Freeconomics

I stumbled across this article today by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired: Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business
and while I'm still digesting it, here are my inital thoughts.

Now, in all honesty, I'd rather not think about money, advertising, web business and all those things that involve what I perceive to be slimy handed people doing back-alley exchanges that almost always seem to involve the exploitation of people in countries far away. On the other hand, I love the idea of things being free. Free! It makes my heart happy just thinking about things being given away with no money exchanged and no animals hurt in the process. Anderson basically argues that the times they are a changing in terms of the way we look at scarcity and markets.

The things that power the web-storage, processing power and bandwidth-are getting cheaper by the day, according to Anderson, making it feasible for companies like Google and Yahoo to give things away (web space, blogs, etc) for free while still making a profit in other arenas. It's all very clever and insidious, and I think the whole free thing could be used to great effect by us non-Capitalists trying to keep our heads above water in a deeply Capitalist world. (Is it possible to be a non-Capitalist in a capitalist world?)