Free-dum 2.0
Is stuff really free on the Internet?
The Internet features networking, cultural performances, and metaphysical speculation about it. Notions from informational machine to digital democracy to being digital, virtual communities, and many many more are the registers of metaphysical speculation. Metaphysical speculation typically registers the experiences of first encounters, when newness is marked as difference and often with a sense of infinitude. A recent entry is Free (Hyperion Press, 2009) by the editor of Wired magazine. It follows the founding editor’s very similar New Rules for the New Economy (1999) just a decade ago now updated for the Web 2.0 generation.
A colleague once characterized Wired as the New Yorker of the high tech set – that is, a hip representation of an aspirational profile, essentially marketing consumption preferences, including consumption of ideas. Each adjudicates to an in-crowd and floats ideas, concepts, “memes” that compose its cultural competence to a community of subscribers who aspire to it. Networking, cultural performance and metaphysical speculation about the Meaning of It All come together in what are essentially lifestyle publications. Wired networks the hip set where IT and the arts intersect in the Bay Area; their cultural performances are chronicled in the magazine, which include a monthly accounting of what’s Wired, Tired and Expired. And metaphysical speculation is floated that sometimes finds its way reformulated into books.
Early versions of the ideas in Free have been floated as articles in the magazine, on the author’s blog, in conference presentations and interviews. This is important as more than a marketing strategy – that is, for networking and as cultural performance. It puts his goods into circulation with important reference groups propounding similar ideas, such as Lawrence Lessig, a major critic of applying intellectual property regimes to new media at Stanford’s law school, or the east coast counterpart, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society – both sites of intense metaphysical speculation about the Internet (e.g., Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, 2006; John Palfrey’s Born Digital, 2008; Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, 2005, or Remix, 2008) and of enthusiastic commentators on each others’ work. The notion of ‘free’ goods and services on the Internet is one of those sites, an island of discourse within the larger Internet world, where other islands have included Internet governance and Digital Divide or, earlier, the Death of Distance.
Much as discussion of Internet governance focused on how the Internet unleashed new forms of participatory governance and that participation was empirically problematic, Free imagines a new economy in which goods and services are given away – that is, without payment in money – or acquired ‘free’ on the Internet, and how to make money from it. Examples of free goods range from Wikipedia to file-sharing, pirated music to academic research reports, and from the prehistory of the Web in the Internet (the Requests for Comment that document the Internet’s early development) to yesterday’s YouTube uploads, television episodes on Hulu.Com, and the editorial content of nearly every major newspaper in the world. Some of this ground has been covered before – for example, the free and open software movements, which Free’s author, Chris Anderson, cites for the distinction between free as ‘liberty’ and as ‘gratis’. It is primarily free-as-gratis that interests him: how, he asks, can an economy work in which so much is given away, where marginal costs trend toward zero, and marginal returns, too?
Part of the answer is borrowed from technologists who settled on ‘reputation’ and peer-recognition as the rewards for contributing to ‘free’ software, which entailed both free-gratis and liberty from corporate models with their proprietary secrets.[1] But Anderson writes journalism, not software, and his models start with advertising-supported cultural production and then go on to the beaux ideals of Silicon Valley startups. First among these is accumulating ‘eyeballs’ or attention, to assemble a user base, effectively a kind of public, following or audience to market to. This is the get-them-in-the-store marketing strategy. Another is the idea of ‘freemiums’, or giving away a limited version of a product or service to entice purchasers to a premium one. These are his principle ideas, and Anderson practices what he preaches. He has assiduously flogged his book in IT venues, including the BBC’s weekly radio show on the latest in info-tech, Digital Planet (30 June 2009),[2] monitors responses to it on a blog established for his earlier book, The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2008), which was on Paraeto distributions, a staple of marketing theory, and offered it free to read (but not to download or make a copy) on Google Books and Scribd.com for a limited time.
