Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote the best-selling 2006 book, The Long Tail. Now he has another hit with his latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. One way to decide whether to invest the time in reading a new book is to read reviews by other writers who have previously demonstrated their own insight. Malcolm Gladwell is one such writer, his books including The Tipping Point and Blink. In this review of Anderson’s book from The New Yorker, Gladwell quite harshly critiques what he sees as the case for Free (Anderson capitalizes the word). Gladwell may overdo it a little, especially as he seems (incorrectly) to think that Anderson argues that everything should be free, but his comments are still well worth reading.
Gladwell first summarizes Anderson’s view as being “an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that ‘information wants to be free.’” All things “made of ideas” are being pushed down in price in our digital age. Rather than being an ephemeral trend, Anderson sees this as inevitable, and perhaps an iron law. The costs of all electronic activity as rapidly falling toward zero, and when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen. Because of the power of Free to create instance consumer demand, Free represents an enormous business opportunity. To embrace the Free, businesses need to move from a “scarcity” mind-set to an “abundance” mind-set.
As a journalist and author, Gladwell focuses particularly on the implications of Free for journalism, publishing, and music. Gladwell critiques Anderson’s belief that it’s more feasible to pay someone to get other people to write than it is to pay people to write. Anderson argues that “From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business.”
More generally, Gladwell disputes the supposed law-like downward movement of prices. Returning to Brand’s famous dictum, Gladwell asks: “But information can’t actually want anything, can it?” At the end of his review, he concludes that the “only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” One of the most useful parts of this critical review is the separating out of four strands of argument in Free: a technological claim, a psychological claim, a procedural claim, and a commercial claim.
Gladwell is quick to dismiss Anderson’s conclusions. First, he uses the case of YouTube (which is so far only costing Google money) to dispute the argument. Then he makes a more general and useful point. Noting Anderson’s comparison to the old claim that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter, Gladwell says: “This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.” If the dispute between the two writers especially interests you, you can find more back-and-forth on the website of marketing guru Seth Godin.