Every tool is a startup now. Every script is a SaaS product. Every neat hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon is, according to the prevailing wisdom, an MVP waiting for its first round of funding. We’ve lost the language to describe what it feels like to make something that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life.
Marcel Mauss published “The Gift” in 1925 and nearly a century later the tech world still hasn’t caught up with his central insight. Gift giving operates as a complete system with its own logic, its own power dynamics, its own concept of value. Gifts create social bonds and build trust in ways that market transactions can’t. The modern internet runs on tools that people built and gave away: Linux, Apache, Python, the cryptographic libraries that keep your bank details from floating around in plain text.
But the gift economy of software has been absorbed into the entrepreneurial economy. Open source became a go-to-market strategy. Free tools became lead magnets. There’s no conceptual space left for the third option, that you did it because you wanted to.
Covering: The Rule of St. Benedict and monastic labor, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, open source burnout, the long tail of human problems that markets will never solve, and why building something small and giving it away is one of the most valuable things you can do.
