http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer

Tim

Cool Thanks!

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail author...

Good stuff

Silent weapons for quiet wars

direct link since i had trouble finding it http://www.wired.com/images/multimed...unabridged.zip

Although, there's some good reading at the link I posted, so don't forget to go there too.

Tim

That's a great article. Forget the audio book, go watch the stop-motion Star Wars Lego movies by kids.

Ah, ok. Go listen to the audio book too...

Anderson's book was given quite a teardown by Malcolm Gladwell in a recent New Yorker. I've read the Gladwell review, but not the book itself (so far). Here's the Gladwell review.

Here's another riff about their differing contentions.

I skimmed the "teardown" and read some of the book (so far). The book struck me as very thought-provoking, and to me, that's all one can expect of most books.

I have had recurrent fantasies of a world in which everything was produced like Wikipedia -- virtually at no cost, by volunteers. The problem would be, how do all these people support themselves? One would just have to redistribute wealth so that all the people keeping the world going thru volunteerism got enough money to prosper.

The book Walden Two, by B.F. Skinner, has a related thesis -- money isn't the only reason people do things -- what if the world was based on something else?

So I'm very interested in the "free" thesis, even if it's wrong. I found sections of the first few chapters quite funny, and well-taken.

And if you like books with extravigant theses, I always try to recommend Alan Harrington's The Immortalist, which has the slogan "the time has come to kill death." It's old, but very well written, and I don't think anyone has ever taken my recommendation that they read it, but I will never stop trying. You can buy it used from Amazon for $3.75 + shipping.

I agree with Anderson, and I agree with Gladwell.

Anderson and his magazine tend to be eye-poppingly optimistic, taking shrewd, clever observations about current trends and trying to make grand, over-arching statements about them.

The best example of this "Wired Manifesto thinking," for me, was the issue about The New Hydrogen Economy. Buried under a lot of interesting ideas and "rah-rah" grandstanding was the basic requirement that the USA switch to nuclear power. While I'm actually a big proponent of nuclear power, and I believe the rich western countries should be working hard to make a viable nuclear alternative by pouring lots of research money into it, I don't think it is something that is done overnight and it certainly shouldn't be dressed up like a "hydrogen economy" instead of a "nuclear economy".

Anderson is doing it again here. While I agree that there's an awful lot of power in Free, Free is changing the world and that it going to change the world a lot more in the future, I agree with Gladwell that Anderson is too optimistic and too grandiose in his conclusions.

I am an active participant in the Free economy. I have had (among other things) my photo in a full page magazine ad and displayed on Australian billboards and my daughter's picture put into a science textbook (as well as my photos being used on many blogs, pamphlets, etc). That would never have happened if I had charged even $10 for the use of my photos.

But Gladwell makes some good points that there are new ways to make money in the new economy, and his example of the Apple App Store is a great example.

Anyway, thanks again for the original link, Tim, and thanks GeraldKo for the interesting rebuttal.

his characterization of RMS as anti-capitalist is somewhat off target, tho one that seemes to show up frequently...