Free your Wallet and your Booty will Follow
I wrote the below in response to a very interesting post by Walter De Brouwer, an organizer of the TEDxBrussels event, and EU responsible for One Laptop per Child. The post is featured here on the TEDxBrussels Ning site, and quoted in part below.
This is what I gather happened. Hendrix was a black American Rock Artist and that did not exist in the States at the time. It was a white thing, and very much a British thing. This was the time of Pete Townsend and the Who. They came first to the Monterey Pop Festival. At the end of their act, as the audience expected, they destroyed their instruments. Hard to beat that. You cannot follow this act and do the same. Jimi Hendrix started by saying that he would “sacrifice something I really love.” That was not destruction, this was sacrifice, sharing. And he started playing The Troggs “Wild Thing”. Suddenly he kissed the guitar, laid it down and sprayed lighter fluid all over it. He lit a match and set it on fire. He seemed to start making love to his guitar and distributed flaming pieces of it ritually to the crowd. It was magical. I have watched this scene over and over again. And no doubt, it contributed immensely to the spirit of the Summer of Love. Not because of the instrument destruction. That had been done before by Pete Townsend, Keith Moon, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kurt Cobain and even Tré Cool. It was about something else. In fact Jimi produced the financial world crisis of today because he unleashed the notion of “sharing”. I wrote about it in “Free The Love Generation” (Ariadne Capital Magazine) in 2005:
Every civilization is allowed to build the kind of heaven it deserves. Ours is most certainly a global bazaar where everyone continually chases the best deal and the best deal is undoubtedly that which costs nothing. The web 2.0 business models that are successful are free of charge, on the house, at no cost, gratis! It seems that our world is trying to play more and more complex non-zero sum games and we seem to get better at it, because more than ever before successful experiments emerge as phenomena.
All this, by simply burning a guitar.
Free love=right on! But, we always pay for what we get — don’t we?
After eventually deciphering the text from your Ariadne Capital article, Walter, I wondered if you were not being ironic. Your description of “our” heaven is hell to me. Why measure ultimate “value” with a pricetag — or lack of one? And, frankly, I for one can’t stomach a connection between Jimi Hendrix and the financial meltdown! If it were up to Jimi, I suppose there’d never have been such a thing as “finance,” and only continuous, macro-personal metaphysical meltdown…
Doesn’t making the search of the “best deal” belittle the objects we are valuing? And since when is the price of something a true reflection of what the thing is actually worth — or even what it truly “costs”…? Attributing value is a personal thing reflected in the subtle, highly-nuanced multiplicity of options our language gives us for doing this: We can value something as “pricey” or “priceless”; “valuable” or “invaluable”… This naming may just be a (the only) real “complex non-zero sum game”!
And the “items” that fall into the “priceless” and “invaluable” categories, well, don’t they add up to something that is far more (and much better) than simply “free”?????
The question is not, in fact, about something being “free” or “20 dollars”, though — but more about how valuable a given object/service/experience is to ME (potentially). AND, in order to have that object/service/experience, what I am going to have to pay — in blood, sweat & tears, burning guitars, and maybe even — but not necessarily, and not even importantly — money…
All this to say: As terrific as it sounds, “non-zero sum games” don’t exist. “Free love” doesn’t exist and “free software” doesn’t exist either — even when it’s “brought to you by Web 2.0″. Jimi Hendrix (and all those musicians you mention) pay/paid for our blissful, enduring enjoyment with their genius and their lives. Come to think of it, we all pay for life with our lives. 
Jimi claimed he made a pact with the Devil. We got “Wild Thing” and the burning guitar, but he paid with his soul.
More boring: After adding in all the hours of development, delivery, maintenance and support (plus personal frustration, agony, tirades and angst), I suppose it would be hard for anyone to say that the Ubuntu shareware running on all those OLPC laptops is truly “free,” after all, too…? But right. My point: It’s all relative. AND, it’s all highly-personal. But, it’s NEVER “free.” And to call *some* things “free,” imho, manages to reduce them to simple bean-counter thinking, which, to me, they don’t deserve. At least, equating Jimi Hendrix with McAfee Virus-scan Plus, for example, is simply unforgivable.
Free love, free music, free software. For all these “non-zero sum” games, isn’t it actually more like the Japanese say, at the end of the day? Not only are “free” things not real — e.g. “free love” is not love. Only love is love. “Free things are the MOST expensive.”