The time you put into reading this isn't free

Chris Anderson’s follow up to his revolutionary The Long Tail (2006, Hyperion) has me reminded of Thomas Friedman for geeks. Stuff that people younger than 25 get naturally but that CEOs and VCs can read and say, “wow, that internets is so amazing!”

Free (2009, Hyperion) sets out to cover new ground in describing the economics of Free but ends up merely relaying interesting case studies and taking a “Gee Whiz” approach to the topic. Anderson states early in the book, “An economy had emerged around Free before the economic model that could describe it” (p.4) And that’s why I’m so disappointed. The Free economy has been well established for the entirety of human history through indigenous societies before Chris Anderson put it all into this singular book. That’s not to say the book isn’t entertaining or that it isn’t a valuable place to read about the history of Free, merely that Anderson’s brillance which shined through in The Long Tail fails to show up in Free with any groundbreaking predictions or observations.

I learned a few things from this book, “the annual deflation rate of the digital world is 50%” (p. 13) and that King Gilette could sell so many razors because he was willing to give them away.  However, from one King to another, Anderson is completely oblivious (as are most neo-classical economists) to the role of energy in the economy. M. King Hubbert’s theory of peak oil production fails to get a single mention and that’s surprising given that the economy derived from cheap oil is the operating system enabling our ability to trade privacy for the Google server farms that eat massive loads of energy to provide us with free word processing and email storage.  Anderson devotes almost two whole pages to the environmental cost of Free (p.226) by addressing the Tragedy of the Commons and stating that “simple economics” has the ability to incorporate the negative externalities ensuring that, “wasting bits will not have the environmental cost of wasting atoms .” The digital economics that Anderson spells out can only last as long as we have inexpensive oil and natural gas running the entire infrastructure of globalization. Semiconductors might represent the triumph of brains over brawn or the, “overthrow of matter in the economy.” (p.83) but if we don’t have the energy to mine coal or buy a barrel of oil for less than $150 USD then I’m sure we’ll be concerned with many other investment strategies than talking about a post-scarcity economy online.

I received  the greatest excitement out of this book when Anderson began addressing Lewis Hyde’s concept of the Gift Economy (p.183) and applying it to interactions on the web. We do a lot of the things we do online because it allows us to contribute in a meaningful way to a community, since all our real-world communities have died in the throes of suburban isolation and dispassionate consumerism. However, many of the actions Anderson assigns to a Gift Economy, like the writing of Amazon and IMDB reviews could equally be chalked up to ego. So I would recommend that you read Free if you’ve got the time, but time isn’t free.