This post is greatly inspired by the awesome article The Federation Fallacy by Alyssa Rosenzweig. Please make sure to check her out. Some of the ideas discussed here today are greatly inspired by the original post, bearing the same name.

Imagine this: the boundary between government control and corporate influence has all but disappeared. One bleeds into the other so seamlessly that you can't quite tell who's pulling the strings. And here's the kicker---you're already in the middle of it. Every time you unlock your phone, launch an app, or just exist online, you're stepping onto a battleground you didn't really sign up for.

I missed a great portion of the technological advancements that computers and the internet went through. I was blissfully offline throughout most of it. Although now that I have been diving more into OSdev and other programming concepts, my understanding of it is that technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. A tool for freedom, connection, progress. Instead, it appears to have become something else entirely---something much more insidious. Governments no longer need to strong-arm their citizens into compliance when corporations can do the dirty work for them. And the best part? Most people, perhaps even you reading this, don't even notice. The social contract didn't just get rewritten; it got outsourced.

But here is where things take a turn. The same technology used to monitor, categorize, and manipulate us also holds the potential to set us free. The internet, encryption, decentralized platforms—these aren't just tools, they are weapons in a fight most people don't even realize they're a part of. And that's the problem. Too many of us engage with technology passively, as consumers and not as participants. We think of it as a service, not a structure of power. That is a monumental mistake. ¹

Take something as basic as data ownership. Who owns your data? The reflexive answer might be, "I do, obviously." But think about it for a second. The moment you tap "Agree" on a terms-of-service agreement you didn't read, you're giving away more than you think. Your habits, your movements, maybe even your thoughts---logged, analyzed, and monetized by entities that have no obligation to you in ways that would not occur to you in your wildest dreams. And here is the brutal truth: once it's gone, it's gone. You don't get to take it back.

Now, let's talk about digital sovereignty. Sounds like something ripped from a cyberpunk novel, but it's real, and it matters. You might have not heard of it before, and frankly I have not thought much of it until my research brought me across several sources that used the term. It is the idea that individuals---and entire nations---should control their digital presence the way they control their physical borders. It is about deciding who gets access to your identity, on what terms, and with what consequences. Yet, somehow, this is is not a mainstream political discussion. We act like it is a niche concern, something for tech nerds to stress about, instead of what it really is---a fundamental issue of power in the 21st century.

Interlude: On Data Ownership

While working on this post, I was reminded several times that in some countries data ownership is, in fact, a mainstream political discussion. I am aware of this, and I really admire the level of optimism required to believe this is somehow the case for an acceptable majority. It isn't. According to Freedom House Freedom on the Net 2020 report, over 80% (the actually cited number is 86%, and I fear it has gotten worse by now) of the world's population live in in regimes where the online participation is partially or fully censored. What is the possibility that most of us own the data when most of us cannot go online without our every move being recorded?

Some European countries have been making extended efforts to ensure privacy as a right, other continents have been regressing steadily. The United States has granted unlimited access to every citizen's data to a private citizen while in Turkiye, the government has decided to form a government department to monitor and act on online activity with little to no regulation. This kind of immense censorship is also the case in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and many more that I can count. Whatever privacy incentive you might be aware of is not the norm, nor is it setting an example for the rest of us. This is quite unfortunate, yet not at all surprising. One of the many dimensions of a state is to express power.

Federation Fallacy: Continued

Make no mistake, this is about power. Data is the raw material of modern power, the foundation upon which influence, control, and wealth are built. Those who have it shape the world. The problem? Governments and corporations have been playing this game for decades, and while you are barely of the rules, they have mastered it. The most average player of the game can barely remember their own passwords, let alone having any awareness of the game.

So what now? What do we do with this knowledge? First, we need to accept that technological literacy isn't optional anymore---it is survival. Second, resistance doesn't always mean taking to the streets, or drawing graffiti on walls. Sometimes, it is as simple as using open-source software, encrypting your messages, or just stopping for a moment to ask, "Why does it have to be this way?" The final step? That's on you. But let me be very clear: doing nothing is a choice, and it has consequences. Costly consequences.

We happen to be at a turning point. The choices we make now--about technology, governance, and personal autonomy--will shape the next century. The only question is: will we be the architects of that future? Or just subjects to it?

Federation: The False Promise of Decentralization

You might have heard of the promise of decentralization, an ideal where the power and control of the digital world are distributed evenly, away from the corporate giants and government entities that currently dominate. Many of us in the open-source and privacy communities dream of this decentralized world. We envision a future where individuals can host their own servers, own their data, and share information freely, without intermediaries like Google, Amazon, or Facebook controlling the flow.

But the reality of decentralized networks, such as federated platforms like Mastodon or the once-promising web, exposes a serious flaw in this vision. Sure, decentralization sounds like the solution to the problem of monopolistic control. But let me break it down. Decentralization isn't as simple as just opening a server and letting users do whatever they want. If you think about it, decentralization often becomes a highly technical and impractical solution for the majority. Most people aren't system administrators. They don't want to host their own email servers, ² handle constant updates, or manage security vulnerabilities. And let's be honest: it is not something most will do. So what happens? The dream of decentralization becomes a playground for the technologically "elite," and the rest of us are left either uninvolved or stuck relying on others to handle the complexity for us.

