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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!