We Have Gift-Feeds, Not Free Tiers - SVF Journals
JULY 21ST, 2026
Today I'd like to say a bit about why Studio Slowcore calls our all-access feeds gift-feeds rather than free tiers to distinguish them from the keyholders-only groups.
If we describe the feeds as "free," that's typically interpreted in market terms. One implication of that framing is that our feeds have no value and somehow magically carry no costs, or at least no costs that should concern the reader.
Framing them as "free," then, would not be a neutral act. "Free" means the structural costs of production and coordination stay hidden by default, which in turn makes it harder to raise good-faith questions about reciprocity obligations.
Our gift-feeds both deliver gift-economic value and carry production/coordination costs. Calling them gift-feeds is helpful for us because it offers more space to make both the gift-value and the costs visible.
We're also thinking about how we might handle commerce in ways that don't extract "surplus" value from the gift-flows and siphon it away from artists and other value-creators without their informed consent. As David Bollier explains, Lewis Hyde points out that it's the gift-flows that generate the increase in value in the first place:
"Lewis Hyde explains how the circulation of gifts generates increases of value: “Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not earn profit, they give increase. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange, the increase stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit.” So treating the value generated by gift economies objectifies the surplus as money, removes it from circulation for private control, and in effect renders it dead (except as a future source for capital)."
~ David Bollier, from Commoning and Changemaking
How, I wonder, should Studio Slowcore think about that distinction between "give increase" and "earn profit" in the context of our hybrid gift + market endeavor?
I don't think it means that setting prices for some of our work or keeping some kinds of value behind a paywall removes all possibility of "give increase" in the gift sense that Bollier details above.
What else might it mean?
Food for thought.
Slowcore Value Flow Journals is a series of exploratory musings and behind-the-scenes process notes. I post them here in the SVF gift-feed whenever they want to be shared.
Here are the rest of the entries in the SVF Journals series thus far. As with everything in our Slowcore Dark Forest, we welcome new comments on previous posts anytime, and will respond no matter how long it's been since the last activity.
Quote source: Michael Erard - A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
