The central relationship between personal practice and social change (the evolution of society) is that social change starts with people, with each individual, and thus as personal practice powerfully influences individuals, it influences social change (through the contributions of these individuals). Personal practice provides a stable foundation to build upon, a meaningful source for influences that can spread far wider than the individual.

Social change is nothing more than individual change observed from afar; the growth of a forest is nothing but the growth of individual plants and trees and blades of grass. One spreads compassion by being compassionate; one spreads love by being love; one empowers by being powerful (in communication and relationship).

I can’t quite say what contribution I’ve made to this world so far, but I try to be a positive force, first and foremost, by who I am. Our power to affect change is manifested daily in interactions with baristas, drivers, sales clerks, beggars, family, friends and strangers. Every interaction is an opportunity to spread love, acceptance and possibility (or hate, judgement and negativity, which we often do unconsciously). Every interaction is an opportunity to serve. Our influence on the world comes not first from what we do — our material contributions and accredited accomplishments — but from who we are, not only to those we like and those we know but to every single person we encounter (and to ourselves!). It’s from this place of being that doing arises.

Personal practice helps us to guide and shape who we are; our ways of being. To be one who cares, who loves, who empowers, who inspires, is to be a powerful force of potential in the world. It is to be the possibility of social change, one interaction at a time. Social change happens on many scales, but it starts small, with every single one of us.

Table of Contents:
1 Summary of key concepts in Free: The future of a radical price
     1.1 Atoms vs. bits
     1.2 Value is no longer determined by price
     1.3 Making money from Free
     1.4 Piracy
     1.5 Economics of abundance
     1.6 “You can’t stop Free.”
2 Free in context: Relation to other ideas and theories
     2.1 Chris Anderson’s qualifications
     2.2 Building on past work
     2.3 New Rules for a New Economy by Kevin Kelly
     2.4 Related theories
     2.5 Karl Marx’s alienated labor
     2.6 Responses to Free
     2.7 Free in practice
     2.8 Chris Anderson, technological determinist?
3 Bibliography
4 Footnotes

Summary of key concepts in Free: The future of a radical price

The reigning logic of the 20th century has been that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Essentially, even if you’re not paying directly, there’s always an associated cost. In Free: The future of a radical price (2009), Chris Anderson challenges this assumption, claiming that this economic maxim is no longer true: with zero as the prevailing base price and economic models of Free revolutionizing various markets, there is such a thing as something for nothing¹.

In the 21st century, there are things that are genuinely free, as opposed to being merely samples, promotions or products that require continued investment (like razors or game systems). Free went from a marketing method to a new economic model, asserts Anderson, and Free has now become the default.

Atoms vs. bits

A key factor behind this transformation is the distinction between atoms, i.e. what’s physically real, versus bits, i.e. what’s virtual and digital (the distinction is also presented as offline versus online). Free is driven by this transition from atoms to bits, and the underlying technologies behind it: computer processors, bandwidth and digital storage, which are continually decreasing in price, to the point where they become “too cheap to meter” (Anderson 77). Prices inevitably fall to to the marginal cost in a competitive market, and as “the most competitive market the world has ever seen,” the Internet creates a situation where “Free becomes not just an option but an inevitability” (172-173, 241).

Anderson takes the oft-repeated maxim “Information wants to be free” (which he covers in the book, 94-100) one step further: “Bits want to be Free”² (241). He explains the significance of the decreasing costs of the technologies that power the Internet thusly:

Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. This is the engine behind the new Free, the one that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. In a world where prices always seem to go up, the cost of anything built on these three technologies will always go down. And keep going down, until it is as close to zero as possible. (78)

“It’s a consumers paradise,” he writes, “The Web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100 percent off” (238).

However, it’s not just digital that’s drawn towards Free: “Atoms would like to be free, too,” he says, but the marginal costs are rarely so low (241). Nonetheless, the Free phenomenon is hardly unique to the digital world. A thriving economy based on many Free concepts exists in China, where “piracy has won” (199), and is accepted as normal and commonplace³ (203). Many of the effects of Free seen online (in the world of bits) can be seen offline in China and Brazil (in the world of atoms).

Anderson acknowledges that “Free sometimes comes with strings attached,” like advertising, limits and bait and switch. But this is mostly 20th century thinking, with atoms. With 21st century Free — digital bits — “there is no need for hidden costs” (although they may still exist) (219).

Value is no longer determined by price

The advent of genuine Free has shifted the determination of value from price to other factors, and created new nonmonetary economies. It is also driven by nonmonetary incentives, like reputation, attention, expression, recognition, trust, and knowledge. Herbert Simon notes that “in an information-rich world… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon). Scarcity of money normally regulates what we purchase, but online, with the abundance of Free, Anderson says that two nonmonetary factors replace money as the primary currency: reputation and attention (creating the “attention economy” and the “reputation economy”) (181).

While the value of these is not new, online they are easily measurable and “becoming more like a real economy every day” (181). With the hyperlink came “a formal language for the exchange of attention and reputation, and currencies for both” (182). An example of this is Google, which has created a “real marketplace of reputation,” with PageRank (the system that determines website ranking in Google results) as the “gold standard of reputation” (183-184). But Google is just one economy and one currency — the Internet is filled with others, each with their own systems and currencies, like Facebook (friends), Twitter (followers), eBay (buyer and seller ratings), reddit (karma), etc. “The quantification of attention and reputation is now a global endeavor,” writes Anderson, “reputation that was once intangible is now increasingly concrete” (184). Anderson says that it’s not difficult to convert attention and reputation into money.

The explanation for this shift away from monetary value builds off of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which Anderson applies in the context of information. Once our need for basic information, knowledge and entertainment is fulfilled, we move to the next level and become more discriminatory, even ourselves creating. Furthermore, when basic tangible needs are met (as they often are today), we find ourselves with extra time, energy and knowledge not fully utilized by our work, and emotional and intellectual needs not satisfied.

“What ‘free labor’ in an area that we value grants us is respect, attention, expression, and an audience,” writes Anderson, “doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary” (189). On Maslow’s hierarchy, this would be the highest level, self-actualization. The Web provides an unprecedented opportunity for such nonmonetary exchanges:

No wonder the Web exploded, driven by volunteer labor—it made people happy to be creative, to contribute, to have an impact, and to be recognized as an expert in something. The potential for such a nonmonetary production economy has been in our society for centuries, waiting for the social systems and tools to emerge to fully realize it. The Web provided those tools, and suddenly a market of free exchange arose. (189)

Making money from Free

While Free represents a de-monetization of the digital economy (a shift from direct monetary gains to those of reputation, attention, etc.) and of many traditional businesses as well (Anderson 131), that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of opportunities to make money, even in a Free economy⁴.

The entire thesis of the book, according to Anderson, is that “making money around Free will be the future of business” (230). The key to this is finding the adjacent scarcity (to what’s Free), like selling support for free software. “Free makes other things more valuable,” writes Anderson, “Every abundance creates a new scarcity” (243). Another obvious way to compete with Free is to offer something better or different.

Anderson says there are hundreds of business models built on Free, all of which “are based on the notion that free stuff does have value and the way we measure that is through people’s actions. There is no greater test of what people value than what they choose to spend their time on” (224).

