What is free and what is a gift?
A week ago, I wrote about my aspirations towards “A Dream”. I thank everyone for an enriching discussion around the topic, and for sharing so much of their personal experience and perceptions of “A Dream”.
One thing I wanted to follow up on from that post is to differentiate a “free” service from a “gift” service. Often “free” and “gift” are seen as interchangeable terms. The differences or similarities between these two terms are a matter of personal definition.
I view them as totally distinct and non-interchangeable, and here is my view of the same. I’ll be happy to listen to other views and have a healthy discussion around it.
What is free and what is a gift?
In this digital age, there are a lot of things that we get for free, or at least perceive as free. Google is free, Gmail is free, Facebook is free, Khan Academy is free, Wikipedia is free, Linux is free. While, as an end-user, we don’t spend money to enjoy the benefits of the above and hence we get it “free”, we cannot group all of these into the same category.
We can look at the “freeness” of these services through different lenses to understand how they differ:
- What is the intention of the giver?
- There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: how is the cost of providing the service offset?
- What is the responsibility of the receiver?
Intention of the giver
In Gmail, Google, Facebook, and countless other free services, the intention of the giver is to make more money out of what is given for free. Often the freely offered service is a “bait fish” for a larger profit for the giver.
If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer; you are the product being sold.
The primary intent is to profit, and the means to achieve this can take different shapes, which sometimes go against what is fair and good for society as a whole.
Contrast this with Wikipedia, whose purpose “is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia”, or Khan Academy, whose mission “is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere”, or the Linux community, which believes “Code is power. Community is strength. We are one.”
Though all the services mentioned are “free”, making them look the same superficially, there is a world of difference between the two groups. While the first wants to give it free because it wants to benefit itself, the second offers it free because it believes in the community commons. I call the former a “free” service, and the latter a “gift”.
For me, “free” services are those that don’t have a strong vision for building the community commons, and may or may not have negative effects on society. Whereas “gift” services are those that have a strong vision to build the community commons.
How is the cost of providing the service offset? What are the long-term effects?
Another important lens through which we can look at “free vs gift” services is how one offsets the cost, and what the long-term effects are. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. There are costs involved in providing a service, be it free or gift.
We live in an age of the attention economy, where the attention taken from a user is more valuable than the knowledge. Through this attention gained, the service provider can gain power, as in a political party gaining an unfair advantage over others by the sheer amount of money spent on information propaganda. Through this attention, companies can sell things that you don’t need.
Google, Gmail, and Facebook sell ads through these free services because of the millions of hours of attention given by their users. While it might seem harmless, or even a better use of our attention, to get these services for free, the bad effects (the individual loss and the loss to society) are often hidden, such as the “filter bubble”: “showing you personalized content that you like, while simultaneously hiding things from you that you won’t like”, creating “a type of intellectual isolation in which you think you are getting the big-picture view, but are actually only getting views that are similar to yours because the Internet is hiding certain content from you.”
In general, the long-term effects of “free” services are not good. They have a deep impact, often in a negative way, on our community.
Gift services also cost a lot in terms of money, time, and energy. These are offset by patrons who support the service, either through monetary contribution or by directly being involved in the service itself as a volunteer. The long-term effects of “gifts” are growing positivity in our society, such as Linux’s “Community is strength. We are one.”
Responsibility of the receiver
The third lens through which we can look at “free” vs “gift” is what responsibility we have when we use a “free” or a “gift” service.
As a “free” user, we have the responsibility to look behind the seemingly good motives of the provider and figure out any hidden agenda, and to be conscious of how we spend our “attention”.
As a “gift” user, we have the responsibility to help this service grow and support it in whatever way possible, for the larger good of humanity.
The more irresponsible we are with a free service, the more profit the giver receives, eventually leading to a service monopoly. The more irresponsible we are with a gift service, the more difficult it becomes to provide the service, eventually leading to its death, like killing the “Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”.
In another post, I want to dive deeper into the “responsibility of the receiver”, especially in the context of a Gift Economy, which I feel is also a highly relevant topic and a continuation of my previous post on my aspirations towards A Dream. Meanwhile, I’m interested to know what your thoughts are on free and gift. What additional lenses can be used to add new perspectives?