WIRED: The Future Is FREE!
Author: Ockshun Jockson
Heh, weren't we just discussing this in the NIN thread?
Wired article
Scenario 1: Low-cost digital distribution will make the summer blockbuster free. Theaters will make their money from concessions — and by selling the premium moviegoing experience at a high price.
There are videogames in Korea and the U.S., online multiplayer ones, that are given away for free. And it's not a gimped experience, these are full-fledged games. The developer makes their money by taking a slice of the virtual goods that are sold in the game, a la eBay.
This beefy Wired article (from the print mag) gives tons of different examples. I can't help but feel all media will become free at the rate we're going.
Interesting stuff... tho' laden with the fuzzy logic and spime-blinders I've come to associate with WIRED over the years. (For awhile, it seemed like you could take whatever "future" their cover story predicted and safely bet that the exact opposite would actually happen.)
And in terms of fuzzy logic, when Anderson talks about the economics of abundance, he writes:
Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing.
Which are all lovely examples if you ignore that these situations have real costs. Obesity is a problem among the American poor because cheap food is fattening. It's faster & cheaper to buy your kid a 49 cent burger at McD's than to buy quality meat or vegetables at the grocery store. Unfortunately, the food is filling but nutrition free -- and the profit comes from working the margins: dirt cheap beef raised on deforested chunks of the Amazon. The apparent "abundance" suggested by obesity comes at a huge, huge cost -- the devastation of irreplaceable forests, the depletion of oxygen, future health costs as more and more Americans succumb to long-term health problems caused by poor diets. Likewise, those cheap T-shirts are so cheap because workers in far-distant Asian lands are getting exploited. As the American economy continues to crumble, as formerly "Third World" economies get up to speed, the economy will flatten and the prices we pay at Wal-Mart will reflect the real costs involved in production. The eternal "growth" posited by most economics theories is plainly false for the reason that physicists laugh at "perpetual motion machines": the universe is a closed system, entropy reigns supreme, and the energy's gotta be comin' from somewhere, baby.
Not to mention that the "give the razor away free and sell the blades at a profit" model assumes the one thing most start up businesses don't have: huge coffers of start-up cash to burn the first year or two and the faith and patience of investors and shareholders who don't panic as the books hemmorrhage red.
Of course, the "free except you have to watch the advertising" models seems to lead to a future of almost Phildickian madness, a daisy chain structure of ads selling ads selling ads selling ads.... We're being held up by the guy who's holding our bootstraps but I'm holding his bootstraps, and what the hell are we standing on, anyway? Not that it's any sillier than the way things work now; the housing market collapse is only confirming my long held suspicion that the so-called economy resembles nothing so much as a vast Ponzi scheme or AmWay racket.
And of course, the depiction of the spimey future of FREE fails to mention the costs of media sickness / message fatigue from the constant barrage of PR & propaganda... see here.
Not to be all full of nonstop hate, there are a lot of interesting ideas in this piece... just not a lot of critical thinking. Anderson writes that the dictum that "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is "wrong" because "a free lunch doesn't necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you'll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab."
But he's the one that's wrong. As every chick on the planet who's ever gotten a "free" drink from the sleazy cheeseball at the end of the bar knows -- if someone is picking up your tab, it generally means they're betting (or hoping) they might get something back from you later.
nice comments ink.
dok, thanks for hipping me to fnords.
Actually, OJ: I'm kind of astonished the article doesn't really get into the "virtual economy" that's spun out of WOW, Second Life, etc. that you mention in your comments -- that's a really fascinating development... taking the "exchange of goods & services" one (further) remove from reality.