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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review at the CAP web site.
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To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
May the Maths Be with you!
Oh, you're from Crete? I'm not, so I suppose I must be allowed into the fancy clubs... :-)
I think the word you're probably looking for is "cretin", i.e. "a stupid, vulgar, or insensitive person : clod, lout" (Merriam-Webster). "Cretan", properly capitalized to boot as it is in your comment, means "someone from Crete".
But if you are indeed a Cretan, then I suppose I must be a cretin. Doh!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
This is pretty much where this debate was during the IT bubble 10 years ago. Everyone was wondering how all the .coms were planning on making money when everything they sold was "free."
Of course, those services that truly were free didn't last, and those that actually weren't free and had many strings attached didn't last either, except the latter pissed a lot of people off in the process. Some managed to IPO and raise money successfully, but raising money and making money are different things, and in the end everyone lost except those who knew when to get out.
They should require by law that every company disclose how they make their money and how they cover their costs. This used to be obvious. Only recently has this become convoluted with all the "innovation" in the financial sector and with contracts. They should also require "simple commerce" without any non-upfront, opt-out type of fees.
Manipulation is not innovation. It is manipulation.