Free: The Future of a Radical Price
by Chris Anderson
Random House, £18.99
Chris Anderson has two products to flog. Obviously, there’s the book, which takes an intriguingly counter-intuitive premise (businesses can make money by giving stuff away) and demonstrates it to be a scaled-up version of an already established tactic, made possible by the low overheads involved in the delivery of online products. In fact, Anderson begins the story of Free in the world of 19th century patent medicines – which is fitting, because with its impossible promises of entrepreneurs growing wealthy at no cost to consumers or themselves, Free is 80 per cent snake oil, too.
In the schema of Free, the book is a loss-leader (offered as a free text download and full-length audiobook on Anderson’s website) for the main product line which is Anderson himself, available for public speaking engagements. Offering himself up as the man with a mainline to the future of the media, Anderson has been racking up column inches in both the fidgety paper media and gloating online outlets with his aggressive assertions of the imminent death of the press. In an especially bullish interview with Der Spiegel, he even declared “media” and “news” to be non-words and announced that the media of the future will be a hobby (although not, presumably, for auditorium fillers like himself).
Funnily enough, Free the book (the printed edition of which, unlike the online edition, isn’t free) doesn’t substantiate either Anderson’s bigger claims or the more vituperative criticism he’s drawn for his thesis. What it actually describes isn’t so much the future promised by the title, but the present we’ve been living in for at least the last decade.
Anderson anatomises free into many forms, from the free sample to the cross-subsidy to what he labels “freemium” (basically, economy and first class services with a zero price on the entry-level line). Google, of course, has built an empire on giving away its products – principally search, but also email, web browser and a whole mass of other applications – allowing it to essentially corner the means of production for usable information, and helping to drive customers towards the advertisers who have paid for space. Anderson draws heavily on the Google experiment to make his case.
He also draws on Wikipedia – not only as an example, but also as an unacknowledged source for a couple of large chunks of text. Such plagiarism is sloppy, and sloppiness is typical of this book: there’s a failure to draw connections or make comparisons between different parts of the argument. Why, for example, do video games seem to be so much more successful in converting free users into paying customers than shareware programmes? Anderson provides the stats, but because he’s only interested in taking lessons from the financially successful segment of the free economy, the lower end gets overlooked.
And what about the unwaged workers of the free economy, like the Wikipedians who became his unwitting co-authors? Anderson seems confident that people will continue to labour gratis on the promise of community and celebrity. Coming from someone who gets well paid for his public speaking gigs assuring journalists that they can make a living by getting other journalists to work for nothing (“leveraging the free”) it’s unclear why anyone should be paying tribute to his half-formed, self-serving economic theory.
Sarah Ditum
