The Economy of Free - Part 1: The Concept
May 13th, 2008 9:48 am
by Nicholas Hillier | Posted in Opinion
The culture of free is embraced in open source programming and punctuated in pirated software. Powerfully, the free economy asserts its strength as the music industry overhauls its business practices in favour of new open sharing models. It is without argument that seeds of enormous social change are starting to manifest themselves in no small part thanks to the internet. So how far can these ideals actually go and is there more to this than just pushing around some binary computer code?
Imagine a world where you don’t pay for products or services. It may sound crazy, but suppose for one moment that this is indeed possible. In this world there is no lingering worry about paying a mortgage, buying groceries, affording college tuition and where even the frivolous trinkets of modern convenience are given away at zero cost.
It’s an interesting utopian vision, bordering on a dreamy fantasy for most people, but do not stop there, delve deeper into this bizarre cosmos. Envision here in this blinding universe, that it is an invented horror to be forced into clinically depressing labour simply to meet the costs of a basic standard of living. You are instead free to choose your life’s creative work as you might now choose the toppings of a sandwich at any fast-food joint.
It is after-all the natural extension of the non-monetary economy. Unbound to a machine of economic compliance, an individual should readily embrace the freedom of choosing to pursue one’s rooted creative desires.
All of this might be a little over-the-top, but it is precisely the type of vision that begins to describe the possibility of a society built upon free economy. Chris Anderson, writer of “The Long Tail” and editor in chief of Wired Magazine has of late been publicizing, and explaining the premise, of his new book “Free”, which is expected to be released early 2009. The interesting thing is it bears a striking similarity to a brand of Anarchy call Anarcho-syndicalism, which describes real freedom as freedom from “wage slavery”.
Chris Anderson states that “Everything that can be digital will become digital, and everything that is digital will become free or have to compete with free.” This is a liberating concept in many ways, and deftly describes a series of events in the history of software development that could usher in (or slowly encourage) a social revolution. This is something that has been hinted at for a long time by the internet and the “Knowledge Society” but not fully realized.
In this series I will explore the idea of a Free-Economy covering salient points and expounding on topical ideas including Open Source Software, Noam Chomsky’s ideas of social anarchy, decentralized tribal governments, the music industry, free information and viral marketing.
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Tags: Anarchy, Chris Anderson, Communications Theory, Free Economy, Noam Chomsky, Oraganic Society, Social Change, Utopia
May 13th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] So as the title implies, I have just started a series on the indusblue blog about the notions of a “Free Economy”. [...]
May 13th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Being in the advertising business, we know that all the content that is provided to consumers as “free” isn’t really free. It is laced with advertising to make it freely available. To be really free we would need to have products that we all use on a daily basis have no advertising as part of those services, which will make them impossible to produce and maintain as people will still need to be paid to build those products.
I can see a free mortgage of the future, my house will be made of Lego with each brick acting as a mini billboard.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Will the notion of the “free” that you will be discussing be related only to straight fiscal costs, or will you be discussing secondary costs and/or barriers to enter into such an economy? These secondary factors could be, but aren’t limited to: socio-economic, educational, environmental, and cultural costs.
In my eyes, any feasible “free (fiscal) economy” will always come at the cost of at least one of the secondary factors above.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Actually, the notion of “free” I will be talking about is more along the lines of the Anarcho-syndicalist idea of “free”, which is freedom from slave-labour.
I feel that this combined with Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on organic societies, reveals a “weak relationship” [to use a programming term] with online communities, open software and Chris Anderson’s thoughts.
Certainly there is a barrier to entry, and there are some huge unproven assumptions… including the assumption that non-monetary economies will produce citizens interested in pursuing creative goals that contribute the the health of the whole.
Also, there is the obvious disconnect between life online, and the brick and mortar reality of paying a mortgage… as Dayton has pointed out.
But I’m less interested in the actual overthrow of the entire economic/capitalist system (which is unlikely to happen in any sort of overwhelming manner in our lifetime) and more interested in speaking about the realization of the grassroots ideals inherent in the internet.
Though it is obvious that I cannot talk about one without understanding the implications of the other.