While estimating exactly how much money Free generates is difficult, especially considering that there’s so much nonmonetary value involved, Anderson does attempt to quantify the extensive Free economy. Noting, however, that there are a lot of Free economies: “from the formal economy of business to the informal economy of volunteerism,” as well as the gift economy and economies that can’t be measured by dollars and cents, like those of attention and reputation (162-164). Nonetheless, in terms of what can be defined in dollars and cents, Anderson roughly estimates the worldwide Free economy to be at least $300 billion, and likely more. That’s an extrapolation of his estimate of $116-150 billion in the United States, which is made up of mostly $80-100 billion in advertising-supported content and services (online and offline), and $36 billion in freemium (including the online video game market and the open source software market, of which the “Linux ecosystem” accounts for around $30 billion).

However, his numbers are based on a lot of guesswork and equivocal estimation, and serve more as an example of the scale of Free rather than concrete statistics. Nonetheless, Anderson concludes that Free is a country-sized economy, and it’s clear from these numbers and the rest of the book that Free has serious business potential. Already, some form of Free has reached nearly every major industry.

But far from being merely an aside to Free, Anderson says that some form of monetization is necessary for industries to continue to thrive. Examining businesses that have been de-monetized, Anderson concludes that, “the winners far outnumber the losers” (131). However, there needs to be some money involved: “if digital Free de-monetizes industries before new models can re-monetize them, then everyone loses” (132). Free is not enough by itself, and works well in conjunction with Paid.

In many cases, products and services are provided free because a few paying subscribers or users subsidize a much larger percentage who don’t pay. This is called “freemium,” where a free version with certain limitations is provided and a better, more advanced or less limited version can be purchased (“versioning” in traditional economics). Anderson says that online, generally only 5 percent of customers need to pay to support the rest. This works because the number of users is so high and the marginal costs are so low, making 5 percent a significant number of customers.

Furthermore, a large number of “free riders,” or passive consumers, is actually good: a large audience is an incentive for people to contribute (just look at Wikipedia) (178-179). The freemium model is one of the most important and most popular of the modern Web. Another is advertising, which has supported content far longer than the Internet has even been around. While there may be a limit to what the advertising market can support, Anderson says it has yet to be reached (222).

The effect Free has on markets goes beyond how money is made. One effect Free (or simply lower cost) has on established markets is that it shrinks the market and redistributes the wealth (sometimes in ways that may be hard to measure, like knowledge — see Wikipedia). New people make money, but less money than the old people made. Much of the previous value (wealth) reappears in nonmonetary resources like information or knowledge (Anderson 130-131).

One worrying (short-term) effect of Free is that a few people or companies become “superrich,” instead of the market being divided equally. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains it (quoted in Anderson, 133), with Free the traditional market segmentation created by varying price levels is eliminated, creating a situation where “rather than a range of products at different prices, it tends to be winner-take-all.” However, Anderson characterizes this as one of the “short-term negative consequences of de-monetization,” while the long-term effects will be positive (133).

Piracy

In any discussion of getting something for nothing, piracy (unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyrighted material) inevitably makes an appearance. Piracy is important in the context of the Free economy as the ultimate source of free content, where anything (digital) can be had for the (almost) unbeatable price of zero, whether the producer intended so or not. “If you don’t offer it [free] explicitly, others will typically find a way to introduce it themselves,” explains Anderson, “The economic incentives to pirate digital goods… are so great that it can be assumed that anything of value in digital form will eventually be pirated and then freely distributed” (72, 229).

While some argue that Free encourages piracy, Anderson says it’s actually the opposite: piracy encourages Free, because the cost of reproduction and distribution is so low compared to the price generally being asked. Anderson equates piracy to the force of gravity, naturally bringing the price down. And “it is almost impossible to stop” (229). In China, piracy even affects the price of physical products, due to an offline form of piracy where imitation products are sold much cheaper than the originals (sometimes before they even hit the market — an advantage of digital piracy as well).

Piracy is both a large chunk of the Free economy, and one of its motivators.

Economics of abundance

I briefly mentioned Anderson’s thoughts on abundance in the section on making money from Free, in that one successful way to compete with free is to find the adjacent scarcity. But abundance is important for another reason: it’s part of how digital Free works. The root of Free in the digital world is an abundance of ideas and information. Products and industries based on ideas and information (what Anderson calls “more brains than brawn”) can expand exponentially while prices continuously decline (84). When material barriers are removed, ideas and information can spread quickly, effortlessly and without costing anything. This is the age of abundance (45), and digital Free is the economics of abundance.

Anderson says abundance is a concept that can be difficult for us to imagine and comprehend, because “our brains are wired for scarcity” (213). We focus on and are motivated by the things we lack. That’s why abundance isn’t always recognized immediately, and it must be properly understood before it can be used to its fullest potential. But once it’s recognized, Anderson says the best way to exploit abundance is to relinquish control — to embrace waste. Because waste is “relative to your sense of scarcity” (191). Certain new abundances — like hard drive capacity and storage — can be wasted, so as to preserve other scarcities, like the time that would be spent organizing and managing⁵. By letting go, abundance can be used advantageously. “One generation’s scarcity is another’s abundance,” writes Anderson, like talking long distance on the phone (which was expensive once but is now free on cell phones, and used liberally) (191).

Another way to exploit abundance is to spread and expand through waste. By maximizing diversity and possible opportunities, there will inevitably be a few cases of success. A lot of “wasted” attempts will eventually pay off (192-193). Anderson says waste is a common occurrence in nature — we humans are unique in our aversion to it. Anderson quotes science fiction writer Cory Doctorow’s analogy of a dandelion. Dandelions spread their seeds everywhere, even if many may not grow. The important thing is that “every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited” (Doctorow, 2008)⁶.

Anderson gives YouTube as an example of this embrace of waste in action, where the staggering amount of video uploaded⁷ maximizes the potential for relevance. Even if some argue that YouTube is “full of crap,” “crap is in the eye of the beholder.” Traditional definitions of quality don’t matter, because “the most important thing is relevance” (194). All these YouTube videos are just “dandelion seeds in search of fertile ground” (195).

When there is no scarcity of space (as with YouTube), there’s no need for quality determination or discrimination⁸. This is the essence of the difference between abundance thinking and scarcity thinking. “If you’re controlling scarce resources you have to be discriminating,” writes Anderson (195). But when resources are abundant, risks can be taken, because the cost of failure is so low (even nonexistent).

Another example of the difference can be seen by comparing print and online content, which Anderson knows first hand. While with print, space is scarce, online, it’s “an abundance economy.” Explains Anderson: “Successes rise to the top, while failures fall to the bottom. Everything can get out there and compete for attention, winning or losing on its merits,” not a manager’s arbitrary decision (although reputation and brand are still important to maintain) (197).

We’re entering a “hybrid world,” “where scarcity and abundance exist side by side” (198).

“You can’t stop Free.”

While the concepts and background in the book help to understand Free, they mainly serve as foundation for Anderson’s key argument: that Free is inevitable and unstoppable, that Free is ultimately good, and that Free is the future. And online, Free has already won, even if the transition and evolution is not yet over. “The Web has become the land of the free, not because of ideology but because of economics,” writes Anderson, “the marginal cost of everything online is close enough to zero that it pays to round down” (92).

Whether we agree or disagree with the implications or causes of Free is irrelevant in the grand scope of Anderson’s vision, because Free is the future whether we like it or not (Godin).