Federation attempts to solve this issue by allowing individuals or groups to host their own servers while still communicating with others across the network. Unlike a fully decentralized system where each user is entirely independent, a federated system connects multiple independent servers that can exchange data while maintaining local control. The idea behind federated platforms like Mastodon is that you can join or create independent instances and still interact with users across the wider network, much like how different email providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) can send messages to each other. This approach avoids the need for a single central authority while still enabling cross-platform communication.

Federation seems like a happy medium between full decentralization and reliance on centralized corporate platforms. But it comes with its own problems. Despite the ideal of decentralization, federated systems have shown a tendency to concentrate power into the hands of a few large instances. While there may be thousands of Mastodon instances, the majority of users end up clustering around a few, leaving power and control in the hands of administrators who run these larger servers. ³

Take Mastodon, for instance. It promises a decentralized, federated alternative to X/Twitter, where users are free to join different servers and interact across a network. But in practice, most people gravitate toward a handful of large instances, making the system feel centralized. The same problem plagues email, XMPP, and even the original decentralized web: while the systems themselves are designed to be federated, the reality is that scale and complexity inevitably lead to centralization. These federated systems are still subject to the whims of a few large players, who end up determining the experience for most users.

So, what does this mean for the dream of decentralization? It means that federation, despite its merits, often falls short of its ideal. It is an imperfect middle ground that tries to balance decentralization with practicality. But as the user base grows, so does the tendency for power to centralize; just in different ways.

Perhaps the solution lies not in decentralization for its own sake but in creating more democratic information spaces. Rather than solely focusing on breaking free from the power of corporations or governments, we must ask: how can we create systems where the power is distributed fairly, transparently, and with participation from all users, not just the elites who can afford to manage complex systems? Ultimately, decentralization and federation offer only partial solutions. The real goal should be creating systems that empower individuals while maintaining the democratic oversight necessary to prevent concentration of power. The dream of a decentralized future may be far from perfect, but it's not impossible. The question is, how do we design it in a way that is inclusive, scalable, and fair to all?

Closing Thoughts

Even as decentralized networks and cryptographic tools emerge as potential solutions, they strike me as far from perfect. The very technologies that promise to free us from corporate and governmental oversight are also fraught with their own limitations and vulnerabilities. Decentralization, for instance, sounds like the answer to control over one's data, yet it introduces new risks--fragmentation, inconsistent security protocols, and the lack of cohesive infrastructure. ⁴ As much as we crave autonomy, it's difficult to ignore that true digital sovereignty may require us torely on infrastructure that is, ironically, still controlled by large tech entities. Peer-to-peer networks and decentralized platforms may offer us a glimmer of freedom, but without mass adoption, scalability, and seamless user experience, they remain niche alternatives.

This creates a paradox: the tools that could allow individuals to reclaim their autonomy are often too difficult or inaccessible for the average user. The notion of "sovereignty" in the digital world, much like its political counterpart, is one of constant negotiation. Governments are learning how to integrate blockchain technologies for more efficient control, while corporations leverage surveillance capitalism to expand their grasp on user behavior. Ironically, the very same technology that could empower individuals is becoming a tool for governance and control, albeit one that is harder to trace and combat. The question we need to grapple with is whether true decentralization is even achievable in a society so deeply embedded in corporate capitalism and surveillance mechanisms. At the same time, can we ever truly achieve the autonomy we crave, or will the future of digital space always be a game of tug-of-war, where the strings are pulled by invisible powers far beyond our control?

In a way, we are all participating in this grand experiment---sometimes as innovators, sometimes as victims---and our level of awareness determines how much influence we have over our own digital future. The question isn't just about how we can protect ourselves, but about whether we can transform the system from within. We may be able to opt-out of certain platforms, but as digital life becomes more entrenched, can we afford to truly escape the architecture that shapes us? The choices we make today in how we interact with technology will set the precedent for how future generations experience their own agency and sovereignty in an increasingly connected, monitored, and data-driven world.

This is all I have for today. I think this post is already very long (and much longer than I have initially intended for it to be), but I'd love to dive deeper into something else that's been on my mind recently: the global reliance on CDNs like Cloudflare. It's wild when you think about how much of the internet today is essentially built on the backs of these centralized systems. Cloudflare and similar services are everywhere, speeding up websites, making them "more secure," and keeping them online. The catch? As we depend more on them, we're putting a lot of trust in a handful of companies that control a massive portion of the web's infrastructure. This brings up some huge questions about power and control. What happens when a company like Cloudflare decides to pull the plug on a website---or worse, if it's compromised in a way that takes down whole sections of the internet? It's one thing to have content spread across servers worldwide, but it's another when those servers are owned by a handful of corporations. It creates single points of failure and makes the internet feel more like a corporate-controlled ecosystem rather than a decentralized space for free expression. There's also the reality that these services often make the calls about what's acceptable or not, sometimes with little transparency or accountability. We've seen this with Cloudflare's past deplatforming decisions, ⁵ which leave us asking, "Who gets to decide who stays online and who doesn't?"