So far, the problem of ‘free’ goods may not be so problematic: we already know about advertising, free samples, ‘selling up’, and other marketing strategies. That explains the developers, though not perhaps in terms they prefer. They prefer – actually, refer to – social connections with users; for them, why users provide information for free from contributing to Wikipedia to Facebook pages to Amazon reviews has been a persistent question that was asked earlier about Web portals and even the Internet itself. To the engineer-inventors of the Internet, giving it away was thought to appeal to the better angels of our nature, or at least the nature they projected onto others. To the more commercially minded, the question is the flip side of finding so much information without having to pay. Anderson observes that one pays in other ways, notably in time but also in inconvenience when, say, reading a book on-line – to which I could add paying in discomfort. Free is a book about marketing, and a routine – aggressively marketed – one at that, but it does have a point.
Why do people give away stuff for free? The simple answer is that they get something besides money in the forms of peer-recognition, prestige, honor. This is bland stuff until one adds what anthropologists have long noted about such transactions that are stripped away in modeling them as currency. Unlike currency, peer-recognition and honor are not anonymous or universally convertible stores of value. They are conversions of something more mundane into something more sublime, often something that can be exchanged into something that cannot. I donate used books to a school that sells them to raise scholarship funds. I get rid of the books and get a tax deduction for charitable contribution. Even without direct acknowledgment from the school such as the lists they publish of cash contributors (public honor), I can personally have a feeling of ‘supporting’ learning in addition to the private pleasure of leisure reading and of converting books I don’t want into a tax deduction. But I cannot sell any of that, and I have only in a loosely metaphorical sense ‘bought’ it. Such exchanges do not involve just ‘something else’ additional to money, they convert up (to honor) what cash-transactions convert down (into expenses).
Second, these are fundamentally exchanges in which anthropologists have long noticed that it is not the gift that matters but the giver (and the receiver) – or, more precisely, what matters about the gift is the giver-receiver relationship. It is a kind of contract that we experience as a feature of the gift. Money belongs to private commerce, until it becomes a contribution to a charity.
Familiarly conceptualized as public goods, the latter is particularly overlooked, or just taken for granted, in discussions of ‘free’ (of cost) goods and ‘gift economies’ among IT mavens. No goods are free; that doesn’t just mean they have other costs but that the goods are embedded in and tokens of relationships themselves articulated, entered into and maintained by exchanges that symbolize them. The mystical power of the thing exchanged – whether a gift, or ‘money’ in our capitalist economy – is the meaning it conveys about a relationship. Why do we have to ‘launder’ some money, and why isn’t writing free software while on salary at IBM or as a university professor also money laundering? A kiss is just a kiss, except when it’s from Mom, from a spouse, from the Pope or a mafia boss. Why do people give away stuff for free? It is not enough to say that they don’t, that they get something else. Is the notion of public goods enough? What else is there?
A comparison might help. Off the coast of New Guinea, Melanesians sail across the open ocean, through crocodile infested waters, in open canoes to trade red shell necklaces for white shell armbands. It seems completely irrational; even if it’s called ‘ritual trade’ or ‘tradition’, what they’re doing is non-rational and so by implication must they be. The anthropologist who dissected this view started by noting that interpretations (‘tradition’ or ‘ritual trade’ or ‘irrationality’) added spurious external information to an incomplete description. To complete the description he added back the native metaphysics, or how they represented it in magical spells and myths, that were part of such exchanges. Then he described how these exchanges themselves were part of an extensive series, that red shell necklaces for white shell armbands were exchanges between high-status persons, and that other kinds of exchanges were similarly between persons of certain statuses, all the way back to villages and households, to the exchanges that secured spouses and the routine exchanges between them. Moreover, points of strategic calculation included relations in which upward conversions were attempted – such as things that circulated in households for things that circulated in villages, things that circulated in villages for things that circulated between islands – which succeeded when equivalence was accorded to the exchangers.