Free in context: Relation to other ideas and theories

Chris Anderson’s qualifications

Chris Anderson has a background in science, having studied physics, done research and written for two science journals for six years⁹. He also wrote for The Economist for seven years, and has served as the editor-in-chief of Wired since 2001, which gives him a frontline view of the differences between print and online, as Wired includes both a thriving online portal and a magazine that has remained strong even while many print publications have closed shop. He previously wrote the New York Times bestselling book The Long Tail. He was listed in The TIME 100 in 2007, praised for his long tail idea by Malcolm Gladwell (who went on to criticize Free two years later; see the section on responses to Free).

He has first-hand experience with Free business models, not just from Wired.com (which is supported by advertising) but from a company he founded called DIYDrones (Anderson 68-69), based on the concept of open source hardware — information about the hardware, like instructions, is made available free, so anyone can build their own, but the finished product is also sold for those who don’t want to do it themselves. Anderson also made Free available to read online gratis, but only for a limited time. The unabridged audiobook is free, while the abridged version costs (for those with more money than time).

Building on past work

Anderson’s book builds on an array of past theories, research, and ideas. Some are merely integrated into his argument, but some are re-interpreted or applied in the context of the information age and the Internet. He looks at Joseph Bertrand’s theory that “in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost” (Anderson 172). According to Anderson, the Internet is a realization of Bertrand’s concept of “a truly competitive market” (175). Geoffrey Parker and Marshall W. Van Alstyne created a model of how free products can be supported in “two-sided markets,” where advertisers support content distribution, through which consumers support advertisers (Anderson 25). Anderson uses this to explore what he calls “The Three-Party Market”¹⁰ (24-25). Anderson explores and interprets Steward Brand’s maxim that “information wants to be free” (expanded from Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution), and its importance in the context of his own ideas (Anderson 94-100). For the gift economy, Anderson builds off of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Anderson also cites economic theories like “versioning” (176), as well as people like Timothy Lee (179), Herbert Simon (180), George Gilder (13-14, 83), and others, both to support his theories and to explain their origins.

New Rules for a New Economy by Kevin Kelly

Much of Anderson’s thinking draws from that of Kevin Kelly a decade earlier, specifically New Rules for a New Economy (a fact which Anderson mentions in the acknowledgements). Concepts in New Rules for a New Economy like utilizing the “swarm,” value in increased numbers, the benefits of maximization of opportunities, scarcity and abundance, and letting go at the top can certainly be found in Anderson’s work. Kelly writes, “The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention” (59), an observation that shows up throughout Free, especially in relation to the attention economy. But the most important intellectual debt, of course, comes from Kelly’s ideas about Free¹¹, set down in Chapter 4 of New Rules for a New Economy, “Follow the Free” (50-64).

Kelly notes a trend that began with the industrial age, where price would decrease at the same time quality increased, which is key to Anderson’s Free economy. This is even more pronounced with the microprocessor, says Kelly. He also observes that today’s consumers expect quality to increase while products still get cheaper over time. Furthermore, he says that computer chips create this quality and price effect on anything they touch. Anderson expands this to any industry built on ideas and information (of which the microprocessor industry is). Kelly also observes that the more of something that is produced, the faster the price goes down (sometimes called the “learning curve,” as the process of production is continuously refined and improved).

The effect microprocessors experienced is even more pronounced with bandwidth, and the price of transmitting bits drops toward zero, or “the free.” It will never actually be free — the price “forever nears zero without ever reaching it” — but “it so closely parallels the bottom limit of free that it behaves as if it is free” (52). In the words of Anderson, “close enough to free to round down” (195). Kelly lays out the implications: “Because prices move inexorably toward the free, the best move in the network economy is to anticipate this cheapness” (53). Anderson again agrees, even using the same maxim of “anticipate the cheap” (79). Like Anderson, Kelly also makes large scale predictions about Free (or cheap) in the future: “All items that can be copied, both tangible and intangible, adhere to the law of inverted pricing and become cheaper as they improve” (54).

Kelly also says that supply and demand are now both driven by technology, and as prices are being pushed down, demand is increasing even faster. “The extent of human needs and desires is limited only by human imagination,” he writes, so “in practical terms, there is no limit” (56). A strategy, then, is “to invent items and services faster than they are commoditized” (57). As Anderson says, every abundance creates a new scarcity. So one must find those scarcities before they become abundant (i.e., commoditized).

A key idea about Free comes from Kelly’s opinion on ubiquity. Ubiquity is valuable in the network economy, says Kelly, and making things free is the most efficient way to achieve ubiquity. “We see many innovative companies in the new economy following the free” (57), he says, and gives some examples that precede Anderson’s staple 21st century examples. Kelly also notes that the marginal cost of reproduction is almost nothing — the first copy is the only one with a significant cost. It costs almost nothing to establish users, and the value goes up with the number of users. “Once the product’s worth and indispensability is established, the company sells auxiliary services or upgrades, continuing its generosity to involve more customers in a virtuous circle,” writes Kelly (58). This works even offline: “‘following the free’ is a universal law” (58). Kelly makes the expansive prediction that “in the distant future nearly everything we make will (at least for a short while) be given away free—refrigerators, skis, laser projectors, clothes, you name it. This will only make sense when these items are pumped full of chips and network nodes, and thus capable of delivering network value” (58).

Kelly says that the “gift economy” of free labor, with the aspects of “attention, community, standards, and shared intelligence,” is “a rehearsal for the radical dynamics of the network economy” (62). “The main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance,” writes Kelly (61). In Free, Anderson attempts to provide this missing model (or models), and explain the models that have emerged since New Rules for a New Economy.

Kelly wrote about Free with technology and networking clearly in mind but before the explosion of the Internet that led to its ubiquity and growth today, and in some ways Anderson is updating Kelly’s ideas for the current digital landscape.

Other links between their works likely exist, and Anderson uses many of the same references (“learning curve,” Moore’s Law, etc.), even using some of the same examples. Kelly’s concept of “the free” foreshadowed Anderson’s ten years later.

From the work of Kelly and others, it’s obvious that Free is not new (a fact Anderson acknowledges), it’s merely the scope and shape of it that’s expanding. A large aspect of Anderson’s work is bringing various separate theories, ideas and principles together under the common heading of “Free.” While many of his ideas are new, many others are merely old ideas repurposed, re-organized or re-interpreted.

The greatest divergence is the scope and scale of Anderson’s ideas. His predictions are expansive and presented as inevitable. In his re-interpretation of past theories for the modern, interconnected digital age, he often expands their scope and expects them to be the norm.

Related theories

Since much of Anderson’s work is based on a variety of earlier theories and ideas (some acknowledged and some perhaps coincidental), there are numerous examples of similar and related theories. Audun Jøsang, Roslan Ismail and Colin Boyd provide an overview of trust and reputation systems online; Mikhail I. Melnik and James Alm, and Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood examine reputation on eBay.

Others like Scott Allen, Jay T. Deragon, Margaret G. Orem and Carter F. Smith have characterized commerce driven by the social Web (the foundation of many reputation and attention economies) as a “relationship economy,” with people as the most important component, and where relationships have intrinsic value (40-41). Allen et al. define the relationship economy as “the people and things we are connected with in our personal networks who or that distribute or consume our capital, which in turn influences our individual production outputs” (15). They explain the significance thusly: “Combine the influence of the human elements [of the social Web] with the economic power of relationship driven commerce and you have a scenario that will create further changes unforeseen, unpredictable, and unimaginable” (7). Allen et al., like Anderson, reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, writing that using online social networks and surfing the Internet fit under the heading of self-actualization (17-18). Carter F. Smith observes the advent of a “knowledge-sharing culture” with blogs, wikis and social networks, which fits with Anderson’s concept of the Internet (Allen et al. 32-33).

