Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free in this week’s New Yorker — I wrote about the dust-up surrounding uncredited passages in the book and what the implications of Anderson’s error might be in the LA Times, so I was curious. I think Gladwell brings up many good questions about Anderson’s thesis — that as stuff becomes close enough to free to round down, our economy is changing.
He’s correct in saying he that the end cost of a product is only partially the product itself — that distribution, execution and other expenses make up the bulk of the cost.
But he’s not correct in implying, then, that things aren’t free. Just because it’s expensive to produce something — a specialized drug (here is the list reputable rehab facilities in Oregon that uses these) — doesn’t mean that the cost will be passed on to the buyer.
Take, for example, the music industry and journalism, two things I know a bit about. Whether it’s the millions it takes to put Metallica on CD or a couple hundred bucks in home recording, songs can be copied and recirculated for free. And the LA Times can be accessed online for free, no subscription necessary. It’s not that songs or newspapers are free to produce — they’re not — but they are free to acquire.
In Gladwell’s drug example, he concludes, “In this case, information does not want to be free.* It wants to be really, really expensive.” But what information wants is not necessarily what information gets. Metallica does not want you to download their music without buying it. But the expectations of Free aren’t dictated by information, or Metallica, or the producer of a drug — they’re from the um, purchasers — people who know that Free is possible, and will continue to choose it first over notfree.
* The phrase “information wants to be free” came from Stewart Brand in the 1980s. It was remixed a few times, but each time he said or wrote it, it was paired with the idea that information also wants to be expensive. Sometimes, when people argue against “information wants to be free,” they overlook the fact that this free-expensive duality was part of the statement in the first place.
