Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

"One night over dinner I asked Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s effects on society – especially politics, government, media, and business. He responded by talking about the potlatch. That’s a traditional celebration and feast of native peoples on the northwest coast of North America. Each celebrant contributes what food and goods they can. The highest status goes to those who give the most away.

“Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?’ Zuckerberg asks. “It’s an alternative to the market economy in a lot of less developed cultures. I’ll contribute something and give it to someone, and then out of obligation or generosity that person will give something back to me. The whole culture works on this framework of mutual giving. The thing that binds those communities together and makes the potlatch work is the fact that the community is small enough that people can see each other’s contributions. But once one of those societies gets past a certain point in size the system breaks down. People can no longer see everything that is going on, and you get freeloaders.”

Zuckerberg says Facebook and other forces on the Internet now create sufficient transparency for gift economies to operate at a large scale. “When there’s more openness, with everyone being able to express their opinion very quickly, more of the economy starts to operate like a gift economy. It puts the onus on companies and organizations to be more good, more trustworthy.” All this transparency and sharing and giving has implications, in his opinion, that go deep into society. “It’s really changing the way that governments work,” he says. “A more transparent world creates a better-governed world and a fairer world.”

This is, for him, a core belief. (David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, pp. 287-288)
Zuckerberg’s genius was to take the gift-based reputation system that makes hacker communities work and insert it at the heart of a new kind of sharing system – a system that enables people to share in public so that they can compete for prestige as they create a common pool of resources. The cultural roots of Facebook lie in hacker culture and the logic of the gift."