Abstrakt
This article aims to analyze a specific form of the gift and its role in human lives, and to explore the moral and ethical values in which the gift is entangled. In 2012, Czech millionaire and Buddhist Libor Malý founded the "generous social network" Hearth.net as the basis of a new social and economic system.
Hearth is a space where users offer and receive gifts without any expectation of a counter-gift. The network raises a debate concerning the nature of the gift and promotes heterogeneous approaches to the gift.
Based on long-term ethnographic research on Hearth.net investigating gift giving, receiving, soliciting, and reciprocity, I argue that the gift reflects insecurities in human lives and relations. I perceive the gift as a hybrid that comprises the ideology of the pure gift, positive moral values, desire for an alternative system, pragmatic choices of everyday life, and tools of the market economy.
Thanks to this multiplicity, the gift provides an ambiguous yet safe category through which individual development and improvement of society can be carried out. It represents an anchor for morality in the contemporary elusive world.