Sorry, I'm rambling again. I hope I was able to pique your interest today and perhaps offer a different perspective. There are many interesting subtopics I could cover, but I would like to avoid overwhelming you with a wave of unfiltered thoughts. Special thanks to @mraureliusr for the initial proofreading, and of course, thank you for reading this. Cheers!

Simon Wu never precisely names the ritual that brings him and his brothers (and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmother) to the temple that weekend. But whether it’s a “coming-of-age ceremony,” a “Burmese bar mitzvah,” or a “meditation retreat,” his temporary monkhood provides the scaffold for a lovely essay. Wu is finely attuned to familial dynamics—see his 2024 Paris Review piece “Costco in Cancún”—and here he extends that lens to the figurative brotherhood of the red and marigold cloth. Faith, feeling, and family, all rendered keenly.

I had experienced this only once. In a Best Western conference room connected to a Hooters off the New Jersey Turnpike two years ago. A meditation retreat organized by my mother. Theinngu meditation is distinct from Vipassana meditation in its engagement with rhythmic breathwork, which can have extreme physical effects. There are only two rules: do not move, and breathe to the track. Three hours at a time. Somewhere around hour two of not moving, my hamstrings began to vibrate like the low end of a baby grand. My hands gnarled, the pain in them flat and insistent. Full-grown adults around me were crying, sweating. For the first two days, at the peak of the pain, I’d move an inch, and it would allay a little. And then it would be back. The monitors wandered around, repeating the rules. Do not move. Breathe. Only on the last day, when I managed to follow the rules in what felt like a Herculean amount of restraint, did I have a breakthrough. My legs felt like they might burst if I didn’t move. My pelvis was sore from sitting for so long; my body was wracked with sharp pains, and it hurt so much that I made an involuntary yelp. I started to cry, but I did not move. And I did break into something like a euphoria: a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain, where it was now—at least a little—more comfortable to be still than to move.

There's this moment—maybe you know it—when you're standing at the edge of a decision that should be simple but isn't. The facts are laid out before you like ingredients on a cutting board. The analysis is complete. The pros and cons have been weighed and measured. And yet something inside you hesitates, whispers a quiet "wait," refuses to be convinced by your own carefully constructed logic.

This is the moment where we're supposed to choose sides in the great war between intuition and logic. Team Gut versus Team Brain. The romantics versus the rationalists. The feelers versus the thinkers.

But what if the war itself is the problem?

the seduction of simple stories —

We love our binaries because they're clean. They give us an identity to wear like a badge: "I'm a logical person," we say, like it's a moral position. Or "I trust my intuition," as if feelings were a form of rebellion against the tyranny of spreadsheets. These simple divisions are so much easier than admitting we're fumbling around in the dark most of the time, trying to make sense of signals we barely understand. There's something almost comforting about declaring allegiance to one side or the other.

I've been both versions of this person, sometimes within the same hour. The one who made elaborate pros and cons lists for everything, convinced enough data will reveal the obviously correct choice. The one who dismisses analysis entirely, trusting that some deeper wisdom will emerge from the mysterious depths of the unconscious—like my gut would guide me toward some mystical truth that mere thinking couldn't access.

Both versions were wrong. Or rather, both were incomplete.

The purely logical, data-me ignored the fact that I am not a static variable in my own equation. My preferences shift like weather patterns. My values evolve in ways that would make past-me unrecognizable. What I thought I wanted at the beginning of any analysis might not be what I want by the end. Logic without self-knowledge is just elaborate self-deception dressed up in the costume of rationality.

The purely intuitive-me ignored the fact that my gut is not some pristine oracle whispering eternal truths. It's been shaped by every fear, every trauma, every half-remembered lesson from childhood. Sometimes what feels like wisdom is just anxiety wearing a very convincing disguise.

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the myth of pure instinct —

We tend to romanticize the idea of untrained instinct. The entrepreneur who "just knew" their startup would succeed. The artist who follows their muse without question. The mother who senses danger before it appears.

But the thing is, the people whose intuition seems most reliable aren't the ones who've abandoned thinking entirely. They're the ones who've done so much thinking, so much observing, so much pattern recognition that their conscious mind has taught their unconscious what to look for.

The firefighter who senses a building is about to collapse isn't channeling mystical energy. They've internalized thousands of tiny signals—the way smoke moves, the sound of settling beams, the feel of heat through their gear. Their "gut feeling" is actually the culmination of extensive training compressed into a flash of knowing.

We marvel at the seasoned poker player who can read a tell in a micro-expression, the experienced teacher who knows which student is struggling before they raise their hand, the veteran nurse who senses something's wrong before the monitors start beeping. What looks like magic is actually pattern recognition refined through thousands of repetitions. Their intuition is logic that has gone underground, so deeply integrated it feels like instinct.

But pure logic has its own blind spots, too. I think about all the times I've built perfect arguments from false premises, optimized for outcomes I didn't actually want, made decisions that looked flawless on paper but felt wrong in my bones.