OK, that’s Melanesia; what about the Internet? There is an expectation of return and of upward conversion, just as in Melanesia. Just as in Melanesia, the proximate goal in giving (time, code, book reviews, personal data on Facebook) is to get something of value, from whom being the important variable if indeed the gift is merely the symbolic residue of the relationship. Membership is the reward, but motives do not run the system. The anthropologist who described the Melanesian system, could do no better than to conclude that Melanesians had other values than those posited for ‘economic man’, the foil of his analysis.[3] They had ‘spiritual’ values or sought ‘psychological’ rewards beyond material ones in their extensive system of exchanges, and this was all the more plain as the things exchanged had so little material, but so much spiritual/psychological, value. This is no better than saying that contributors to free software (or to Wikipedia or to Amazon reviews or to Facebook) do it for the ‘rewards’ of peer recognition or even, perhaps more interestingly, for membership in a cult. It doesn’t explain the system, or explains it with phlogiston, or with the ‘dormitive properties’ apocryphally invoked to explain why opium makes you sleepy.
More data was a good enough solution at the empirical level. It restored missing information that the Economic Man account left out of account; but it really didn’t advance the account beyond adducing additional variables, partly because it did not move beyond intentionality in action. That was left to Marcel Mauss, who, in a few short pages,[4] summarized what Malinowski had described as the manifestations of “a vast system of prestations” that culminated in “most elevated” versions which “gathered up many others” and conferred significance on them as situated, highly contextualized versions of the whole system.
Likewise, ‘free’ is a system feature – of free/open software, Wikipedia contributions, user reviews on Amazon.com, information posted on Facebook, the web and, indeed, the Internet itself. These are not ‘given away for nothing’ or even for something by their creators. What is designated ‘free’ may be differentiated from fee-for-service transactions, but they are still transactions, still part of a “vast system” of exchanges that continuously produce and reproduce the system that the engineers engineers who invented it conceptualize as a ‘stack’ of applications. New ones draw meaning from previous ones, particularly those that provide ‘platforms’ for the newer applications. That is, looking at the system, where these transactions are, instead of outside it, where they aren’t, register its flows of significance as properties of the system instead of as alternatives in ‘market’ economics with, as Anderson notes, its presumptions of scarcity.
Anderson introduces plenitude as an explanation for ‘free goods’, but less because they are plentiful – there are many impediments to acquiring the Internet’s free goods – than because plenty would be scarcity’s opposite within the system of capitalist economy. In that system, the prime depressor of prices is plentiful supply. What this misses is how, apart from such comparison, the exchanges are part of a system that confers its significance on them. It is in this sense that Internet users are ‘converting up’ when they contribute to Wikipedia pages, Amazon.com reviews, post data of friendships and preferences on Facebook, contribute to free/open software projects. What they do draws its significance from the system in which those actions lodge, or acquires its significance by being incorporated into that system. The same actions can still mean something else outside the system where, say, a review contributed to Amazon.com would just be an opinion, or Free just another marketing strategy, without the series of preliminary exchanges (blog entries, interviews on IT shows, digital versions on the Internet) that convert it upwards into a book.[5]
Exchanges in Melanesia mean something because they take part in and compose a system, whose abstracted representations are the exchanges between chiefs of red shell necklaces for white shell armbands. Lesser exchanges, between other persons, are situated, contextualized versions of those. Applying this comparison to the Internet, one would want to develop a list of its component exchanges and the correlated social identities of those who perform them, then determine how these ‘stack’, and what are the terminal points where the whole system culminates or is abstracted into purely symbolic exchanges. Where would those be? One hint from the sociology of exchanges is that those that are reciprocated soonest, that have the shortest term, have the most specific value, most restricted or local significance. They mark fleeting relations, while the longer the cycle the greater the significance, the more the exchange symbolizes. A debt unpaid is a relationship; a debt discharged is a relationship ended. With this as a guide, we should look for long-cycle exchanges, particularly system-building exchanges that are never ‘paid off’, something like a sociological counterpart to public debt in macroeconomics.
