What Free Actually Means on the Web

Hello, Gemlanders, I’m back again after a Christmas and New Year’s hiatus. Now it’s 2022 and time to get gemlogging again, although I feel like a typewriter whose keys have all been bashed at once—stuck together in one big jam because of wanting to say everything at once. My posts here will be as much about sorting out my thoughts in a logical arrangement as anything else.

What I really want to explore on this gemlog is:

Why pay for art?

There’s a reason I’m exploring it here, on Gemini, instead of elsewhere. The reason I found out about Gemini at all is because of the dawning realization of how exploitative Web2 had become (thanks to Jaron Lanier and Shoshana Zuboff—see previous posts for details). We have all been wholesale plundered and extracted.

That is true in any case of our personal metadata or “data exhaust.” We didn’t even know it was valuable—and for quite a long time, neither did Google. They stumbled into it, kind of like stumbling into a bubbling spring of oil that the landowner considers a nuisance to agriculture but you realize can be sold for enormous profits in a budding energy economy.

That is where the biggest wealth transfer has taken place, and with an incredible imbalance of knowledge about what exactly was happening. Zuboff compares it to the Spanish conquest of the Americas: they formally announced that they were taking over, but the indigenous who heard the announcement didn’t understand the Spanish words. Tough luck on them.

But there’s another area where the exploitation has happened, and it’s partly due to our own collusion. Again, an ignorant collusion, but collusion all the same.

Namely, we offered up our creativity for free. Most people saw this as a beautiful thing. Who would’ve thought you could crowd-source the world’s hugest encyclopedia for no money at all? Who would’ve thought people would Instagram poetry for free, design templates and code programs for free, share music for free? Who would've thought people would gladly share quips, quotes, and cute cats on social media for free?

The early internet seemed to prove that we human beings aren’t greedy after all but generous, and the utopia of the internet has released our best impulses!

Of course, none of it was free. People’s creativity was proffered free of charge because they were well enough off from other sources to have surplus time to create. Someone else was paying their salaries. If their free gifts online inadvertently deleted someone else’s job, there was no way it would ever become visible to them. I suppose it was much the same for the Spanish back home who enjoyed the flow of silver, gold, and potatoes, having no idea what was being wrought upon the new continent to bring it to them.

People also could offer their creativity free on the internet because of costly hardware and software. Prices went down for both, of course, but not to zero. Not to mention internet service providers themselves. The *medium* of art rather than the art itself became the magnet for wealth. What looked free was actually a redirection of profits to tech companies.

Curiously enough, even the tech world fell for the utopia of free. There’s a reason nearly every online program and software starts out free. (Hardware is different, of course, but there’s even a precedent here—like electric companies giving away inefficient, energy-sucking light bulbs for free.) It builds users, momentum, and—not least of all—admiration.

But sooner or later, even software companies have to make money. Freemium turns premium. Scaling up turns upscale. And if you can’t get people to pay, then you have to quietly thieve. Hence “Don’t-be-evil” Google turning evil.

I despise the bait-and-switch, but I recognize my complicity. I was perfectly happy to use the free search, never once thinking how anything that good could possibly be free.

Google will survive (or not—who cares?). But what is worrisome to me is the fate of all the creative individuals out there who have gotten sucked into this.

We’ve trained ourselves and others that our creativity is worth nothing. How will we come back from that?