The problem isn't logic itself—it's logic divorced from the messy reality of being human. We're not computers. We're not consistent. We're not even particularly good at knowing what we want. Any system of reasoning that doesn't account for these facts isn't rational at all—it's just pretend objectivity.

The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about, Pascal said. But I'd add: reason has blind spots that the heart sees clearly.

the practice of noticing —

So what's the alternative? How do we navigate decisions without falling into either trap?

I keep coming back to the idea of contact. Not the mystical kind, but the mundane kind. The daily practice of paying attention to your own operating system. This is where something like my THE DAILY 5 framework becomes less about self-help and more about data collection—five minutes of stream-of-consciousness writing, not to solve anything or manifest anything, just to observe.

It's boring work. There's no eureka moment, no sudden download of cosmic wisdom. Just the slow accumulation of data about myself. What energizes me and what drains me. The patterns I repeat without noticing. The stories I tell myself about situations before I've even fully understood them.

And gradually, something shifts. The voice that whispers unease about certain choices becomes more articulate. It starts to speak in specifics rather than vague feelings. The analysis becomes more honest because it's informed by actual self-knowledge rather than who I think I should be.

trusting (by training) your gut —

What I'm learning is that the best decisions come from neither pure logic nor pure intuition, but from something I'm starting to think of as "trained intuition"—a gut that's been educated by experience, observation, and yes, even analysis.

It's the difference between a snap judgment and a considered response. Between a hunch and a hypothesis. Between wishful thinking and genuine insight.

Maybe this is what wisdom looks like… not the triumph of heart over mind or mind over heart, but the slow development of discernment. The ability to hold multiple sources of information—logical, emotional, somatic, intuitive—and let them inform each other. It's messier than the clean binary we're offered. It requires more of us.

But this isn't just philosophy. It's practice.

The next time you're standing at the edge of a decision—ingredients laid out, analysis complete, but something inside you hesitates—try this: Don't rush to pick a side. Instead, get curious about the gap between what makes logical sense and what feels right.

It’s not about finding the "right" answer. It's about developing the capacity to hold complexity without immediately collapsing into the comfort of simple stories. It's about building informed instinct—a gut that's been trained by truth, and a mind that's been educated by the full spectrum of your actual experience.

Because the best decisions don't come from picking a side. They come from integration. From the patient work of becoming someone who can think and feel simultaneously, who can analyze and trust, who can be both rational and intuitive without apology.

That might be the most practical skill any of us can develop.

XO, STEPF

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MORE FROM WILD BARE THOUGHTS 🐆

In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?

This serves a few purposes. First, it maintains community focus. Before this question, we were flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people who wandered in to the bar (so to speak), and that made things a little awkward. Second, the application establishes a baseline for people willing and able to read text. This helps in getting people to follow server policy and talk to moderators when needed. Finally, it is remarkably effective at keeping out spammers. In almost six years of operation, we’ve had only a handful of spam accounts.

I was talking about this with Erin Kissane last year, as she and Darius Kazemi conducted research for their report on Fediverse governance. We shared a fear that Large Language Models (LLMs) would lower the cost of sophisticated, automated spam and harassment campaigns against small servers like ours in ways we simply couldn’t defend against.

Anyway, here’s an application we got last week, for a user named mrfr:

Hi! I’m a queer person with a long-standing interest in the leather and kink community. I value consent, safety, and exploration, and I’m always looking to learn more and connect with others who share those principles. I’m especially drawn to power exchange dynamics and enjoy impact play, bondage, and classic leather gear.

On the surface, this is a great application. It mentions specific kinks, it uses actual sentences, and it touches on key community concepts like consent and power exchange. Saying “I’m a queer person” is a tad odd. Normally you’d be more specific, like “I’m a dyke” or “I’m a non-binary bootblack”, but the Zoomers do use this sort of phrasing. It does feel slightly LLM-flavored—something about the sentence structure and tone has just a touch of that soap-sheen to it—but that’s hardly definitive. Some of our applications from actual humans read just like this.

I approved the account. A few hours later, it posted this:

It turns out mrfr is short for Market Research Future, a company which produces reports about all kinds of things from batteries to interior design. They actually have phone numbers on their web site, so I called +44 1720 412 167 to ask if they were aware of the posts. It is remarkably fun to ask business people about their interest in queer BDSM—sometimes stigma works in your favor. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m guessing they either conducting this spam campaign directly, or commissioned an SEO company which (perhaps without their knowledge) is doing it on their behalf.

Anyway, we’re not the only ones. There are also mrfr accounts purporting to be a weird car enthusiast, a like-minded individual, a bear into market research on interior design trends, and a green building market research enthusiast in DC, Maryland, or Virginia. Over on the seven-user loud.computer, mrfr applied with the text:

I’m a creative thinker who enjoys experimental art, internet culture, and unconventional digital spaces. I’d like to join loud.computer to connect with others who embrace weird, bold, and expressive online creativity, and to contribute to a community that values playfulness, individuality, and artistic freedom.