It is not without accident (but it was without design) that the Internet originated in the public sector, financed with public sector funds and as a sort of public or at least shared utility that its makers grew by growing that public. It is well known that the Internet began from a taxpayer funded project, less well appreciated that that project was a utility (before it was metaphysically represented as a thing in itself) to connect scare computers with relatively more abundant (cheaper) communications. At least, that was the inventors initial conception. Projects, functions, utilities added to it had to follow this model, or at least not bend it too far, and to be rationalized in metaphysical representations shared with those publics, notwithstanding constant tugs and pressures to privatize all or parts of it (the physical ‘backbone’ in the Reagan years, the Web during the Clinton years). Despite pushes to coopt the Internet for private gain, the fate particularly of software applications has been to be pulled toward the models of public utilities, common goods. This has never been smooth: those who favor the public utility model have been continuously alarmed by partial cooptations into the private sector,[6] others encouraged when such cooptation seemed to come up short.[7]
Commercialization of the Internet, and later of the Web and of applications that run on it, as Anderson and others have noted, has been devilishly hard. It is hard not just because users have come to expect applications to be as free as the Internet, even though almost all users pay for access to it, nor that subsidies lie behind give-aways, such as giving away software to gain market-share (and drive competitors out). What has been hard has been colonizing it with existing commercial models, which arguably would encounter precisely the same sorts of competitive dis-advantage in any regime of public goods. It is this which encourages the idea that the Internet represents somehow a new economy, when what it represents is a system and systematization of exchanges – one, I am suggesting, that has more in common with a public service than with the market.
Some on the political left are both encouraged by this prospect, and develop metaphysical representations of the Internet as ‘naturally’ public and free, and are alarmed at threats to it by commercialization. The political right has always pushed either to privatize it, to put some of it into commercial hands, or to limit what it can do to complementary functions. This sort of complementarity shows up in paid access but free content; it also shows up in the idea of the ‘freemium’ or free sample, where emphasis is on ‘sample’. Try, then buy. But the very confusion of the field where both right and left are divided against themselves is a powerful indicator that the cultural economy of the Internet is not an inversion within the field of political economy. It is not just a change of signs, or even replacement of scarcity with plentitude. It needs to be understood as a system of exchanges, which are gathered up and culminate in sublime forms that convey their significance to others as more situated, contextualized, limited versions.
This is where metaphysical representations become important, and why there are so many of them. Nearly all are logically incoherent: they envision a new way of being (being digital, digital natives, digital democracy, e-commerce, etc.) but focus on old tasks, usually structured by a presumption of liberation. The Internet/Web/Facebook will liberate actors from limitations/scarcities/fixities in time and space to realize a nature somehow checked at the entrance to modern societies (or to traditional ones when these ideas are taken overseas). Metaphysical speculation doesn’t have to be logical – that can be a drawback – but it has to be visionary and so, typically, projects some liberated feature. What is interesting here is the reaching for more sublime representations, or ‘trading up’. (What’s interesting in an American cultural context is that the sublime is individual enhancement, but that is another story.)
An example is one of the core ideas of the free-economy interpretations, which is that free attracts users, builds a public, gathers ‘mind-share’, which can later be ‘monetized’ by selling something to them, or by selling them to advertisers. Google is said to excel at this, so is Amazon.com, by parsing user inputs and reaggregating those as preference profiles, which has long been a basic step in scientific marketing strategy. Facebook is a recent entrant into this charmed circle, which is said to be the goal of Silicon Valley startups since the collapse of dot-com investments in e-commerce.[8] If that is so, attracting users who do not pay but who stick around is really not different than the goal of the original developers of the Internet to spread it by expanding it to what was imagined a natural community of users.
