Free on the Internet, Continued

To summarize the last post: in a burst of generosity, we humans offered our creativity for free on the internet, not realizing that:

1) our creativity was valuable and there were legitimate ways to be recompensed for it,

2) not paying for creativity on the internet did not stop the flow of funds but redirected it toward ISPs, hardware, and software, and

3) sooner or later someone would have to turn a profit and pay the bills; but without honest options for payment, the worst of us turned to hidden plunder (Google, Facebook, and virtually everything with cookies attached) and the best of us got plundered.

I am trying to stop *being* plundered, as are many others, by building walls around the citadel of my data, all the while resenting the time and even the need to do so. I’ve deleted idle accounts, changed all passwords, installed a VPN, switched to Metager and DuckDuckGo, and still I know it’s a bit like the cavalry coming out to meet the tanks.

Again, a good topic—for another time and place, perhaps. Here I’d like to examine my ongoing desire *to* plunder.

Because, what’s happened to me in the past fifteen or twenty years is that I’ve grown entitled to my free. It irritates or even outrages me to pay for things that are perfectly worth paying for.

It may have started with Slate. I think I found it when it started and read a bunch of articles and liked them. And then one day it had a paywall. I thought, Who the hell do you think you are to make me start paying for your free content?! It was a freemium model, but it inadvertently trained me to feel cheated by the perfectly legit ask.

This is probably also about the time I started noticing Google ads, and shortly thereafter figured out how to disable them. It’s been a war of attrition ever since.

Now I just avoid things that require subscriptions, yet wonder why the vast internet is so full crap. I complain that my free software doesn't collage my photos or extract pages from my PDFs, then waste enormous amounts of time searching for free online tools to do those things, even though paying would ultimately be cheaper. Every so often I’ll have enough of it all and pay a lot for something that works really well—Scrivener or Adobe Indesign—though inevitably I’ll still feel a bit cheated, especially with subscription models.

And let’s not even talk about music.

I never noticed any of this in any conscious way, though, until I started creating things that I thought were worthy of the pay. And then I got outraged how few others were willing to pay for my creativity.

Maybe it was just a cosmic rebalancing of the books!

This is one of the deep roots of my experimenting with Gemini. Of course, lots here is free. The huge advantage, of course, is the deliberate choice in Gemini to run lean and mean. As I speak, my father-in-law, who already runs servers as part of his business, is setting up Gemini capacity for my usage. His expertise is donated for the pleasure of trying out something new (at least I hope so) and the actual cost of running it is almost negligible. I never realized till now how complex and costly our visual-first Web is, nor how inexpensive and simple the internet could be when it was text-forward.

Flounder is a special program for gemlogging (and also making it visible to users of the Web). Alex assures me it costs him next to nothing; but because I am trying to extract myself from the extractive economy, I decided to support him on Patreon.

And finally, after my lament over giving away of our creativity for free, you may wonder why on earth I'm doing it here!

So to be clear, first of all, I don't object to anyone's giving away anything for free—but I do object to the refusal to realize that free is never entirely free, and the long-term economic cost of accustoming ourselves to fake free.

Second, it's worth it to me to gemlog here just to sort out my thoughts in quasi-public but less obviously connected to my real identity, since I'm both sorting out what I think and revising it as I go.

Third, I think the freemium model is legit for creative work: it's fair to give potential customers the chance to find out if they actually like your work before asking them to pay for it. Something like the "free" samples of food at grocery stores, hoping to make a long-term fan out of you.

And fourth, I will in fact make use of my Gemini footprint to share information about creative work for which I do in fact ask payment—as much to accustom myself to get over the feeling that it's somehow wrong.

So you've been warned! Don't get offended when I ask. You certainly don't need to buy. But let's collectively overcome our distaste at paying for creativity.