Over on ni.hil.ist, their mods rejected a similar application.

I’m drawn to communities that value critical thinking, irony, and a healthy dose of existential reflection. Ni.hil.ist seems like a space that resonates with that mindset. I’m interested in engaging with others who enjoy deep, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous discussions about society, technology, and meaning—or the lack thereof. Looking forward to contributing thoughtfully to the discourse.

These too have the sheen of LLM slop. Of course a human could be behind these accounts—doing some background research and writing out detailed, plausible applications. But this is expensive, and a quick glance at either of our sites would have told that person that we have small reach and active moderation: a poor combination for would-be spammers. The posts don’t read as human either: the 4bear posting, for instance, incorrectly summarizes a report on interior design markets as if it offered interior design tips.

I strongly suspect that Market Research Future, or a subcontractor, is conducting an automated spam campaign which uses a Large Language Model to evaluate a Mastodon instance, submit a plausible application for an account, and to post slop which links to Market Research Future reports.

In some sense, this is a wildly sophisticated attack. The state of NLP seven years ago would have made this sort of thing flatly impossible. It is now effective. There is no way for moderators to robustly deny these kinds of applications without also rejecting real human beings searching for community.

In another sense, this attack is remarkably naive. All the accounts are named mrfr, which made it easy for admins to informally chat and discover the coordinated nature of the attack. They all link to the same domain, which is easy to interpret as spam. They use Indian IPs, where few of our users are located; we could reluctantly geoblock India to reduce spam. These shortcomings are trivial to overcome, and I expect they have been already, or will be shortly.

A more critical weakness is that these accounts only posted obvious spam; they made no effort to build up a plausible persona. Generating plausible human posts is more difficult, but broadly feasible with current LLM technology. It is essentially impossible for human moderators to reliably distinguish between an autistic rope bunny (hi) whose special interest is battery technology, and an LLM spambot which posts about how much they love to be tied up, and also new trends in battery chemistry. These bots have been extant on Twitter and other large social networks for years; many Fediverse moderators believe only our relative obscurity has shielded us so far.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis—in a world where, as one friend related this week, newbies can ask an LLM for advice on exploring their kinks, and the machine tells them to try solo breath play.

In this world I think woof.group, and many forums like it, will collapse.

One could imagine more sophisticated, high-contact interviews with applicants, but this would be time consuming. My colleagues relate stories from their companies about hiring employees who faked their interviews and calls using LLM prompts and real-time video manipulation. It is not hard to imagine that even if we had the time to talk to every applicant individually, those interviews might be successfully automated in the next few decades. Remember, it doesn’t have to work every time to be successful.

Maybe the fundamental limitations of transformer models will provide us with a cost-effective defense—we somehow force LLMs to blow out the context window during the signup flow, or come up with reliable, constantly-updated libraries of “ignore all previous instructions”-style incantations which we stamp invisibly throughout our web pages. Barring new inventions, I suspect these are unlikely to be robust against a large-scale, heterogenous mix of attackers. This arms race also sounds exhausting to keep up with. Drew DeVault’s Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face weighs heavy on my mind.

Perhaps we demand stronger assurance of identity. You only get an invite if you meet a moderator in person, or the web acquires a cryptographic web-of-trust scheme. I was that nerd trying to convince people to do GPG key-signing parties in high school, and we all know how that worked out. Perhaps in a future LLM-contaminated web, the incentives will be different. On the other hand, that kind of scheme closes off the forum to some of the people who need it most: those who are closeted, who face social or state repression, or are geographically or socially isolated.

Perhaps small forums will prove unprofitable, and attackers will simply give up. From my experience with small mail servers and web sites, I don’t think this is likely.

Right now, I lean towards thinking forums like woof.group will become untenable under LLM pressure. I’m not sure how long we have left. Perhaps five or ten years? In the mean time, I’m trying to invest in in-person networks as much as possible. Bars, clubs, hosting parties, activities with friends.

That, at least, feels safe for now.

Today I’m sharing something very near and dear to me.

All my work as a writer and public gadfly is built on a small number of core values. These guide me the way a compass guides a sailor.

Some critics would call this their theory. And they would tell you that all critics need a theory.

I’m not so sure about that.

But I do believe that good critics require guiding principles. These exist at a deeper level than theory. You don’t just think them—you feel them in your heart and soul.

You live by them. Or at least you try to.

Ah, but these key principles are often hidden from view. They guide my writing, but are rarely the subject of it.

On a few occasions, however, I address them directly.

I did that a few years back in an essay for Image Journal. And now, with the permission of editor Mary Kenagy Mitchell, I’m sharing a revised and updated version of it with you.

It tells you how I view creative people and their work. It talks about gifts and the gifted. And it looks with apprehension and skepticism at how those gifts are threatened right now

When I finally get around to publishing a collection of my essays, this one will be one of foundational texts. But today I share it freely on The Honest Broker.

Consider it as my gift to you.

Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month—or less).