In The Friction-Free Economy: Marketing Strategies for a Wired World, T.G. Lewis shares many of the same ideas as Anderson in his claim that the rules of marketing are changing radically (Bill Gates also explores what he calls “friction-free capitalism” in his book The Road Ahead, among other interesting predictions¹²). A “friction-free economy,” says Lewis (paraphrased by Amazon.com), is “one that assumes a zero production and distribution cost, with no competitors and infinite resources.”

A strategy in this new economy is “mainstreaming,” which is gaining a significant market share very quickly, often by giving the product or service away (which can even work for offline companies), which works since supply creates demand (an inversion of the traditional principle). Once a company is dominant, or mainstream, Lewis says, it tends to remain there and becomes difficult to unseat. In Lewis’s friction-free economy, market share is key. A friction-free economy also entails consumers getting things directly from the source; removing the middlemen.¹³ Lewis also notes the effect of quality increasing while prices decrease.

John Case of Inc. Magazine argues that “low-friction” has affected almost every sector of the marketplace, and two of his rules for responding are eerily reminiscent of Anderson’s: offer something different, and offer something better.

In Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age, Clay Shirky takes a negative view of abundance in the short term, but says in the long term the effects are still positive. “The low-quality material that comes with increased freedom accompanies the experimentation that creates the stuff we will end up prizing,” he writes, “In comparison with a previous age’s scarcity, abundance brings a rapid fall in average quality, but over time experimentation pays off, diversity expands the range of the possible, and the best work becomes better than what went before.” As Anderson says, a maximization of opportunities will eventually yield returns.

Shirky says it would seem that aggregators like YouTube and Facebook making money off of content provided free by creators is unfair. But the people providing the content don’t seem to expect payment. Perhaps they are contributors, not workers — “intending their contributions to be acts of sharing rather than production…labors of love.” Shirky likens this to a bar, where people prefer being in the social environment of the bar, even if the owners are profiting from this “content.”

With the traditional effort required removed, amateurs are opting for the visibility once reserved for professionals. “We have always wanted to be autonomous, competent and connected; it’s just now that social media has become an environment for enacting those desires, rather than suppressing them,” writes Shirky. Social media has created a situation where, as Anderson observed, money is no longer the primary motivator. Shirky examines fan fiction communities, where people often work in the “world of affection,” where recognition is important, instead of the “world of money.”

Shirky looks at the popular Apache server, which is free. Because Apache relies on collaboration, its noncommercial nature is important: “it has to be noncommercial in order to be able to take in contributions from as many people as it can as cheaply as it can.” This could apply to various free projects.

Evan I. Schwartz talks about Internet abundance and the attention scarcity in Webonomics. “Traditional economics is based on the notion of scarcity – that human desires will always exceed available resources such as food, clothing and shelter” (1), whereas on the web, there’s an abundance of resources and a scarcity of demand.¹⁴ “On the Web, the main commodity in limited supply is the attention of the busy people using it,” writes Schwartz, “The underlying battle in the Web economy is the ability to command and sustain that attention” (2). Following from this, quality of information is one of the most important elements in the Web economy.

A concept related to the increased participation of individuals instead of corporations comes from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s concept of the “groundswell” and the power of social networking, media and technology. They define the groundswell as, “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations” (9). The groundswell was brought about by the collision of people, technologies and economics.

The economics aspect is simple: “on the Internet, traffic equals money” (primarily due to advertising, they note) (Li and Bernoff 11). If we replace “traffic” with “attention,” it’s easy to see how this fits with Anderson’s ideas. Just as Anderson says that the Internet has changed the balance of economics, Li and Bernoff say that “the groundswell has changed the balance of power.” Anyone can create a site that “connects people with people,” even marginalizing traditional institutions that used to serve the same purpose as the new site (13). While Li and Bernoff explore how to conduct business not in the world of Free but in the world of social technologies, they are often overlapping, and linked closely through the common technology that’s driving them, the Internet.

An interesting alternative view focused more on the financial and directly monetary aspects of the Internet can be found in the Cato Institute’s The Future of Money in the Information Age. William Melton comes to the same conclusion as Anderson that the Internet creates more liquidity, but for a very different reason: whereas Anderson calls the Internet a “liquidity machine” because of scale (128), Melton says it’s because the Internet creates increased trust with technology like digital signatures and certificates (Dorn 26). Melton believes this will actually expand the financial prospects of the Internet: “The liquidity (in all of its various forms) provided by these evolving systems will stimulate sales, not only of existing goods and services, but more importantly this more efficient electronic liquidity will stimulate production of new goods and services, services that cannot today be economically provided” (Dorn 26; this was written in 1997, and it seems to have come true, with sites like Lulu and Kickstarter).

He also argues there are no limits to the number of goods and services available in the marketplace (similar to Kelly), that there is “an infinite progression, and therefore potentially an infinite supply” (Dorn 26). He says that with the marketplace created by the Internet, the combination of increased speed, removal of the boundaries of geography and “increasing efficiency and convenience in payment systems and in the granting of liquidity” will “bring society a new age of plenty and opportunity” (Dorn 27).

In the same book (in relation to government regulation of commerce but nonetheless relevant), Lawrence Gasman observes that, “Ultimately, [the Web] has a physical reality rooted in hardware, software, and human organizations, much like the human organizations we have always known and with the same weaknesses” (Dorn 42).

Bill Frezza writes that “Perhaps, for the first time, sovereign individuals will have the tools to construct a practical realization of laissez-faire capitalism… At the root of this system will be new monetary institutions that must inherently rest on the consent of the participants” (Dorn 33).

Karl Marx’s alienated labor

Karl Marx’s ideas (outlined in Chapter 2 of Paddy Scannell’s Media and Communication, “Mass culture”) seem relevant to the subject of Anderson’s book. Marx writes of non-alienated labor, focused on the individual — individual expression, pleasure, and personality. This is the kind of labor that Anderson says people do free, to fulfill something for themselves that their job fails to satisfy. It may not be in the sector that Marx envisioned, but the Internet has nonetheless created an avenue for non-alienated labor for all.

“In your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need,” wrote Marx (quoted in Scannell 38). The Internet provides the opportunity for sharing easily for the benefit of others (for example, with Wikipedia), with recognition and satisfaction in return. The Internet allows for these connections, and for immediacy.

Scannell writes that “Alienated labour shows up first in the fact that the labourer, even before he starts to work has already sold himself for a wage” (38). When one works not for a wage, as in the genuinely Free economy, this alienation does not have the same opportunity to begin. It could be argued that one instead sells oneself for attention or reputation, but these are more benign, and Doctorow (2009) shows that free labor goes even beyond that. Where commodified labor is “the denial of social existence” (Scannell 39), the Internet reinforces social connections in many ways, particularly with interactions involving free labor (like personally motivated social media). Everyone involved can benefit and contribute, of their own will, donating time, attention and effort for the reasons they deem worthy.

Marx says that hidden in the commodity is the rate of exploitation, i.e. the difference between what the capitalist makes and what the worker makes. If money is removed from the equation, or if the worker provides what he makes directly, it seems that this effect could be erased.

The labor conditions outlined by Marx still exist, but the free labor economy described by Anderson and Doctorow (2009) provides a way for people to labor for themselves and for a common good, with control over the process and their involvement, and the possibility of satisfaction and self-expression.

