Evolution of the Internet: Gift Economy vs. Profit
From the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Oct. 3, 1995
This article was published shortly after I became the president of Twin Cities Free-Net, after the departure of TCFN’s founding president, Olaf Holt.
While the article says that the turn toward profit on the internet “created a crisis” for me and others, that wording seems a little over the top. I was certainly aware of the trend toward for-profit activity on the net, and I saw it as inevitable. But I believed that commercial activity would be able to live comfortably side-by-side with the internet’s traditional gift economy. Twenty years later, I think the truth of this is self-evident.
(If the text in this first section of the article is too small to read, just click on the image to expand it.)