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The Gift

By Ted Gioia

Once upon a time, I encountered an economist in a most unlikely setting. I had traveled to Assisi in the Umbria region of Italy to attend a global summit devoted to “Love and Forgiveness.” The last thing I expected here was an education in economics.

But that’s what I got.

The location was a perfect place to make me think about compassion, caring, and connectedness—not debits and credits. Assisi was, after all, the same place where Saint Francis had launched a mini-revolution drawing on those virtues some eight hundred years ago.

In Assisi, St. Francis had actually renounced all worldly goods—even the clothes he wore. Now that is something they don’t teach in Econ 101. Giotto depicted the scene in a famous fresco, painted in 1295. You can still see it in Assisi today.

I played a small role in the love-and-forgiveness agenda, called upon to offer a few cogent observations on how musicians can help their communities. But, frankly, I viewed my attendance in Assisi more as a break from the here-and-now—a chance to focus on something larger than myself and my everyday concerns.

We had gathered together at the end of the first day, and I was grooving on the mood in the room. It was surprisingly serene, a kind of kumbaya-on-steroids vibe rare in any setting, but especially in large gatherings of professionals from diverse fields. That’s when a young woman introduced herself, and told me that she was an economist specializing in gratuitous actions.

I am rarely left speechless, but I didn’t know quite how to respond to this introduction. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I must have made that clear from my vague, stumbling response.

She tried to help out with a brief description, but her words were more a dictionary definition than a real explanation. (“Gratuitous actions are those undertaken without any expectation of financial gain or other advantage, perhaps out of kindness or compassion or charity….”)

Well sure, I knew that already. The real mystery was what an economist could possibly study in these actions.

Weren’t acts of kindness and compassion the exact opposite of economic behavior. Or, putting it more bluntly, didn’t kind they start at the very place where economics comes to a screeching halt?

Was there really room in the dismal science for random acts of kindness?

But I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Back when I was a grad student, I’d discovered sociologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 book The Gift, which looked at communities where gift exchanges serve as a robust supplement to economic transactions. Mauss saw that these acts of seemingly disinterested generosity provide a social glue that bonds people together.

Gifts might be less efficient than market-driven transactions—where everything gets measured and quantified down to the second decimal point. But they play a similar function in society. Or maybe even a better function.

After all, gifts really are exchanges of value, in their own quirky way—although no money is involved. They made cash-free dealing possible long before the invention of debit cards. And they have an advantage over paying with paper or plastic, because they create goodwill and a sense of responsibility toward others in a way that economic transactions can never match.

All of us have seen this in our own lives. If your neighbor asks for a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, you don’t calculate the price. You give without asking for payment, and do so wisely, because you may need to ask a favor in return someday. The same is true of holiday gift-giving, which has a much larger signification than can be measured in dollars.

By the same token, if your spouse forgets to give you a gift on your birthday, the financial impact is probably the least of your concerns. The absence of a gift can be very destructive—and sometimes hurts more than a physical injury.

Back when I first studied gift exchange, I dismissed its economic importance—after all, it reflects only a tiny portion of our transactions. Perhaps it might interest an anthropologist, but only as a kind of curiosity item, a refreshing but impractical alternative to the real substance of economic life. But as I see it now, the gift economy is much larger than I realized.

In fact, I now believe that gifts are the most important part of our shared life.

For a start, gifting almost as large as the transaction-based economy. I’ve seen its predominance in my own life. I never charge my children for their meals. The many hours spent by my wife and me fulfilling the responsibilities of household life never show up on a payroll. We are gifting constantly in our family.

I have many friends involved with elder care or community service or church activities—and a long list of similar endeavors. They operate off-the-grid, so to speak—at least from a conventional economic perspective.

These are gift exchanges, pure and simple, and they are everywhere you look, even in a modern capitalist society. And they are just as essential—maybe even more so—than the transactions that take place in retail stores and Amazon.com.

But I’m concerned here with a different class of activities, ones that straddle these two spheres—and are hard to classify for that very reason. I’m talking specifically of artistic or creative pursuits, endeavors that are typically pursued for the intrinsic joy of sharing one’s gifts, but are frequently commoditized and placed on the market.

So let me ask a simple question. Are artistic creations part of the gift economy or the transaction economy?

That’s not an easy question to answer.

It took more than a half century before a major thinker pushed more deeply into the field of study initiated by Marcel Mauss in the 1920s. But when Lewis Hyde published his provocative book The Gift in 1983, he focused his attention primarily on the arts.

He understood that artists are very similar to the tribes and communities studied by Mauss. Creative people themselves are gifted—even the language we use here is revealing—and they feel a strong drive to share their gifts with others. Even more intriguing, their day-to-day lives prove the most incredible claim made by Hyde: namely the seemingly paradoxical assertion that gifts increase in value when given away.

“The increase is the core of the gift,” Hyde asserts confidently. But how can that possibly be true? When measured in dollars and cents, the act of giving destroys value. At best, we break even—assuming I get a gift of comparable value in return.

But is that really so?

