Describing the McDonald’s double cheeseburger as “the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” might seem beyond fanciful, but according to the author of Freakonomics, it is not as absurd a suggestion as it appears.

So when I say the internet is a gift economy, I don’t just mean that many of us read and watch and write and post for free. I mean that the way content changes hands on the internet works more like a potlatch than the stock market.

I started thinking of the internet in this way after reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a modern classic that describes the artistic process using the anthropological literature on gift exchange. Gift exchanges, says Hyde, paraphrasing Marcel Mauss, create “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” The gift must always be kept in motion. If you’re a one of the Uduk people in northeast Africa, for example, and someone gives you a goat, you can kill the goat and throw a big party, or you can give the goat’s milk to your neighbors, but you can’t use the goat to start an artisanal cheese business. “One man’s gift … must not be another man’s capital.”

Another example Hyde offers is the Kula gift exchange practiced by the Massim people in the South Pacific. Two items circulate in constant, ceremonial exchange: red shell necklaces move clockwise and armshells move counter-clockwise. You are obligated to give an armshell and receive a necklace in return, then pass the necklace on in the other direction. If one person refuses to give, the circle, and the community it creates, breaks.

Wherefrom comes this urge to expose such traumatic interiors? After all, hoarding can be nothing new – it’s easy to imagine a Cyclops’s cavern stuffed to the roof with sheep bones, cheese rinds and the remains of hapless Argonauts. The splurge of reality obesity shows that the explanation is simple: schadenfreude. We look upon those poor wobblers being shaken to their core by life coaches and think to ourselves, I may be a little on the tubby side but – Jesus! – I’m not that bad. Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and, for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds us.

In the darkest depths of terra firma, springtails, a humble class of creepy-crawlies, quietly go about their business. Researchers documenting life in the world’s deepest cave, Krubera-Voronya on the eastern side of the Black Sea, discovered four new species of springtail, including the eyeless Anurida stereoodorata (inset), which subsist on fungi and decaying organic material. The intrepid scientists monitored sections of the cave for a month, looking for life using pitfall traps baited with cheese. Two of the species, Plutomurus ortobalaganensis (pictured above), found 1980 meters down, and Schaefferia profundissima found 1600 meters down, now hold the record for deepest living underground invertebrates, researchers report today in Terrestrial Arthropod Reviews. Their new finds bury the previous record-holder for deepest-dwelling springtail, Ongulonychiurus colpus, a Spanish cave creature found 550 meters down. And since these new species were one of the most common decomposers in Krubera-Voronya cave, they probably have no need to snatch creatures from the surface for food—as H.G. Wells’s subterranean Morlocks did in The Time Machine.

On value of cheese, mutilated limbs and torture tools...

The value of an item is surprisingly flexible in open-world RPGs. It can be determined by three factors - the game’s formal currency, the player’s personal tastes and its rareness. In game worlds where the player has somewhere to call home and a large enough range of items, those items create their own economies of worth. Give someone a home, and if they have any pride they’ll start putting possessions in it.

Bethesda is the king of providing this kind of player-determined canvas. Megaton’s house in Fallout 3 was always a ridiculous depository for me, being the place where I dump the spoils of scouring the wasteland, which I did purely for my own sense of achievement (and something to show off for laughs). I’d fill the entry hall with rocket launchers and miniguns while stockpiling ammunition, drugs, cigarettes and teddy bears on the upper floor.

Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of papyrus and paper, books were often made of the pumice-smoothed skins of sheep, goats, deer, or, most luxuriously, of an aborted calf. The act of writing required rulers, awls, fine pens, and weights to keep the surfaces flat. Ink was a mix of soot, water, and tree gum; it was revised with knives, razors, brushes, rags, and page-restoring mixtures of milk, cheese, and lime. Squirming black creatures called bookworms liked to eat these pages, along with wool blankets and cream cheese. In the silence of monastery libraries, even the books’ contents were indicated by bodily gestures. Monks copying pagan books requested them by scratching their ears like dogs with fleas, or, if the book were particularly offensive, shoving two fingers in their mouths, as if gagging. In Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, these objects, offensive or sacred, are the primary players.

“What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? - a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at all costs expel, excise, reject? Or something like a parasite, with which we must negotiate a contract of symbiosis? I lean toward the second solution, as life itself does. l’m even willing to bet that in the future the best treatment for cancer will switch from eliminating it to a method that will profit from its dynamism.

Why? Because, objectively, we have to continue living with cancers, with germs, with evil and even violence. It’s better to find a symbiotic equilibrium, even fairly primitive, than to reopen a war that is always lost because we and the enemy find renewed force in the relationship. If we were to implacably dean up ail the germs, as Puritanism would have us do, they would soon become resistant to our techniques of elimination and require new armaments. Instead, why not culture them in curdled milk, which sometimes results in delicious cheeses?” - Quote source: Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time Inspiration for posting: Re-engineering human cells to attack cancer

nevver:

Get the cheese

Look, I wouldn’t trade the 21st century for any other. We have toilet paper and vitamin-fortified milk and a measles vaccine. We can buy avocados in Fairbanks in January. But sometimes, particularly in the United States, we tend to put too much faith into the transformative powers of technology. Is progress really a curve that sweeps perpetually, unfailingly higher? Wasn’t toy-making or winemaking or milk-making or cheese-making or cement-making sometimes performed with more skill 300 or 700 or 1,900 years ago? I think of a tour guide I once overheard in the Roman Forum. She pointed with the tip of a folded umbrella at an excavation and said, “Notice how the masonry gets better the earlier we go.” Perhaps the most compelling argument against geoengineering is that the whole thing is a massive and ruinous distraction. We ought to be sharply curbing our appetites right now, not having hypothetical debates about where we might build mile-long tea-saucer cannons.