On 'free' things
I donated blood yesterday. The friendly phlebotomists rewarded my altruism with a free t-shirt. How nice of them to do so. I have a pretty large collection of free t-shirts from donating blood and I wear them all proudly. Mostly, I wear them because they're next in the drawer, but I also like to normalize and highlight little acts of altruism. I believe in the mission of donating blood, and I will gladly act as their walking billboard. There's the catch though. They're asking me to lend my personal credibility to their brand, and they'll pay the cost of the shirt to compensate me for the cost of my credibility. If you don't think your credibility is worth much, ask yourself the question 'How much would it take for me to drive around with a bumper sticker for the presidential candidate that I didn't vote for?'. I'll bet your answer to that is substantially more than the cost of the bumper sticker. It turns out what you wear on your shirt, and on your bumper are actually worth a lot, both to you and to the person who owns the message. In fact, a lot of things that are called 'free' are paid for twice, once monatarily by the company that bought it, and once by you in opportunity and social costs. So if there's so much value, why do we call them 'free'?
Maybe we should mentally put an asterisk everywhere we see the word 'free'. When you see the word 'free', think of it as a shorthand for 'free... monatarily to you at this time' . Or maybe we should mentally replace the word 'free' with 'paid for earlier by an advertising contract'. That would be the much more honest labeling. When you download an app that's 'free', you're trading away some of your attention, advertisers have bought a chance to sway a decision about how you spend money or how you vote. When you use a 'free' social media app, you're trading away the contents of your personal correspondence with your friends and loved ones so that some other company can have another shot at manipulating your behavior and emotions. Free of cost, but there’s still a price that’s paid.
In the age of the internet, ‘free’ can also mean exploitative. If you want to consume free content on the internet, maybe you watch the newest clips from your favorite youtube channels, or read a blog. When you pay for a movie, your dollars support an industry that has to actually hire and pay the wages of the people who create the content. In contrast, when you watch a free clip on YouTube, the person who invested their time and creativity making that video typically gets nothing or is woefully underpaid while YouTube gets the majority. Artistic and creative endeavors are probably the areas where it is most important to pay fairly for the value we get, precisely because it is so easy for companies to undervalue their creative contributors. Bloggers and contributors are just exploited versions of columnists and journalists. When a free 'online magazine' doesn't hire staff journalists, they're simply becoming a middle man to siphon profits away from their contributors. Ask any graphic artist how often they get requests for them to perform unpaid work in exchange for 'the exposure'.
Beyond the ethical ramifications of free things, the most obvious difference is quality. Fan fiction stories are plentiful and free in internet forums, but they're just not as good as the work by professional novelists. Free apps nominally perform the function they claim, but paid software always performs much better. We only have a limited amount of time here on Earth, a limited number of books that we'll read and a limited number of hours that we'll invest in front of a computer monitor. I know paying for your experiences is expensive, but your time is valuable too. Investing in software that makes you more productive, or buying tickets to a show is investing in your own experiences and increasing the value of your own time.