Saturday 1 December 2007

Pic of the day: The freeconomy may be beginning in the virtual worlds, but it is spilling over into real life.

The freeconomy is coming

NaNoWriMo is over, but it still makes me think. The rising tide has lifted amateur novels in both quantity and quality. Perhaps the two are related: As more and more people write novels just because they can, some of them are bound to be good. And as people keep doing this, some of them are getting better over time. I think I am one of those, but I wonder if I have enough years left to become truly good. Also I have other things to do in my life. Incidentally, most of them are freeconomic too. Including this journal.

Yes, back on track: What is "freeconomy"? At the sight of it, a contradiction in terms. Economics are about the allocation of scarce resources. For this reason, we don't buy air, as there is plenty of it for everyone. In most of the world, we are buying water in some form, though it is mostly cheap, as there is mostly plenty of water in the areas where humans have settled the most. On the other extreme, rare metals fetch a lot of money (which represent other goods and services) because they cannot easily be replicated. The more gold or zirconium we use, the less there is left, and we could easily run into a shortage one day.

In fact, shortages seem to be returning, after a long absence. The price of oil has risen relentlessly, but you all know about this if you don't live as hermits in the wilderness. Coal, metals, building materials are still scarce despite the sudden slowdown in the USA. The ships simply change their route to China and have no problem emptying their cargo. Even in Europe, it can be hard to find quality building stone or mortar, and prices remain high. So it seems a strange time for me to babble about "freeconomy".

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But in my little world, the freeconomy is relentlessly seeping in, like a rising tide, only more slowly, over the course of years. For instance at work I have a computer (or three) running a free operating system. Ubuntu Linux is better suited than Microsoft Windows when you only need to do basic stuff like writing, making spreadsheets, handling e-mail, checking things on the Internet, and playing music. Linux needs less resources to do the same things faster. There are some specialized applications that are not available, but for everyday use it is actually better. And it is hard to compete with the price: $0.00!

More and more computer games thrive on the creativity of the users. The rapidly growing segment of "massively multiplayer online games" (such as EverQuest or World of Warcraft) would be rather pointless without the players and their relentless creativity. In a way, you can say that the players ARE the content. The rest is just the framework that allow them to unfold their creativity. While most of these games are not free, they are generally affordable, and free contenders can be found if you really are that broke.

Meanwhile, offline games often allow users to modify or add parts of the game. This is a tendency that has increased rapidly over the last decade and so. Some player of the popular game The Sims 2 have downloaded literally thousands of clothes, hairstyles, furniture, food etc, far more than what was in the game when they first installed it. And not only quantity but also quality: Many of the free downloads are simply prettier than the default objects. A few even have added functionality. And for the most part, it is free. You find the same trend in many other modern games.

On the Internet, free stuff is more or less the rule. Even if we discard piracy and plagiarism, there are a lot of free books, comics, music and even small movies. And of course news and facts. Curious students can literally know more than their teachers about topics that interest them, and patients are sometimes better informed than their doctor. Whether you want to learn a new language or care for a hamster, chances are you will go to the Internet first. And before buying a car, you probably read a lot of reviews by users and experts alike. We have grown accustomed to this. If we suddenly had to pay for all this information, we would get quite upset! Information may or may not want to be free, but we certainly want it to.

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But it goes further than this. Information is a part of so many things. True, there are still things where the "metal value" is the most important, such as gold or steel. But often information lets us use alternative resources, such as ceramics instead of metals. At other times, we can use the existing resources better, for instance making cars or skyscrapers with less steel and still have them be as solid as before, or better, thanks to improved engineering. We take for granted that a new car uses less fuel, is more comfortable and safer than the equivalent model from 10 or 20 years ago. And don't get me started on computers. My latest computer at home runs rings around the one from spring 2006, but actually cost noticeably less. This too is something we take for granted.

As the information content in products goes up, the price goes down. Scientists and engineers are constantly exchanging information. Not as freely as we might wish, but more than we might fear. When something is entirely in the realm of information, it will usually be available for free sooner or later. I still haven't been able to find a good free speech recognition, but I expect there to be one within five years. By "good" I mean equal to the best commercial product of today. There are already free word processors, spreadsheets and databases that compete squarely against the commercial versions. I'm using them. In fact, I am writing this in one of them.

We will still need food, and a roof over the head, and many such things. The freeconomy has not made all that much inroads in the material world yet. But it may happen. And even now, prices of many goods are lower and lower due to higher information content. For the freeconomy to completely take over, we need a situation where pretty much everyone has their basic needs filled, so they have the time and resources to do something for others. Even then, people are still greedy. But not all are greedy all the time. Often the wish for praise is stronger than material greed. And we cannot even rule out true goodness of the heart, although I expect it to be very rare.

Perhaps we don't really need to be good for the freeconomy to come. Perhaps the rising tide of information will usher in the age of nanotech, where copying loaves and fishes will be as easy as copying music today... just drag and drop. Perhaps people will be good simply because they cannot be bothered to be evil, much like we now pay more taxes than we really needed if we had let the poor starve and die. But maybe, just maybe, one day we will have a revolution of the heart, and we will assign things their true value. For the truth is: there is no information structure in the known universe as amazing as the human soul, and even one of those is surely worth more than all the riches of the world.