Not in the arts. Take, for example, my own vocation in music. As strange as it seems, the more a musician gives, the greater the total value created. The musician who plays alone in the practice room creates very little value, and that’s true whether you measure it in dollars or in the less tangible psychological, emotional and social metrics of gift exchange. But when that same song is performed for a thousand people, its value increases enormously—and the catalyst here isn’t the transaction (the ticket price to a concert, for example), but the song itself, which becomes more powerful through this act of sharing.

In other words, music is what I call an anti-commodity—my name for things that aren’t exhausted when used or given away, but get larger and more valuable, like the fish and loaves in the gospel. In that way, a song is like love or friendship or trust, those other anti-commodities that increase with the giving rather than get depleted.

The same is true of a painting or novel or dramatic production and many other artistic creations. We have now arrived at what, in Hyde’s words, “seems at first to be a paradox of gift exchange: when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost.”

“Music is what I call an anti-commodity—my name for things that aren’t exhausted when used or given away, but get larger and more valuable.”

We have now entered into the crux of the dilemma facing gifted people in our cultural ecosystem, one that has grown into a huge crisis in the digital age. All creative people grasp, if only subconsciously, that their gifts were meant for giving. Even more to the point, the value of their gift increases (for both giver and receiver) through that open-hearted act of exchange.

We even have a special term for it in the digital age; it’s called going viral. And this unrestrained viral gifting may be the most potent force of our digital age. Even the President and the Pope want to give freely on the web in the hopes of going viral. But virality comes at a steep price—for the simple reason that is has no price.

The very act of sharing undermines the financial value of the gift. As Hyde has shown, the power of the gift erodes as soon as you demand payment. You could call this the “paywall dilemma.”

So take your pick—do you give or do you sell? When you embrace one of these strategies, it limits your freedom to pursue the other. In an extreme case, staying true to your gift may undermine the economic basis of your life. Even paying the rent and putting food on the table become acute challenges. On the other hand, when a gifted artist focuses primarily on financial gain, the gift is debased and might disappear completely.

Unlike Marcel Mauss or Lewis Hyde, I prefer to view gifts as the basis of a transcendental economy—or even a spiritual economy. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them,” Paul asserts in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. He adds that these are given us for the “common good.”

If this is true—and I believe it is—the Internet ought to serve as a reliable platform for sending our gifts out into in the world. Certainly there’s no more powerful tool for reaching out to the larger global community. In fact, I believe there might even be a moral imperative for each of us to do this—both as givers and receivers.

But the cruel truth of the web is that the gifted contribute to the digital world (often for free) only to see their gifts quickly appropriated by others who, like the buyers and sellers in the temple, debase everything they touch. The gift gets turned into a commodity, and is used by these merchants for self-serving interests and financial gain.

That’s increasingly true nowadays. The brutal economic underpinnings of the dominant digital platforms serve to punish the giver and destroy the transcendent, disinterested essence of the gift.

This gets us to the heart of artistic alienation in the digital age. Even artists without financial worries—maybe a working spouse or trust fund pays the bills—understand this conflict. If they give their talent away, they feel shortchanged and exploited, but if they attach a price tag to every creative act, they betray the very essence of their gift.

And if a miracle happens, say the artist gets rich on the art, the inevitable accusations of selling out will be voiced—and often from those who were the most loyal fans when the artist was operating in obscurity.

Most other professions lack this obsessive anxiety over transactions, unless they possess some creative or artistic component. Do dentists worry about inauthentic ways of filling cavities? Does a car mechanic who takes a better-paying job in a new auto shop fret about selling out? I don’t think so.

These conflicts in the artistic psyche have always existed, but they take on particular urgency in the Age of the Internet. Lewis Hyde wrote The Gift before the birth of the worldwide web, and never grappled with these trade-offs. Even later, when commenting on the Internet, Hyde didn’t seem to comprehend the crisis it has created for the gifted. In a postscript to the 25^th anniversary edition of his book Hyde actually offered optimistic predictions on how the Internet will serve as glorious platform for gift exchange.

He’s not completely mistaken. There are web platforms built on gratuitous giving. Just consider the many crowdsourcing platforms that help address everything from unpaid medical bills to impoverished artistry. These high tech tools participate in the true essence of the gift.

But the real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges. The shareholders and management of Facebook may act as if their corporate mandates are driven by friendship and goodwill—they even call everyone you know a friend, the same way Soviet commissars addressed everyone as comrade back in the day. But this is a smokescreen for a company built on money-making, not gift exchange. The same is true of Google, Instagram, TikTok, eBay, and almost any other web platform you can name.

“The real foundation of the Internet is businesses that pretend to be gift exchanges.”

Sometimes the language is overtly deceptive, but it’s not hard to see through the spin and hype. Silicon Valley may have put the word “pal” into Paypal, but what I’m sending through its payment platform is cold hard cash, not love and forgiveness. YouTube, despite the name, isn’t really about you—it’s about the estimated $40 billion in revenues the platform generates by “giving” away music and other apparent freebies in order to sell ads.

These businesses deliberately blur the boundaries between gift exchange and economic transactions. They have smartly constructed their platforms to lure the gifted into a faux gift exchange communities—built entirely on creative people who get paid as little as possible for their contributions.

