The unexpected gift economies thriving online

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New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser was recently interviewed by Judy Woodruff for her PBS News Hours series, America at a Crossroads. “In the digital world, we’ve lived in this world that’s just private companies,” said Eli. “That’s like organizing your whole society in a mall.”

But it’s important to remember — that’s not the only way to live! Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, first broke our collective brains with her international bestseller, Braiding Sweetgrass. Her new book, The Serviceberry, presents a radical vision for localized living, away from commercialism and towards more personal, human connection and mutual reliance.

Below, writers Kelly (Oakland, CA) and Anna Pendergrast (Wellington, NZ), who wrote previously for our digital magazine, offer a look at how this vision can work digitally, and the cracks in the digital mall facade that are worth learning more about.

And, if you want to help build up some reciprocity where you live, here's an opportunity: We’re in the early stages of building a new online social product for local communities and are looking for folks who want to experiment with us and help bring it to their local area. Learn more here.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2024 book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, made ripples with its evocative description of an interconnected gift economy underpinned by relationships, ongoing cycles of reciprocity, and the abundance gained by sharing what you have:

Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough, rather than far more than our share. The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met by sharing what we have.

In The Serviceberry (which was first published as an essay before being expanded into a book), most of Kimmerer's examples of gift economies relate to local ecologies and small-scale localized systems of generosity and reciprocity. While she briefly touches on digitally-mediated and online gift economies, most of the book is focused resolutely on the IRL: harvests, plant ecologies, local exchanges.

In this newsletter, we take a deeper look at some of the themes Kimmerer expounds in The Serviceberry, and consider how they might manifest in digital projects and online spaces. Specifically, we explore tools that support reciprocity at a community level, ways people are protecting and contributing to the knowledge commons, and what it might look like to build digital technologies within natural limits. Some of these projects work with the dominant commercialised platforms, but many are actively trying to build something new or independent.


Builders of digital social spaces should take note of the non-traditional forms and functions that have enabled these products and services to find unconventional success.Stewards might recognize the innovation in self-governance and collaboration in these different examples.

On first reading, some of the concepts and anecdotes in The Serviceberry felt a little like conventional wisdom rather than a new lens through which to view resource sharing. For us this perhaps reflects that some of the concepts discussed in a North American Indigenous context have similarities to those present in Māori culture that we have both had the privilege of learning from.

If you’re familiar with Kimmerer’s previous work, or with ideas about donut economics or mutual aid, you might notice that The Serviceberry draws from adjacent ideas. However, Kimmerer’s encouragement to give freely and consider how much is enough has stayed with us long after reading, and her words continue to inform the thinking about community and reciprocity that we’ve been exploring in our work and lives this year.

The examples outlined below only scratch the surface. If you’ve heard of, or participated in, digital projects or spaces that embody the kind of reciprocity and gift economies Kimmerer discusses, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Reciprocity at the scale of community

Kimmerer talks about a scale of gift economy that is purposefully small and usually based on individual, or one-to-few relationships. However, she does expand her field of vision to consider what resource sharing and reciprocity might look like at a (local) community level, recognising that increasing the scale of exchange can also increase the potential for positive impact. In our local communities and networks, we see many powerful examples where digital tools and platforms are vital tools to support the distribution of resources at a community scale.

Los Angeles-based art project Endless Orchard encourages people to develop communal resources by growing, tending, and mapping fruit trees in their local areas and then share the resulting bounty — including by making jam with others. The Endless Orchard website has a crowdsourced map with the location of thousands of publicly accessible fruit trees and bushes from places as far afield as Greece, Argentina and Australia.

A screenshot of the Endless Orchard map, zoomed into Los Angeles, showing where there are fruit trees people have signed up to share from.

Fundraising platforms like GoFundMe have become vital tools to fund people’s immediate needs during and after emergencies, but the distribution of money through these platforms can tend to favour affluent people with strong social capital and connections. During recent disasters and crises, community organisations and activists have worked to counter this bias towards already-wealthy fundraisers by compiling spreadsheets of verified GoFundMe pages to expand and amplify community requests for support.

Following the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, lists were compiled for Black, Latino, and disabled folks who were displaced. Also, during the ongoing conflict in Gaza, Operation Olive Branch was created to support and amplify aid requests of Palestinian families, including with a centralized spreadsheet of aid requests. These lists were circulated widely on social media, including short form video platforms like TikTok.

Online platforms and tools also facilitate in-community (offline) giving and lending. FreeCycle and the Buy Nothing Project have a global reach and facilitate the gifting of everything from plant cuttings to bicycles to almost-expired cosmetics. Outside the bigger platforms, there are local platforms and services like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, which New_ Public’s research found to enable powerful acts of reciprocity and building community resilience. FPF is a purposely-small, family-owned public benefit corporation with very strong moderation, two decades of successful operation, and over 230,000 active users across more than 200 locally-specific forums.

