The idea of a Gift economy comes down to goods given and services provided with no specific agreement, or expectation of anything in return. It is a philosophy and business model that has been around for centuries and is gaining popularity by with many people with Left wing or progressive ideologies, because of the current financial crisis and the corporate greed that supposedly fueled it.
It is quite popular offline in the form of restaurants and club nights that run on donations for entry where people can pay what they feel, if at all such as Melbourne's Lentil as Anything Restaurants and the popular unsigned bands night on Sunday's at the seminal Sneaky Dee's bar in Toronto. Online, Australia's Yoink.com carries the slogan 'Get giving', where people advertise unwanted goods to pass on for absolutely no charge or catch. There are also the many carpooling, hitchhiking and couch-surfing websites globally that continue with unconditional acts of kindness to fuel the 'free economy'.
The Amazon.com Honor System allows webmasters to request that gift receivers make donations for maintenance, instead of their standard subscription fee. By simply placing an Amazon.com donation box on the front page of participating sites, the receivers can provide instant reciprocation by immediate donations. In other words, they can 'donate' cash to their favourite sites on the World Wide Web. The Amazon Honor System commenced Fall 2001 but was discontinued late 2008, replaced by Amazon Payments. However, they claim to be possibly implementing a similar system in the near future.
It has been a large contribution of their charitable work such as relief agencies like the American Red Cross. By early 2005, almost 200,000 people had donated over $15.7 million US.
Some of the best examples of a gift economy can be found in tribal and pre-tribal systems. Most hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, are a gift economy, with food shared freely among members of the group. This works to ensure the overall health of the group by keeping all members strong, and protects individual members from their own times of famine. If a group goes out hunting, for example, and only one hunter finds any game, he could hoard that game, making themselves healthier, but condemning the rest of the tribe to malnourishment.
(McGuigan, B.), What is a Gift Economy?.
