The limits of giving it all away

On Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World."

No book from my shelves features more daunting blurbs than my 25th anniversary edition of Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World” (originally published in 1979). Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer are all here as touts, because, in David Foster Wallace’s words, “No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged.”

Challenge accepted. But after a brisk read, I feel only half-changed by “The Gift,” even provoked to some consternation about the limits of sharing in the 21st century.

“The Gift” speaks to that pervasive feeling among creatives that modern life is hostile to our existence. Like an abridged Das Kapital for artists, Hyde’s cult classic argues that our exuberant, creative, spiritual, communal drive (represented by the Greek eros) has been starved out by our rational, dispassionate, property-seeking, individualistic, acquisitive selves (logos). Artists need less logos and more eros. A contrast is “gift economies,” like tribal and sacrificial cultures, where people are nourished by receiving gifts but only fulfilled if those gifts are given away, creating a benevolent cycle where material gain is beside the point. “In communities drawn together by gift exchange, ‘status,’ ‘prestige’ or ‘esteem’ take the place of cash remuneration,” Hyde writes. The worst thing you can be in a gift economy is an accumulator, a hoarder, a profiteer — a capitalist.

Well, we’re all capitalists now. Rather, the cost of our creativity only gets more extreme alongside capitalism’s generation of explosive wealth and productivity gains. “There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor,” Hyde writes in a footnote. “When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of the work.” The hours you spend writing poetry only gets more costly in relative terms when you could have spent those same hours working as an AI knowledge architect earning six figures or higher. The machines move faster and faster, but reading Goethe, meditating, praying to your tutelary spirits, doing whatever channels the divinities of human inspiration, never gets more efficient. The question Hyde poses is how artists can cultivate that old gift-receiving and gift-giving spirit that causes creativity to flourish.

At the time “The Gift” was reissued in the mid-2000s (when I was gifted my copy of the book), we were entering the peak “information wants to be free” era. What if you just tried giving away your work and recreate the benevolent cycle? Creative Commons and Wikipedia had just been founded and were gaining traction; Radiohead released “In Rainbows” digitally on a pay-whatever-you-want basis, and many fans paid when they didn’t have to; author Cory Doctorow gave his books away for free and said it juiced his print sales. The absurd Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended copyrights to protect characters like Mickey Mouse from falling into public domain for another 20 years, was a great policy evil of the time. Copyrights needed to become more permissive, not more restrictive.

It takes retrospect to understand how utterly the share-everything movement of the 2000s won the argument. As a digital media Millennial, I’ve spent much of my adult life receiving and generating free content in online sharing economies, first through blogs (like this newsletter), then through social media (where you may have found me sharing this piece), now through unlimited AI-scraped and -generated content (where these words will be ingested into a vast eddy of human-generated inputs). I’m out here freely receiving and giving myself away. More people than ever are probably engaged in some degree of creative activity. So why does it seem like creatives are more miserable today than when Hyde published “The Gift” in 1979, when it was objectively harder to encounter and distribute creative expression?

I did some light googling. Of the blurbers on my 2007 edition of Hyde’s “The Gift,” only Jonathan Lethem — who wrote a famous artistically “plagiarized” essay that same year for Harper’s made up of other writers’ lines, called “The Ecstasy of Influence” — seems especially sanguine about the state of things. Generative AI is appropriative, but so are artists, Lethem said in a recent interview: “I’m avoiding the word ‘original’ because that cuts against my whole other rhetoric that maybe fewer things are original than we like to think.”

Margaret Atwood, in contrast, is among the authors to sign an Authors Guild letter demanding permission and compensation from AI companies for training on copyrighted works, which are the arguments of copyright maximalists: “In the past decade or so, authors have experienced a forty percent decline in income, and the current median income for full-time writers in 2022 was only $23,000.” (I can’t tell if the “G Dyer” on the same Authors Guild letter belongs to fellow “The Gift” blurber Geoff Dyer.)

Fellow blurber Zadie Smith could not get further offline if she tried. She raves against the evils of social media as a “behavior modification system” and refuses to own a smartphone. From a 2024 interview with Ezra Klein:

All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.

And when I look at the people who have designed these things — what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be — the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it.

And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV-addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It’s going to be amazing. That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred. …

And though I’ve missed most of it, I know that the internet is a culture and it’s joyful to so many people. And it’s been nothing but L.O.L.s and pleasure and there’s been delight all over it, just as there was delight in television for me. But the political consequences are clear. It’s so boring to say, but just the effect on people’s ability to attend has been radical.

I certainly don’t know I’d be happier if I were to turn away from having a more shareable life online, to treat my writing more like a commodity, locked up on the shelves at CVS. Fellow independent digital writers have increasingly come to see paywallification as a necessary evil. But like Zadie Smith, I feel pulled to spend more time away from so much free sharing. I resent being told I should return to Elon Musk’s X.com because of its network effects, that the communal sharing there would give me more influence. Don’t I want more influence? One of the rewards of gift economies is supposed to be prestige. Maybe I’m not properly seeing the prestige in it.