Good morning,

This is the season of gifting. And people who gift thoughtfully are a rare breed. So, what is it about gifts and gifting that makes it nuanced? This is a question Lewis Hyde explores deeply in the meticulously researched The Gift. 

“It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I

may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.

“But a gift makes a connection. To take the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table, and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal begins, a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his neighbour’s. And his neighbour will return the

gesture, filling the first man’s empty glass. In an economic sense nothing has happened. No one has any more wine than he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The French customarily tend to ignore people whom they do not know, but in these little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for an hour or more. ‘A conflict exists,’ says Levi-Strauss, ‘not very keen to be sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a state of tension between the norm of privacy and the fact of community… This is the fleeting but difficult situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace which does away with the mutual uncertainty.’ Spatial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions another exchange—conversation—and a whole series of trivial social ties unfolds.

“There are many such simple examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions…

“To take just one of the innumerable examples of marriage gifts, in New Caledonia when boys reach puberty they seek out girls from the clan complementary to their own and exchange tokens whose value and nature are set by custom. A boy’s first question to a girl whose favour he seeks is, ‘Will you take my gifts or not?’ The answer is sometimes ‘I will take them,’ and sometimes ‘I have taken the gifts of another man. I don’t want to exchange with you.’ To accept a boy’s gifts initiates a series of oscillating reciprocations which leads finally to the formal gifts of nuptial union. Courtship in New Caledonia, it seems, is no different from courtship throughout the world.”

A popular story that dominates headlines is how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace humans. We have, however, always argued it will either create a new class of jobs or both will work together. And this first person account by Laura Preston in The Guardian, who worked for a year as a backup to a chatbot called Brenda, is one of the best first person accounts we have read in recent times—it reinforces our view. 

“It was the spring of 2019. My time as a creative writing student had just come to an end, as had my funding, and the rent was due; I needed a job. I sent the recruiter my CV. Several phone interviews later, I was signing up for training slots and watching a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation on fair-housing law. I did a little maths: an operator made $25 an hour, and worked between 15 and 30 hours a week, depending on how lucky they were in the weekly shift lottery…

“(W)e operators, with our advanced degrees in the humanities, had aptitudes Brenda lacked. We were intuitive, articulate and sensitive to the finer points of delivery. At $25 an hour we also cost almost nothing to employ, by corporate standards. Under the Brenda-operator alliance, everyone came out ahead: the operators got paid better than they would as adjunct professors, and Brenda became more likeable, more convincing, more humane. Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed by PhDs in literature.