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Agalmics
agalmics (uh-GAL-miks), n. [Gr. "agalma", "a pleasing gift"]
The study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods.
While I worry myself over the clash between Open Source principles and Capitalist economies, there are other thinkers who are already miles ahead of me on this subject.
I recently discovered an excellent essay by Robert Levin from 1999 that introduces the concept of agalmics, taking the gift culture of the Internet (which has been an ever increasing trend over the last ten years) and extending it into “an economy of non-scarcity”. His ideas are convincing, accessible, and very exciting to anyone who may be disillusioned with traditional capitalism.
“In games theory, a ‘zero-sum game‘ is one in which one player’s gain is another player’s loss. Conventional economics often describes zero-sum games. When two suppliers compete for the dollars of a single customer, or when two government agencies compete with each other for fixed budget dollars, a zero sum game is played. A ‘positive-sum game’ is one in which players can gain by behavior which enhances the gains of others. Efficient agalmics is a positive-sum game. For example, when a free software programmer gives his source code away, he gains a large population of users to report bugs; the users gain the use of his programs. By awarding the other players points, the player gains points.”
Levin points out that the idea of a gift culture is not new, or even particularly radical. It is just humans learning to co-operate for everyone’s advantage, a concept we would conventionally refer to as civilisation. Gift cultures have existed before in our history, but have often fallen to overwhelming capitalist influence. The Chinook tradition of Potlatch, which I have discussed before, is a good example.
After a lifetime under the influence of traditional capitalism, an agalmic economy sounds almost utopian, but can it actually work? Current market forces are very powerful and deeply entrenched, but societies, like any other organism, change as they grow and a system that works well during one stage of development may be highly inappropriate later in the cycle, like an adult wearing diapers. We may be at the point where new economic ideas are not only desirable, but essential, for society to advance.
If the rise of the Open Source movement, the eager adoption of file sharing, the growth of Wikipedia etc., are just early portents of a much larger trend, these may be very exciting times.
[follow up post: The New Information Economics]
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October 11th, 2007 at 1:04 am
Interestingly, the term agalmics was deleted from Wikipedia due to determination that it was a “non-notable neologism”. (I’m sure that Erin McKean didn’t get to vote on that…)
Not sure if there’s a better single word for the field of study, but Eben Moglen has written a sentence I like on the subject:
“The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?”
I’ve always been struck by how certain scarcities can be eliminated when a system is organized a certain way. My first amazement was how someone using a computer paint program need never run out of red pixels while they are drawing, because the software and memory is structured so it manages to “recycle” one color into another.
This property need not be unique to computers, MP3s, or Wikis. In fact, my perspective on software is that digital systems are a proof-of-concept showing a hint of what we could achieve in a physical universe (such as ours)… if we nailed down precisely what kind of abundance we were trying to optimize for (and what kinds of scarcity we were willing to tolerate to get it).
My point with all of this is only that I think scarcity is (in the long run) a largely artificial phenomena, arising out of disagreements in agendas and priorities of those participating in a shared space. So a study of “agalmics” will ultimately boil down to a study of aesthetics and game theory.
(Case in point: I recently saw this multiplayer paint program in which you are given a quota of paint to use, before the composition is passed to the next player…)