Who does is really a question of how. No matter how you look at it, the Internet is not financed by users paying for it, save at a very few points (such as Internet Service Providers or for physical equipment). It is financed on a model of subsidies whether from the public purse, in the case of the early Internet, or corporate sponsors in the case of advertising, startups, loss-leading and other familiar means of embedding commercial transactions inside more lasting relationships, or longer term exchanges – in effect, trading up from short-term transactions to long-term relationships. On the one hand, there really is no conundrum, except perhaps how to translate familiar marketing practices, such as free samples, onto the Internet or, conversely, how to preserve some pre-Internet monopoly. On the other hand, the Internet really is like a foreign country in the sense that the exchanges that make it the Internet and not something else are differently constituted, differently prioritized, than market-exchanges.
The difference is less the components than how they are shaped into a coherent form. The information surfeit, or plentitude, is a feature of ritual and myth, part of the ritualization of the space that includes, mutatis mutandis, metaphysical speculation about its overall shape, its significance, its foundational reality. An example would be the famous dictum that “information wants to be free.”[9] Transactions in ‘free’ goods and services are cultural performances that take significance not only as ‘non-market’ – or, in the strong form, not-corporate – in a capitalist context, where there will always be something pre- or anti-capitalist about them, or at least about the referents we have for common goods. Outside that context, they also take on the significance of the Internet itself, become instances of it, gathered up by it into a “vast scheme” whose systemic properties are missed, or misinterpreted, from the actor perspective. Melanesians engage in all sorts of exchanges because that is what they do; exchanges establish relationships, which may be highly agonistic, but the alternative is no relationship, which is to say there is no alternative. Such is often the sense that we have of market economies, that there really is no outside, or that outsides are few, highly circumscribed, and for all that tenuous; so the degree of resistance in the cultural economy of the internet seems all the more remarkable, its relative alienness more profound, for being so close at hand, all around instead of far off, like Melanesia. So, too, the Internet.
What’s interesting about this is how the Internet is a site of high, and persistent, contestation. Its gurus, mavens and big-thinkers struggle to tell myths about it, myths about free-dom, and to enact them ritually by putting on cultural performances, expressivity seemingly for its own sake and transactions in ‘friendship’ (aka, networking). This means lots of reputation management, not least for exchanges that convert up (from remixes to making unexpected connections or links) from lower value goods/services/ideas to higher value ones (generally, newer, more seamless), such as magazine article to blog to IT interview to book. Also, metaphysical speculations about the Internet tend to traffic in greedy, but one-dimensional ideas, whether it is the ‘long tail’ (of Paraeto distributions) or ‘free’ (as in samples), or earlier ‘digital democracy’ the ‘death of distance’, the ‘software machine’, or many others that reach for more sublime representations that don’t just re-present or reproduce the system but present what it produces.
As analysis, Free is merely derivative from the reference group sociology that has been around since the 1950s when pop versions fretted over the discovery of other-directedness, just as The Long Tail is merely derivative from the conceptualization of Paraeto distributions. As a cultural text, however, it is interesting, like a scrap of overheard conversation, a myth told – actually performed – both to explain and to instruct, with a secret to reveal and hidden powers to evoke.
Notes
[1] A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar by Nikolai Bezroukov. First Monday, volume 4, number 12 (December 1999), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/index.html
[2] http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20090623-0830a.mp3
[3] Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1922).
[4] Essai sur le don, Année Sociologique, seconde serié I (1923-24), Ch 2, part 2. The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (Cohen & West, 1966).
[5] Another Internet tech guru, Esther Dyson, once explained that she wrote for free to get invited to speak for fees.
[6] E.g., Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber (MIT Press 2002); Alexander Galloway, Protocol (MIT Press 2004); Jack Goldsmith, Who Controls the Internet (Oxford 2006); Lawrence Lessig, Code (2000).
[7] A notable example would be Chris Anderson’s earlier book, The Long Tail (Hyperion 2008) or the hopeful writings of web-designer Clay Shirky, such as in Here Comes Everybody (Penguin 2008).
[8] Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (Gotham Books, 2008).
[9] A meme that has multiple lives <http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html>, but as normative apocrypha is attributed to Richard Stalling, visionary guru of the free software movement, and popularized by John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in Wired magazine (The economy of ideas, 1993, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html)
