Working definition. Reciprocity is the circulation of benefit and obligation that keeps a relationship from becoming extraction.
Inherited meaning
Gift economies, mutual aid, ecology, and social life all depend on forms of return that are not reducible to immediate exchange. Reciprocity does not require identical contributions; it requires recognition that flourishing is relational.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI systems receive from creators, communities, users, workers, environments, and public knowledge. If value flows only toward the deployer, the system depletes the world it learns from. Reciprocity asks how generated capability returns nourishment to its sources.
What changes in practice
Trace each important input to the people or commons that sustained it. Build recognition, compensation, shared access, and contribution back into the model of value—not as charity after profit.