rebirth of the gift economy

Charles Eisenstein wrote, in Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age, on Reality Sandwich

the only business model that makes sense for most digital content is the model of the gift: to offer it as a gift, and to receive gifts in turn.

Primitive economies were wholly gift economies, which was natural when each consumer was also a producer. Today, the dominant model for profit-making business is to control scarce resources and sell their produce, or the resources themselves, to people who need them...

Since then, scarce resources have, one after another, fallen under private control, while many resources that were once abundant have been made scarce. It is hard to make someone pay for something that they can easily procure themselves. The quintessential example is water, perhaps the most abundant substance on the planet, but made scarce today through our our separation from nature and the pollution and chemical treatment of the water supply. As a result, bottled water has been the number one beverage growth category over the last two decades.
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With the Internet today, we again have a situation in which the source of (at least a certain kind of) wealth is equally available to all, and again in which the distinction between producer and consumer blurs.
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The gift model is quite natural for digital content... the unit cost to deliver digital content has dropped to nearly zero. This dematerialization means that no depletion is incurred by giving something away. No matter how many copies of my book or recordings people download from my website, my store of them is not depleted thereby. Supply is infinite; therefore, according to the law of supply and demand, the natural price point is zero.

What, then, shall induce me to produce such content in the first place?.. It is the desire to give of our gifts in order to create a more beautiful world.

Here we see the selfish old control-based paradigm giving way to the sharing new paradigm of giving. This is an unstoppable shift, that will extend far beyond the digital realms. Soon we may even be able to find drinking water again without paying for it.....