Behind these projects and platforms is a sense of trust that community members will take what they need and leave enough for others. This reflects Kimmerer’s description of the “honorable harvest” — a set of usually unwritten guidelines found across many Indigenous cultures that encourage people to harvest with “restraint, respect, reverence, and reciprocity.” For those considering facilitating digitally-supported local gift communities, tools like New_ Public’s guidance for building flourishing online communities can help to ensure they’re inclusive, uplifting, and public-spirited.

Building and maintaining the knowledge commons

While most of Kimmerer’s examples of the gift economy are rooted in physical communities, she notes that her students have kept her in the loop with examples of digital gift economies — often in the form of free and generous knowledge exchange on YouTube and TikTok.

The big commercial video platforms are most well known, but there are a suite of other websites and tools designed specifically for people to contribute to an information commons in a volunteer capacity, without the commercial growth imperatives and the algorithmic distortions. They usually provide specific parameters and guidelines for contributing, and help to build up collective knowledge bases in a methodical way. Wikipedia is the largest and most prominent example, with millions of articles and over 125,000 Wikipedia user accounts making edits to the English site in the past month.

WatchDuty provides everyone from individuals to emergency response centres with real-time information about fire risk and response from verified sources. The service, which currently covers 22 states, gained over 2 million new users during the LA wildfires and filled a huge, urgent need for reliable and centralized fire updates in a rapidly-changing information ecosystem. WatchDuty is a non-profit and largely relies on volunteers, who monitor official radio broadcasts and other information sources around the clock and provide locally-relevant updates to users.

Citizen science enables members of the public to contribute to scientific projects by collecting, uploading and analyzing data, often about particular species or natural features. iNaturalist, a non-profit founded in 2008, lets people log and identify plants in their local area, and user findings are shared with scientific data repositories like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Merlin Bird ID from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been trained by volunteers who have contributed over three million descriptors to help match users’ observations of birds in their area to the most likely species. You can find more projects, and perhaps even contribute, through the catalogs put together by organisations like the New Zealand Science Learning Hub and the US government’s Citizen Science page.

There is also a growing movement that empowers people to keep their things working for longer. iFixit, which sells repair tools and parts for device repair, also hosts a robust community that develops manuals and other resources to teach people how to fix stuff — from smart phones to technical medical equipment. Billed as the “world’s largest repair manual,” iFixit provides free repair guides for a mind-boggling range of items and advocates for Right to Repair legislation.

It’s worth remembering that YouTube and TikTok, as well as new, massive general-purpose AI models like ChatGPT, are built on our collective knowledge and exist to generate vast ad revenues. In contrast, these not-for-profit platforms and collaborative projects all need funding, and they rely on a variety of income streams, from selling products to receiving grants. In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer talks about libraries as examples of a community-scale gift economy, paid for by taxes. Whether via grants or sales or taxes, we think it is essential to support models that facilitate the exchange of knowledge outside the extractive capitalist system.

An internet with natural limits

Kimmerer introduces readers to the idea of “enoughness” — taking only enough rather than far more than our share. “Recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more,” she writes. What does “enoughness” look like in a digital context? For us, this involves considering ways to minimize the resources used in the production of digital devices, data storage, and running websites.

Low-powered website design is an emerging practice of building websites to reduce the energy used, especially to display graphics and videos. Low-tech Magazine takes this idea to the limit, running the website on a small solar-powered server, with a website that adjusts depending on the amount of sunlight and battery power available. It also means that sometimes (like if it’s been cloudy for too long) the website just isn’t online.

Companies like Backmarket and even BestBuy refurbish and sell used smartphones and laptops, reducing the need to extract raw materials to produce new devices. In addition, initiatives like French company Dipli’s “Re program” trade-in service make buying used easier and more alluring to customers otherwise accustomed to having the newest and shiniest devices.

Complex computation is resource intensive, and the energy and water it takes to run hyper-scale data centres is particularly important in the current context of fast-proliferating, energy-demanding generative AI tools. Before we collectively concede that the obvious, inevitable next step is to use more electricity than ever before and build larger data centers than ever before, there is an opportunity to pause and consider alternatives in how things are built, and whether the endless expansion of digital capabilities and AI tools are in fact benefitting people and the planet. What would it look like to build a digital ecosystem within natural limits?

We’d love to hear from you: Have you heard of or participated in digital projects or spaces that embody the kind of reciprocity and gift economy Kimmerer discusses? Please comment below and keep the conversation going.

–Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast, Antistatic