This is actually another post on the relationship of certain business models to generosity, but is not called The Business of Generosity (Part 5) because the series is getting too long and this post seeks the underlying ideas related to the quality of generosity.

I wrote in an earlier post about Kevin Kelly and his ideas about a new economy growing out of the basic free nature of internet products. Here, in a Wired article by Chris Anderson, is an even more direct article about how free is currently working as an e-business model. It is interesting to read, not only because he gives a wonderful example from the past (Gillette razor blades) but because he goes on to break down different business models in which free works. Why does it feel like free should be capitalized in this context, as if it is the name of a model (Free)? Anderson also applies the word abundance and refers to a gift economy, formerly terms associated with the cultural fringe of hippie communes and visionary socialists. Here is a short video presenting the context for this discussion:

These ideas, that our economy has a dominant and growing section based around things being given away, are very exciting. Imagine actually having a functional gift-economy based on an abundance model? This might mean that if we can give all people access (and that is a big if), that quite suddenly the have-nots will not be separated from the haves and we might have socio-economic equity at a level never possible before. However, I am also very concerned about the term generosity being applied to this. After all, at this point no matter how much is given away free, it is in the name of fueling the huge revenues of for-profit companies like Google and Yahoo. It cannot be called a model based on manipulation, however businesses have made corporate profits the goal of all this “free”-dom.

Here is a slideshow by Neil Perkins about marketing based on a free and generosity model. Part of it is clearly aimed at sales and new kind of aggressive marketing. And part of it is about growing meaning and happiness for everyone. Are we being old fashioned thinkers in seeing these two intents as mutually exclusive? Have a look:

My big concern is that generosity gets pulled into this new thinking, where marketing for financial profit also promotes altruistic values about improving life and spreading happiness. Perhaps we need a new word for generosity because by definition that quality is not self-interested. The word derives from the Latin generosus ‘noble, magnanimous’, and magnanimous derives from the Latin magnus ‘great’ + animus ‘soul’. If sales techniques are also promoting human values at the level of our souls, that will not only require new ways of thinking about what it means to be human, but will require new language to describe it. I hope I am not being jaded and rigid here, since unimaginable positive change may be within reach.