More from the debate about Chris Anderson’s Free, this time from Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow writing in The Guardian:

There’s a pretty strong case to be made that “free” has some inherent antipathy to capitalism. […] There’s plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it’s a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. […] But for the sizeable fraction of this material—and it is sizeable—that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the “price” of the material is “free.” The material, is, instead, literally priceless. It represents a large and increasing segment of our public life that is conducted entirely for reasons outside the marketplace.

I think Doctorow totally nails it, suggesting that Anderson’s misreading of Hyde is actually the heart of the problem with Free. Where Hyde sees two economies, a commercial economy and a creative economy, Anderson sees only one. Doctorow:

And here’s where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.