This one’s also going in the personal bible archives…
Original source: https://kk.org/thetechnium/technology-want/
Some excerpts:
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“there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and half prices have been headed toward zero.
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GPS was a novelty luxury only a few years ago. It was expensive. As its technical standards spread into mapping services and hand helds, it becomes essential, and the basic service (where am I?) will become a commodity and free. But as it drops toward the free, hundreds of additional advance GPS functions will be added to the fixed function so that more people will pay ever more for location services than anyone pays now. Where-am-I information will be free and ubiquitous, but new services will be expensive at first.
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As crackpot as it sounds, in the distant future nearly everything we make will (at least for a short while) be given away free—refrigerators, skis, laser projectors, clothes, you name it. This will only make sense when these items are pumped full of chips and network nodes, and thus capable of delivering network value.
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Automobiles, like air travel, are headed in direction where all software and digital devices are headed: toward the free. Imagine, I said, if you could give away a very basic no-frills car for free
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A car will move you from A to B, but it also offers privacy, immediacy of travel, a portable office, an entertainment center, status, and design joy
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Google has the same opportunities with them that all producers have. They offer free commodities and charge for premium services. Search is free; yet they charge enterprises for custom Google search. Or they shift their customer from reader to advertiser; in Google’s eyes the chief audience for search is advertising companies, whom they charge
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Technology wants to be free, as in free beer, because as it become free it also increases freedom. The inherent talents, capabilities and benefits of a technology cannot be released until it is almost free. The drive toward the free unleashes the constraints on each species in the technium, allowing it to interact with as many other species of technology as is possible, engendering new hybrids and deeper ecologies of tools, and permitting human users more choices and freedoms of use