The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Kevin Kelly has a great new essay out on his blog The Technicum, called Better Than Free. In it, he discusses how the cost of things that can be copied - which is pretty much anything tangible - is quickly approaching free. And yet, he says, it is still possible to make a living, and in some instances a fortune, in this giveaway economy.

How is this possible? As Kelly puts it:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

So, what can’t be copied? Kelly suggests that in the land of FREE, making a living becomes less about the thing, and more about the qualities of that thing, particularly what he calls “generative values.”

These generative values are concepts like Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability. These and similar qualities surround the free core with a layer of value for which people are willing to pay sometimes great sums of money.

For example, Kelly has this to say about Accessibility:

Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them…The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

There is a huge backlash going on right now in the realm of traditional business against this economy of free. This is most memorably embodied in the litigious flounderings of the music recording industry, who have adopted what can only be perceived as insane business model of suing their customer. To those industries, all this brouhaha appears to be a simple attempt to “protect their interests.” To everyone else, however, it is seen for what it really is: the death throes of a creature who’s to stupid to realize it’s already dead.

Here’s the important take-away from this discussion: Your product is worthless.

Not worthless as in devoid of value, mind you. But worthless in that somewhere, somehow, someone who cares enough can get it for free. And the more people who bother to do so, the more free versions there are. After a while (and usually this happens very, very quickly if your product is even remotely desirable) there are enough free versions on the market that getting one of those is even easier than going to your site or store and simply paying for it.

It’s pointless to fight this. It will only cost you more time, more money and more energy than you have to spare, and in the end you can only hope to accomplish one of two undesirable alternatives:

You could lose, in which case you’ll find yourself right back where you started and all that time, money and effort might as well have been dropped into a black hole for all the effect it will have.

Or you could win, and in doing so make your product harder to get and more expensive than everyone else’s and permeated by such negative public opinion that only those who have no other choice will buy it (and then complain about having to do so prolifically and vociferously to anyone who’ll listen). And as soon as any other reasonable choice presents itself, you can bet that what few customers you do retain will scatter like rats fleeing a burning building.

Your only real option, therefore, is to accept that your product is, in and of itself, a commodity of little or no monetary value and learn to leverage with qualities and values that people are willing to pay for. The downside is that this is all still pretty new, so only a few people have figured out how to make it work for them. The upside is that this is all still pretty new, so the field’s still wide open and there’s lots of room for innovation, creativity and fun.

So go play. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Society and Culture //