My friend Scott Shershow comes down on the side of the gift in his The Work and the Gift (sorry for the plot spoiler...).
Nature is a perpetual gift according to capitalist ideology. As Cameron Tonkinwise points out, "Mike Beard (State Senator, Republican, Shakopee, Minnesota) is getting media coverage for saying, 'God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.' " See my book The Poetics of Spice. Eternal abundance as the capitalist myth. Peel open a Puritan work ethicist and you'll find a drifty opium head.
Yet Cameron then argues, "An important opportunity in relation to the development of more sustainable futures (because less materials intense, but also with different socialities) is the re-emergence of sharing systems." Now watch the video.
Interesting yes? Online scholarship is surely part of this.
Okay, let's articulate the differences between this and the traditional circuit of modernity:
Nature as eternal gift < > human hoarding and consumerism