The emergence of "freeconomics"

"Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competency for our age".

Words by Chris Anderson, the author of the "Long Tail" book, discussing on his blog (via Dennis) the "emerging realization that abundance is driving our world", or the emergence of "freeconomics":

"I begin my economics of abundance speech with Carver Mead's mind-bending question: "What happens when things get (nearly) free?" His answer is that you waste them, be they transistors or megabytes of bandwidth capacity. You use them profligately, extravagantly, irresponsibly. You shift out of conservation mode and get into exploitation mode. You do crazy things like offering people the ability to put their whole music collection in their pocket, or promising the average email user that they'll never have to delete another message to conserve space. Just as Alan Kay "wasted" transistors to create the graphic user interface, we will all learn how to waste newly abundant resources, retraining our minds to ignore our instincts about costs and scarcity."

The speech he's referring to, he gave it recently at the PopTech conference in Maine. Venture capitalist David Hornik was there and summarizes it as follows:

"The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste."

Summaries of the speech also by Ethan Zuckerman and by Core77.

While I find Chris' argument compelling, and it opens up a whole new way to appreciate and understand the recent digital developments, I have a really hard time with the idea of abundance being linked to "learning how to waste". Yes, hard drives (storage) cost only a few dozen cents a gigabyte; bandwidth (communication) costs only cents per gigabyte; processors (computation) are virtually free - they cost pennies per MIPS. But those are just the components. Bits are not weightless, neither psychologically (our time, our attention span) nor factually: consider just this factoid, from a report by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (via Worldchanging):

"A single high-powered rack of servers consumes enough energy in a single year to power a hybrid car across the United States 337 times".

Socially, politically, environmentally, morally, and even economically, that's something that's not abundant, nor that calls for "use with abandon, without concern for waste".

UPDATE - Nick Carr concurs.

Comments

[Alexandra Suárez]

I would like to have the e-mail address or a phone number or an assistant's phone number of Mr Chris Anderson to contact him.

[BG]

His e-mail address is on his blog:
http://www.longtail.com/about.html