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Here's my Guardian review of Chris Anderson's excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As with The Long Tail, Free gave me lots to think about: it does a tremendous job of enumerating the economic and business opportunities derived from the net's capacity to deliver so much for free. However, I think that, as with The Long Tail, Free stops short of considering one of the most important aspects of the net: the extent to which purely non-economic, non-commercial activity is filling in niches that were formerly reserved for commercial undertakings, or were altogether invisible.
There's plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it's a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. Who gets which chair and desk at your office is more likely to be determined on the lines of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" than on the basis of the infallible wisdom of the marketplace. The internally socialistic, externally capitalistic character of most of our institutions tells us that there's something to the idea that markets may not be the solution to all our problems.
And here's where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.
And there is certainly some portion of this "free" activity that was created in a bid to join the non-free economy: would-be Hollywood auteurs who hope to be discovered on YouTube, for example. There's also plenty of blended free and non-free activity
But for the sizeable fraction of this material – and it is sizeable – that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the "price" of the material is "free".
Chris Anderson's Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short
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I've read the book as well as your review. I agree with your critique that Anderson misses the point about "free" activity that does not have a capitalist profit motive. Looking at history, capitalism has a tendency to co-opt supposed counter-cultural/"freedom" movements. What is to stop it from appropriating free? Free like piracy is just another business model. Even if Anderson's analysis is sloppy at times and an imperfect road map of how capitalists could appropriate "free", it may just well be prophetic of capitalism to come.
I haven't read Chris' book yet, but I'm wondering if he and Cory are getting hung up on a confusion between "price" and "cost". While "price" is the total of the resources someone pays to acquire something, and is all the marketplace cares about, to the producer "cost" is the total of the resources that went into producing the item and getting it to the person who finally possesses it, which may include the "price" of things that were used to produce the item.
Cost is important because the resources used cannot be used for something else. If you spend all day just acquiring enough to enable the survival of your family, you can't afford to give away much in philanthropy or charity. If you've got lots of stuff, that is, you are rich, you can afford to be generous.
All that is prologue to the thought I had when I first read Stewart Brand's "Information wants to be free..." comment. It seems to be a restatement of the economic dictum that "price falls to the marginal cost of production", the cost of making one more copy. The cost of digital copies tends toward zero, consisting of the medium used to store the copy and the effort that goes into copying, which means that the price should tend toward free.
In a world of 3D printers, or stereolithography machines, or whatever you want to call the devices used by Cory's "Makers", the information content, the model of the item and the algorithms the item can enact, are digital copies. The price of items should fall to the cost of raw materials, distribution, and the operation and maintenance of the copiers.
We might be at the beginning of an age where stuff, at least manufactured stuff, becomes very cheap if not free. Or, of course, I might be the one who is confused.
And those that control the blueprint data are the kings of that age, John. Thats why the copyright lobby is as large as it is. When most is done by automated systems, based on easy to copy data, those that holds the final say about the price and use of that data, controls the world economy.
Its basically diamond age...
Great point about copyright, turn. I am going to have to reread
"The Diamond Age". I obviously didn't grok it the first time.
The light bulb just went off about "After the Siege", as well.
[...] a conversation with writer Cory Doctorow by Diane Coutu in Harvard Business Review (behind the paywall): Coutu: What about the impoverished [...]