Responses to Free

One of the most notable objections to Anderson’s thesis came shortly after the book’s release, in the form of a book review by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell has many questions and objections to Anderson. He wants to know how a business could actually re-organize around incentives of “non-monetary rewards.” He says it’s companies like Amazon that want information to be free (not the information itself), because they can make money off of it. “Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?” he asks.

He says that “Close enough to free to round down,” on a large scale (which the Internet provides), is not free. Gladwell says that Anderson makes the incorrect assumption “that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.” Instead, the infrastructure and other physical aspects that don’t follow the rules of Free remain.¹⁵ For example, the costs behind the development of drugs lie not in the information aspect but in what comes after, like testing. He says there are many instances where information is definitely not free, and yet still popular — like premium cable and iPhone downloads. Finally, Gladwell concludes that Anderson is trying to prove universal principles where none exist: “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”

One of the most high-profile responses to Gladwell came from author Seth Godin, with a blog post succinctly titled “Malcolm is wrong.”¹⁶ While not directly addressing Gladwell’s concerns, he explains why two commons arguments against Free are wrong. The first is, “should we want free to be the future?,” which is irrelevant, because “it is.” The second is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?,” which doesn’t matter, because “It’s happening,” and “The world will change around it, because the world has no choice.” He predicts paper newspapers will disappear in the not-too-distant future. “In a world of free, everyone can play,” he writes, creating a surplus of people writing, many doing it for free (and some doing it well).

Another response comes from a review by Cory Doctorow (2009), who interestingly enough is cited by Anderson in Free. While much of Doctorow’s review is positive, he believes that Free suffers from “an unwillingness to consider the wider implications of a world centred on a commodity that can be infinitely reproduced at no marginal cost.” While speaking of an economy based on the price of zero, Anderson nonetheless retains a capitalist view, while Doctorow says that “There’s a pretty strong case to be made that ‘free’ has some inherent antipathy to capitalism.” It’s not necessary for Free to always act in the context of markets.

“Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture,” writes Doctorow, “he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity.” Some of this activity is related to the monetary economy, or a mix of free and non-free, but a large amount was created not for any reason related to money, or expectations of future benefit, but “for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, [and] it is just wrong to say that the ‘price’ of the material is ‘free’. The material, is, instead, literally priceless. It represents a large and increasing segment of our public life that is conducted entirely for reasons outside the marketplace.” Throughout the industrial era, the majority of life has been “outside the marketplace,” after all. As for abundance, “do abundant goods really need organising [by a market]?”

Doctorow also notes that Anderson fails to address the implications for the many practitioners who will be displaced by digital technologies. “Anderson paints a rosy picture of free, even noting the gains we all experienced as a result of the creative destruction of travel agents and stockbrokers thanks to Expedia and Etrade,” while failing to compassionately explore the negative implications and the value that will be lost, says Doctorow. While Doctorow finds Gladwell’s analysis “hollow,” one of Doctorow’s final observations seems similar: that Free “describes a business-climate that no longer exists.”

Free in practice

As for evidence of the trends described in Free, certain prominent examples are now even more relevant. Anderson notes that YouTube has yet to make money (195-196), and it’s one of the examples Gladwell cites for why Anderson is wrong.¹⁷ However, the New York Times reported in September 2010 that YouTube was expected to make a profit for the year, with $450 million in revenue (which had more than doubled each year for the preceding three years). In March 2011, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney predicted revenues of $1.33 billion for 2011 and $1.7 billion for 2012 (he estimated $825 for 2010). In June 2012, he updated his estimates for 2012 to $3.6 billion ($2.4 billion after paying partners). And it’s working well for users, who can make money from YouTube’s Partner Program (the Internet created new opportunities for free labor, but many individuals are also harnessing it to make money from their efforts).

Facebook, another Internet company Anderson cites as having yet to find a profitable business model (164), had revenues of $3.71 billion in 2011, with $1 billion in profit (83% from advertising, and the rest from Facebook’s virtual currency, used for virtual goods in games).

A report by the Inside Network predicts the virtual goods market, which Anderson mentions (as supporting free to play games), will reach $2.9 billion in the United States in 2012. “Virtual goods, and the companies that distribute them, are continuing to bring about one of the largest disruptions entertainment, communication, and e-commerce infrastructure businesses have seen in years,” wrote report co-author Justin Smith. SuperData Research predicts the virtual goods market will reach $14.8 billion worldwide in 2012. By 2015, it’s predicted to pass $20 billion. Of the aforementioned Facebook revenues, $557 million came from virtual goods; 12% of all revenue came through Zynga, a social gaming company. With casual games, free to play has become the default.

Companies like Dropbox and Evernote have been very sucessful with freemium models, while other entrepreneurs have argued against the merit of such approaches, calling for creators to charge and users to pay. A popular adage from those critical of Free business models is if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

A plethora of anecdotes can be found to support either approach, but to call one the incontestable winner or decry the other as ineffective is naive; both work for some and not for others. It depends on a variety of factors, both controllable and unpredictable. Free has proven its viability and staying power — but so has Paid. The Internet has created an ecosystem where multifarious business models can co-exist and thrive.

Chris Anderson, technological determinist?

In Media and Communication, Scannell explores the of idea technological determinism, that “machines make history” (140). That is, technological advancements define society and affect social change, as opposed to technology’s invention and use being a result of society. “The technology of a society imposes a determinate pattern on the social relations of that society,” explains Scannell (140). Using the distinctions put forth by Raymond Williams, there’s the deterministic view and the symptomatic view, the latter being where technological innovation follows “already existing social processes” (Scannell 140).

Looking at Anderson, it would seem that he’s somewhat of a technological determinist. He sees Free as being driven not primarily by individual agency but by the inherent characteristics of the Internet. It’s the progress and price decline of processors, storage and bandwidth that has led to much of today’s innovation. The objective aspects of technology make Free inevitable, and individuals — as much as some may protest, like those of the traditional media — cannot stop it.

Anderson does not see Free as a result of human ingenuity or drive (participation for pleasure, or love, or conversation, a complaint of Doctorow, as covered above). In his view, the explosion of innovation and creativity on the Internet is largely due to the nature of the underlying technology, and aspects like reputation and attention being easily measurable. However, what the Internet has been used for is not what it was intended for, and its utility is constantly changing and evolving. It’s undeniable that much of what happens on the Internet is socially-driven. But as far as Free is concerned, Anderson seems to present its origins not in society but in technology.

Perhaps Anderson would be more accurately defined as an economic determinist, in the sense that he points to the economic realities of digital technology as leading to Free. As Frederick Engels wrote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch” (54). Engels says “that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged” (54). In Free, Anderson shows how all three of these factors of production have radically changed, along with the distribution of wealth.

If we are to believe Anderson that Free is the future and Engels that social change and political revolutions are caused by the economics of each epoch, would Free not be the defining characteristic of our generation?

Bibliography

(↑ Table of Contents)

(Links to books are Amazon.com affiliate links. It does seems appropriate…)

Allen, Scott, Jay T. Deragon, Margaret G. Orem, and Carter F. Smith. The Emergence of The Relationship Economy: The New Order of Things to Come. California: Happy About, 2008.

Anderson, Chris. Free: the Future of a Radical Price. London: Random House Business, 2009.

Case, John. “The Friction-Free Economy.” Inc. Magazine. Mansueto Ventures LLC, 1 Jun. 1996.

Doctorow, Cory. “Think Like a Dandelion.” Locus Online. Locus Publications, 6 May 2008.

Doctorow, Cory. “Chris Anderson’s Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short.” guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media Limited, 28 July 2009.

