Malcolm Gladwell Bitchslaps Chris Anderson

June 29th, 2009, by The Angry Drunk

Full dis­clo­sure: I have not read, and have no inten­tion of read­ing Wired edi­tor Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” This is mainly because I think that Anderson is a deluded cyber­topian free­tard, and I have no inten­tion of giv­ing money to some­one who is exhort­ing the rest of us to give our work away for free. I’ll read Chris’s tripe the very day he decides to post it online free of charge.

Even though I don’t rec­om­mend read­ing Anderson’s bab­ble, I do highly rec­om­mend read­ing Malcom Gladwell’s evis­cer­a­tion of Anderson’s “logic” in his review of the book in The New Yorker. Gladwell does an excel­lent job of expos­ing Anderson’s cyber­topian fan­tasy for the garbage that it is.

hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link

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Update: I just found out that Anderson is releas­ing a free edi­tion of Free. Fuck it, it’s still tripe.

6 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • Sigivald

    I’ll read Chris’s tripe the very day he decides to post it online free of charge.

    So, accord­ing to Gruber’s lat­est note, you’ll be doing it on July 9?

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Read the update :) And no, I still won’t be read­ing it. My time is equally unfree, and I have bet­ter things to do with it than read cyber­topian twaddle.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Just fin­ished read­ing it. Anderson is yet another utopian douchebag who thinks that unless there’s an obvi­ous mate­ri­als cost up front, every­thing costs noth­ing to make. And infra­struc­ture? That’s paid for and main­tained by yet another fuck­ing magic beanfield.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Bing Bing Bing Bing

    Give the man a prize. I was keep­ing this argu­ment in reserve for when the free­tards inevitably show up. Anderson, like every free­tard before him only con­sid­ers the deliv­ery costs, never the total cost of pro­duc­tion. My ideas have worth (mar­ket will­ing) regard­less of whether they are sent via IP pack­ets, printed on paper, or carved on fuck­ing golden plates.

  • Vega

    People who sub­scribe to this crap are prob­a­bly the same idiots who go on about how Apple is rip­ping every­body off just because some igno­rant ana­lystards at isup­pli have said the iPhones mate­r­ial cost is only $3.50 or some­thing. And because we all now engi­neer­ing, soft­ware devel­op­ment, admin­is­tra­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and all the other things Apple does come for free, the iPhone should only be $3.55.

    Oh, and I bet a Venn-diagram of the “con­tent should be free”-cheapskates and the “I can build a com­puter with the same specs as a Mac for less than half price”-douchebags looks like two fuck­ing con­cen­tric cir­cles, aka a sphincter.

  • Sigivald

    Heh. The update wasn’t on my screen when I posted. (Load bunch of tabs, work through, repeat…)

    I do try to read the whole thing before posting!