You might even say that the digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day.

At first, these platforms did little to harm the cultural ecosystem. After all, nobody was ever forced to participate. A musician, for example, could still operate under the status quo, and sell albums….well, at least for a short period before demand for physical albums collapsed. But when the audience stopped buying—and who can blame them, when the largest companies in the world insist on giving away music for free?—that option disappeared.

No, you’re not forced to participate in the digital age, but good luck trying to find another way to survive as a gifted or creative person.

“The digital economy creates billionaires out of the unpaid labor of the gifted—who freely give their gifts every day.”

The damage done varies from field to field, but no area of creative work has emerged unscathed from this masquerade—in which transaction-based companies pretend that they are gift exchanges.

Journalists watch as newspaper after newspaper shuts down—more than 2,000 during the last two decades—but many still write their articles, although often with little or no pay. Photographers, videographers, illustrators, and dozens of other creative professionals have felt the same pinch. The gifted give while others prosper.

The deception is almost as disturbing as the economic impact. The largest companies in the world pretend they aren’t profit-driven enterprises, acting as if they were the Trobriand Islanders described in Mauss’s book The Gift. On the surface, companies like Facebook and Google give things away, and ask you to give stuff in return—which might be something as innocent as a status update about your restaurant meal.

But your gift to the digital platform is often far more problematic, for example private information about your health or finances or some other aspect of your personal life. In the most extreme cases, creative individuals are expected to give away the very basis of their livelihood.

No merchant or trader, no matter how greedy, ever dared do that in the past. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest,” economist Adam Smith once declared in a famous passage. But nowadays Mr. Smith would need to revise his inquiry into the wealth of nations. Mark. Zucherberg does want us to trust in his benevolence, and the same is true of Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai and other tech titans who run these behemoth web businesses.

We ought to withhold our trust. The very fact that these platforms are disguised as gift exchanges should alert us to the danger they represent. We need to be even more suspicious in dealing with them than we are in transacting with the butcher or baker—both because of their masquerade and also because of their enormous power, which is approaching monopolistic levels.

The true antecedents of Zuckerberg and company aren’t Rockefeller and Carnegie—capitalists who later became philanthropists on a grand scale—but rather that sly Dutch trader who purchased the island of Manhattan for 24 dollars of beads and trinkets. I’m fairly certain that the losing side in that transaction thought they were involved in a friendly gift exchange, just like the musicians who upload their songs to social media or the journalists who give free access to their writing via search engines.

The problem isn’t with gift exchange—which is a building block of all societies, and underpins our relationships of love, trust and friendship. The evil only emerges in that gray zone where transaction-driven traders pretend they operate on those compassionate values while counting every penny back in their lavish headquarters.

That gray zone now encompasses a huge portion of our economy, and almost all of our creative world. Of course, money still changes hands, but now it happens indirectly and out-of-sight. Meanwhile, the gifted people who create this value receive little or nothing.

Even those who agree with my claims here may have despaired of any solution. The digital age has arrived, they believe, and it’s pointless to fight it. Who can possibly prevail against the collective might of Google, Facebook, Apple and other tech giants?

But it’s important to remember that these corporations, for all their size and dominance, aren’t authoritarian governments. They really are vulnerable. That’s because they ultimately rely on hundreds of millions of individuals whose active daily participation in their schemes make the abuses possible.

And sometimes the gifted—or other parties—really do push back.

There are plenty of examples from the past of dominant companies exerting too much power, and getting forcibly downsized as a result. I’ve written elsewhere about the East India Company, one of the most evil businesses in history—and I’m sad to report that its economic model is very similar to Alphabet’s.

I could also point to Standard Oil, which once controlled 90% of the petroleum that made America run. But it eventually ran into an even more powerful force, namely the Supreme Court, which broke it up into 34 separate companies, each with a different mission and board of directors. Similar days of judgment arrived for AT&T, Sears and other enterprises who thought they could dictate their own terms.

But what do we do now?

1. First and foremost, we must demand absolute transparency. The charade of inviting artists to participate in a faux gift exchange, while billionaires get rich off their unpaid efforts needs to be called what it is—namely, a tool of economic exploitation.

2. In addition, we should make a public outcry when any business asks a creative professional to work for free. This is a shameful practice, and ought to be treated as such.

3. We also need to respect the intellectual property of the gifted. And we do this even when they act as if their creative efforts are pure gifts. That doesn’t justify their exploitation by others.

4. Finally, we must create true gift exchanges on the web—altruistic enterprises that support those gifted individuals in our midst. Some already exist—such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter. I also commend transaction-driven platforms (Bandcamp, Substack, etc.) when they create business models that reward the gifted more than the gatekeeper.

The Internet is a source of empowerment to all, not just to tech titans. When used by those motivated by generosity, compassion and fairness, it can be transformative. It can—and should—be an engine of caring and goodwill.

We should all want to be a part of that.

We are fortunate that the tools are at hand to make this happen. If we take advantage of these technologies, and use them with genuine reciprocity, just maybe it will go viral. That could be our gift to the future.