Dorn, James A., ed. The Future of Money in the Information Age (full text). Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997.

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Trans. Edward Aveling. 1970.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Priced to Sell – Is Free the Future?” The New Yorker. Condé Nast Digital, 6 July 2009.

Godin, Seth. “Malcolm is wrong.” Seth’s Blog. 30 June 2009.

Jøsang, Audun, Roslan Ismail, and Colin Boyd. “A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision.” Decision Support Systems 43.2 (2007): 618-44.

Kelly, Kevin. New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World. New York, NY: Viking, 1998. New Rules for a New Economy is available in its entirety on Kelly’s website, along with selected maxims.

Lewis, T. G. The Friction-free Economy: Marketing Strategies for a Wired World. New York: HarperBusiness, 1997.

Li, Charlene, and Josh Bernoff. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008.

Melnik, Mikhail I., and James Alm. “Does a Seller’s Ecommerce Reputation Matter? Evidence from Ebay Auctions.” The Journal of Industrial Economics 50.3 (2002): 337-49.

Parker, Geoffrey, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne. “Two-Sided Network Effects: A Theory of Information Product Design.” Management Science 51.10 (2005): 1494-1504.

Resnick, Paul, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood. “The Value of Reputation on EBay: A Controlled Experiment.” Experimental Economics 9.2 (2006): 79-101.

Scannell, Paddy. Media and Communication. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009.

Schwartz, Evan I. Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web. New York, NY: Broadway, 1998.

Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin, 2010.

Simon, Herbert A. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. By Martin Greenberger. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

TCI Management Consultants. “The Friction-Free Economy: Book Review from TCI Management Consultants.” TCI Management Consultants. A great overview of The Friction-Free Economy.

It was to be, in every way, Jodorowsky‘s Dune (unfortunately it was never made, although a documentary about the adaption is being released). The project was approached in this way from the very beginning, due to the way Jodorowsky viewed the work of artists (originally written in French):

I did not want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes, nor Edipo with Esquilo.

There is an artist, only one in the medium of a million other artists, which only once in his life, by a species of divine grace, receives an immortal topic, a MYTH… I say “receives” and not “creates” because the works of art its received in a state of mediumnity directly of the unconscious collective. Work exceeds the artist and to some extent, it kills it because humanity, by receiving the impact of the Myth, has a major need to erase the individual who received it and transmitted: its individual personality obstructs, stains the purity of the message which, of its base, requires to be anonymous… We know whom created the cathedral of Notre-Dame, neither the Aztec solar calendar, neither the tarot of Marseilles, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.

One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote – of course incomplete – and that we carry in the heart the total character… Christ belongs not to Mark, neither to Luke, neither to Matthew, nor to John… There are many other Gospels known as apocryphal books and there is as many lifes of Christ as there are believers. Each one of us has their own version of Dune, its Jessica, their Paul… I felt in enthusiastic admiration towards Herbert and at the same time in conflict (I think that the same thing occurred to him)… He obstructed me… I did not want him as a technical adviser … I did everything to move him away from the project… I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transmit it: the Myth was to give up the literary form and to become Image…

Regardless of its truth, the idea that certain incredible stories do not “belong” to the person who first presented them is interesting. It means that once an idea has been released, it’s the property of the world, of humanity, not of a single person. There can be many versions, and none are inherently canon. To believe this has some serious implications, like invalidating the concept of copyright (in certain situations, when taken to the extreme), and I don’t think that it’s fair or beneficial to remove the understanding of ownership from the original creator. It is, however, an interesting philosophy to consider as it relates to originality and creativity. Interpretation, extrapolation, and re-creation strengthen any creative ecosystem.

Such a philosophy as Jodorowsky’s makes it easier for someone who’s created a world or a set of characters to lease them to someone else for adaption or expansion. Orson Scott Card, for example, isn’t worried about absolute faithfulness to the book for the film adaption of Ender’s Game, it seems, from what he wrote after visiting the set:

…it was amusing when others asked me how it felt to have my book brought to life. My book was already alive in the mind of every reader. This is writer-director Gavin Hood’s movie, so they were his words, and it was his scene.

He’s not relinquishing his right to the story or its characters, but he’s accepting that his version is not the only version.

This whole idea reminds me of something Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in her TED talk. In ancient Greek and Roman societies, creativity was not something believed to come from a person. It was more like a divine companion, outside of the individual, “that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.” The Greeks called these “divine attendant spirits” daemons. The Romans called them geniuses. A genius was not something a person could be; it was more like a “magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.” Which absolves a lot of responsibility and pressure from people who we would consider to be naturally talented and creative:

So brilliant — there it is, right there that distance that I’m talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant you couldn’t take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time.

And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was let’s put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there’s no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it’s the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.

And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

It’s undeniable that sometimes creativity just seems to flow. When there’s no friction, no hesitance, no struggle; the words just keep coming, fitting together as if choreographed by some invisible guide, each a step towards a perfect dance of language and meaning. Inspiration arrives unexpectedly, dormant imagination and brilliance spring to life, and creativity seems not to be something that must be called, but something that must simply be let free.

What if we don’t entirely own our own creativity? What if we’re accessing something greater, or something is being transmitted through us? I’m not putting this forth as the truth — I’m putting it forth as something worth considering, independent from its relation to “reality” as we know it. I don’t think creativity is some daemon crouching in the corner, but I do think considering creativity and inspiration as more than meets the eye has value ¹. The work that comes from an artist can be greater than the artist himself. And I don’t think the originator of an idea or a story or a realm should have his claim to them renounced, no matter their greatness, but I do think all are more powerful when others are allowed to change them, to remake them, and to expand them. An idea, after all, is only as powerful as its execution, and why should stories be constrained by what one single imagination is capable of?

Seth Godin:

Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. [...] Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

Banksy:

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value.

As I’ve said before, meaning is inherent to the act of creation, but it is manifested in the act of sharing. The artist creates meaning and value in his own way by creating, yet the audience supplies their own meaning and derives their own value. The two need not agree, but that does not make them incompatible (the two above quotes complement each other). Art is entirely subjective, and this subjectivity is integral to both its creation and acceptance (“acceptance” that could include a rejection of meaning and value).

Steven Pressfield has an interesting way of defining this symbiotic dichotomy, with a focus on commercial response:

Track #1, the Muse Track, represents our work in its most authentic, true-to-itself and true-to-our-own-heart expression.

Track #2, the Commercial Track, represents the response our work gets in the marketplace.

With art, there is:
1. the art itself,
2. the artist’s relationship to her art (Pressfield’s Track #1), and
3. everyone else’s relationship to her art (Pressfield’s Track #2).

The latter two are accompanied by judgements of meaning and value, and the third one involves a commercial value judgement, which often seeps into the second one, the artist’s relationship to her art. There’s also attention, recognition, and other non-monetary currency.

Pressfield advises that an artist not let the third layer of judgements overwhelm her own, that one remains grounded on Track #1, and finds balance between the two tracks. And when we’re lucky they overlap: “When an artist’s voice is true enough to his own heart and authentic enough to his own vision, Track #1 pulls Track #2 to it. Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan. Hunter S. Thompson.”

Creation cannot exist in a vacuum devoid of any relationship beyond the artist and his art, but both must nonetheless be separated — protected — from misguided or greedy influences. The artist guides the art, and the world guides the artist. It’s up to each artist to decide by how much.

