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe
gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in
ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also
observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially
in show business and among the very wealthy.
Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain
and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift
cultures, social status is determined not by what you control
but by what you give away.
Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the
multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy.
And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality
open source.
For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of
open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no
serious shortage of the `survival necessities' -- disk space, network
bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This
abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of
competitive success is reputation among one's peers.
This observation is not in itself entirely sufficient to explain the
observed features of hacker culture, however. The cracker d00dz have
a gift culture which thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of
the hackers, but their behavior is very different. The group
mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than
among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is
much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless
executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.
What this shows, in case it wasn't obvious, is that there is more than
one way to run a gift culture. History and values matter. I have
summarized the history of the hacker culture elsewhere in ; the ways in which it shaped present behavior
are not mysterious. Hackers have defined their culture by set of
choices about the form which their competition will take. It
is that form which we will examine in the remainder of this paper.