In a hundred years, we’ll have computer chips embedded in our bodies, integrating us more than ever into the digital world — and the vast network that connects it (a successor to the internet, and the latest of many iterations). The barriers to distraction will be lower than ever; only mental defenses will remain, like focus, discipline and restraint. Instead of a click and some keystrokes, all it will take to access Twitter — or any digital repository — will be a thought. Our brains, with the help of a processor or converter, will be able to interact directly with data and information, without the assistance of any external device.

The transition will be gradual, of course. If started with phones, and other things we use already — glasses, watches, wristbands, clothing. As technology advances, the need for multiple external devices will decrease, as functionality is continuously compounded into smaller, more powerful devices, and eventually into our minds and bodies.

Every surface will be covered in advertisements and information. Touch will control anything not integrated with the chips connected to our minds.

The only solace will be to close our eyes and disable the chip (or enter an electronic-free zone, where the chip will turn off and advertisments will be static, more easily avoided) — unless the chip is performing a function essential to our survival, like regulating or preventing a mental disease, in which case it can never be off. (A rare few will reject the integration of chips, like those today who believe they don’t need the internet.)

For matters of the mind, the line between organic and digital, natural and artificial, a line that is already blurring, will be functionally irrelevant.

1. That it is timeless and permanent
2. That it is accessible to anyone, and infinitely reproducible

To expect anything less is to deny the way the internet can — and often does — work. Too often, people seem to be surprised by the privacy issues created by their own actions; by their own thoughtless sharing. To ensure adequate privacy of personal information, one must be aware of the nature and consequences of digital sharing.

It should be noted, neither of these outcomes are guaranteed, but they are both very possible, and in some cases likely.

That it is timeless and permanent

Unlike paper — books, notes, letters — digital content does not decay. It does not fade away in the face of time. For the most part, it does not need to be maintained to remain. Once something has been digitized or created in digital format, it is essentially timeless, disappearing only by intentional deletion or neglect (like old storage being discarded or formats becoming obsolete). The limits of the physical world do not exist in the digital world — digital data is constrained only by the physical tools that are used to contain digital information. As data storage becomes more reliable and its cost decreases, the constraints of the physical world — the need for maintenance, the effect of time’s passing, limited space — become increasingly irrelevant.

When you are the sole proprietor of your data, it’s easy to delete, and in most cases unlikely to be recovered. But when it is made available on a network, it becomes another story entirely.

That it is accessible to anyone, and infinitely reproducible

With digital information, infinite copies can be made, with no loss of quality. Once something is on a network, anyone on that network can make copies, and it can be spread and duplicated endlessly, each copy being equal to the “original”. Therefore, deleting your information is not always enough. Once digital content has been released, if it has any relevance or value, it’s likely to continue to exist in one form or another, even after the “original” is gone. Backups and copies are made not only by other users but automatically by certain services. Archive.org, for example, is a “digital library”, providing access to many old websites. On sites like Facebook, “deleting” content removes it from the front-end of the service, but it can take more time before it’s deleted from their storage (and there’s no telling who of your “friends” has downloaded a copy).

Even if it can be accessed by only a single person, that person has the power to release it to the world. That’s why semi-public networks can still result in open access. As with any interaction, the only thing between “private” and “public” is trust: a network is only as private as its users. The larger the network, the more likely any content shared on it will reach someone unintended and untrustworthy.

To be able to share judiciously, it’s important to be aware of how digital content and networks work, and the potential consequences of digitally sharing personal information and media.

Posting a status update to Facebook or Twitter is not the same as saying it aloud to your friends; uploading a photo is not the same as passing a printed one around; putting family photos on a website intended only for friends and family is not the same as showing them the album. And crucially, neither are the consequences.

Then he felt something soft beneath his foot, and whiffed a pungent stench. He looked down to see dog shit under shoe.

Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever–the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check [our] email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or…) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It’s not abnormal, and it’s not just for business. It’s just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it’s just life.

But there’s an important — crucial — difference between cigarettes and smartphones, or any mobile devices (one of many differences, like the obvious one that cigarettes can kill you and those around you). Or more accurately, a contrast between the relationship smokers have to smoking and the one most of us have to our mobile devices.

Smoking is a social activity. You can smoke and talk. Cigarettes are shared. The most common icebreaker between strangers I hear is “Can I have a cigarette?” or “Got a light?” Smoking is something you can do in conjunction with another activity.

But you don’t text and talk (you might think you can, but for the person trying to have a conversation with you, it’s frustrating). Checking email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram is not something done while simultaneously interacting with the people around you. It’s an alternative, a withdrawal, an escape. Digital connection instead of immediate social connection. Smartphones — not their nature, but our prevailing use of them — is individual, antisocial (paradoxically), and disconnected (from our immediate surroundings).

Writes Bogost:

As Marshall McLuhan observed, the cigarette enhances a sense of poise and calm by giving the smoker a prop, reducing social awkwardness. It retrieves tribal practices of ritual and security and obsolesces loneliness by giving everyone something in common to do, such as asking for a light.

In the same way, a smartphone is a prop. But instead of a prop that encourages interaction — asking for a light, socializing in the smoking area — it encourages distraction, avoidance, pulling further into one’s self. Devices like smartphones pull us out of the moment constantly, in ways addictions like cigarettes only achieve occasionally (smokers excuse themselves to smoke, but is that worse than constant peeping with no excuse?). Cigarettes are harmful to our longterm health. Smartphones are harmful to everyday face-to-face communication.

Recently, I noticed myself in the same pattern that you mention, reaching for my iPhone before I even knew why I wanted it. Too frequently the culprit was Twitter. Recognizing this fact, I deleted My Twitter client. Soon I was reaching for my phone habitually only to find I had nothing to do with it. Soon after that I deleted any other app that became a time-sink.

Well, after that why would I need an iPhone? I rearranged the apps I had into categories — nature, media, productivity and creative. Quickly I started using the creative folder. It even contained the native notes app packaged with the iPhone. It also contained a recorder. I began to reach for my phone with motives besides boredom. An interesting conversation? Recorder app. A random thought? Notes.

This loose system begins to take on new life when you shuffle the categories. I added the built in clock app to “nature” not knowing what else to do with it. Move it to creative, or media and it instantly has a new context. Same with the compass app.

I love the idea of a creative folder, and of shifting an app’s context by shifting its categorization. Despite its ability to distract, I also find tremendous value in having such a powerful device as the iPhone with me at all times¹. My most used creative apps — iTalk Recorder Premium, Camera+ and Simplenote — are all on my home screen.

And while I haven’t deleted all the potential distractions (although they do have their own folder), I have another barrier between me and the endless internet: I have a prepaid plan with very limited data. Wi-Fi is ubiquitous enough that if I need to connect, I usually can, and I have enough data for occasional directions or to check my email when I’m expecting an important message. But it encourages me to only connect to the internet when I’ll be somewhere for a while, or somewhere familiar, as opposed to anytime and anywhere. It was an intentional decision, and when I’m away from the usual places where Wi-Fi networks are remembered, it makes accessing the internet something I consider instead of something that’s automatic. And it’s great for another reason: it’s a whole lot cheaper.

I always just felt like the ending that we were shooting for was gonna be one that dealt with sorta the emotional reality of the characters, and gave some fundamental explanation for ‘why— what did these people get out of this plane crash?’ And the answer, as corny as it sounds, was the one that appealed to me the most, which is: each other. That’s what they got. They were all fucked up, sad individuals who were lost in their own lives and hated themselves, and somehow they found some fundamental community amongst each other. If they hadn’t met each other, and spent all that time on the island, then they would never have been able to forgive themselves for their past sins, and break through to some sort of level of self awakening and forgiveness. It is new agey, it is hokey, but it’s the story that I wanted to tell.

As I ranted after finishing it, I was disappointed by the concluding episode of Lost (the insane expecations set by the quality of all previous finales didn’t help). I felt that it failed to do justice to the six seasons that preceded it — Lost‘s narrative and mysteries were boxes within boxes, and each season we got closer to what was inside. And then at the last minute, instead of being opened, the final box was wrapped in pretty paper with a neat bow on top. The finale provided emotional closure, but it did not provide closure on the epic scale of the tale that Lost told.

The most common argument I’ve heard for why the finale worked (or was simply satisfying) was that it focused on the characters, and that’s what the show was about all along. This seems to be how Lindelof saw it.

While the characters were certainly important — the reason the show remained gripping even through undeniable ups and downs in quality and focus — I don’t feel like providing their stories with some purgatorial purpose negates an expectation that similar justice be done to the mysteries and mythology of the show.

Nonetheless, for both those who felt slighted and satisfied by the ending, it’s interesting to hear Lindelof’s perspective, two years later, on the finale and the saga of one of TV’s most interesting, unique and polarizing shows. It’s pretty amazing — a testament to the show — that I’m still interested after all this time.

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Roger Ebert¹:

[Sportswriter Bill Lyon] gave me the most useful advice I have ever received as a writer: “One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damn thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?” These rules saved me half a career’s worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.

R. A. Salvatore²:

My process is simple: I have an outline, I start writing, I throw away the outline and the characters take me on an adventure.
…
You’re doing something right if the story is pulling you instead of listening to you.

Neil Gaiman³:

On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.

George R.R. Martin⁴:

There are days I really enjoy writing and there are days I f–king hate it. I can see it in my head and the words won’t come. I try to put it on the page and it feels stiff and wooden and it’s stupid. Writing is hard work.
…
On my best writing days, which don’t come very often, I lose track of all time and space. I fall into my chair in the morning, and then look up and it’s dark outside and my back hurts.

It’s an escape from unexpected interaction, from uncomfortable situations, from the uncontrollable world. It’s an escape from facing the world as it comes at me; from life as it is.

It’s the power of distraction, and it’s easy to abuse: every time I reach for it, it’s as likely be for escapism as for utility. I often reach for it for no reason at all: out of habit, or to escape from nothing in particular. And it’s only a slip into my pocket away, at all times. The discretion for appropriate use is my responsibility alone, especially as its use is increasingly accepted without question. It’s up to me to use it right; to enrich, not detract.

The device in my pocket is rarely more important than what’s around me. Remembering that when my mind yearns for easy distraction — for anything to avoid a moment of mental idling — is the hard part.

Sidney’s more than a mere bass player, he’s a fabulous disaster! He’s a symbol. Metaphor. He embodies the dementia of a nihilistic generation. He’s a fucking star!

-The Sex Pistols’ manager in Sid and Nancy

Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1986, about the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious) surfaces a perspective of a society that is dirty, wild, abusive, rude, and hopeless. Drugs control, define and ultimately ruin lives. No one is good or innocent; even the children are rioting. With a bit of time, it could very well turn into the world of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. But it felt glamorized, especially in the beginning. The story and the characters seemed exaggerated.

And yet the portrayal of junkies and drug use was unapologetically dark. Despite glamorization of some aspects, the film seemed to show a one-sided vision of punk culture: the anger, the violence, purposeful apathy, self-destructive drug use, but no community or real sense of (sub)culture. There was only the downward spiral, devoid of hope or even the consideration that not caring has its benefits (it was only shown to be destructive). So it may have been accurate, at least about elements of the culture if not the story it’s based on, but it was an incomplete, unsympathetic vision.

John Lydon (also of the Sex Pistols) has been especially outspoken in his hatred of the movie, not only because he believes it’s entirely inaccurate, but because he disagrees with the message of the movie:

The squalid New York hotel scenes were fine, except they needed to be even more squalid. All of the scenes in London with the Pistols were nonsense. None bore any sense of reality. The chap who played Sid, Gary Oldman, I thought was quite good. But even he only played the stage persona as opposed to the real person. I don’t consider that Gary Oldman’s fault because he’s a bloody good actor. If only he had the opportunity to speak to someone who knew the man. I don’t think they ever had the intent to research properly in order to make a seriously accurate movie. It was all just for money, wasn’t it? To humiliate somebody’s life like that—and very successfully—was very annoying to me… It was all someone else’s fucking fantasy, some Oxford graduate who missed the punk rock era. The bastard.

The film, like many of the period, is thus more a snapshot of a time and a place and a group of people, than a “true” story about its subjects. It intends to capture a feeling, an archetype, more than a factual account (perhaps this was not Cox’s intention; but the filmmakers did seem to be aware of it, calling Sid, through the character of the manager, a “symbol” and a “metaphor.”). This is something we saw quite frequently in class — films that capture life in an era more than they capture a single story. Even Downtown 81, based on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s real life, was as much about life in those days as telling Basquiat’s story.

Essentially, I think the film can be summed up in a scene later in the story, where Sid and Nancy sit on the bed in a hotel room, high on heroin, Sid holding Nancy as the room burns, lit by a discarded cigarette. Too apathetic to react — or simply unable — they sit and watch as the world around them burns. Sid lights another cigarette. And this is the tale the movie tells: a destructive, tragic love story, of two junkies destroying themselves, and each other, oblivious to the world around them burning, oblivious to the fact that they sparked it.

We saw the same kind of apathy, of simply not giving a f-ck (there’s really no better way to put it), from those interviewed in The Decline of Western Civilization and much of the other punk material we’ve seen. Yet Decline‘s portrayal was more nuanced, less dark and certainly less judgmental. Most of what we’ve seen was created out of appreciation or at least fascination with the culture and stories being shared. Cox, on the other hand, while certainly being interested in his subjects, harbored no sympathy or respect for them. He wanted to do the film because he was worried that someone else’s portrayal would be too sympathetic, and might represent someone he saw as a sellout and a traitor as a real punk.¹ And the one-sided approach shows — but it’s also an important look at a terrible and tragic aspect of the culture that, as much as it might have been grafted onto a specific story for Cox’s exploitative means, is very real.

In one scene, an old friend starts talking to Sid and gets puked on. As Sid stumbles away, the friends shouts, “You’re gonna make someone a lot of money Sid!”

And that much, undeniably, the movie got right.

Drugs warp the world you’re in, entertainment invites you into a world created by someone else (and with games, lets you control it), and the internet not only provides endless worlds to dive into, some related to reality and some not, but it gives you control of the narrative and the experience in a way few other things do. Anonymity, virtual access to the entire world, and countless networks and communities for every use and topic mean you can find or craft exactly the world desired — and get lost in it. That’s both the wonder and the danger of a digital world with seemingly unlimited possibility.

The key, then, like any resource or tool, becomes how you use it. Like a traveler visiting a favorite location, you must accept that sooner or later, you have to go home.

I’m coming to realize that the internet in all its forms (my computer, my devices, even the television) is simply a place. And I can only be in one place at a time. When I’m sitting in a room with my 2 year old daughter who wants to read a book and I’m checking my phone every five minutes, I’m not in that room. So my goal is to be as fully present as I can, all the time, no matter what I’m doing.

Relevant to my post on digital travel.