Wired editor-in-chief and Free author Chris Anderson giving a lecture in Chile last October. Photo by Carito Orellana.

I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, which is available free on Google Books or as a free audiobook. There has been a debate raging around Anderson’s book for a week or two now. For those wishing to catch up, Eric Etheridge’s NYT Opinionator blog has a great roundup of yaysayers and naysayers, and it’s well worth a look.

Here’s useful tidbit from Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed critique:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

What’s really fun about reading Gladwell’s review is getting a sense of how his mind works. The quote above literally shows him sorting ideas into bins and tagging them as he goes. Fantastic.

Seth Godin responded to Gladwell’s critique in support of Anderson and added a few insights of his own. Worth repeating:

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people.

Very much agreed with Seth on that.

One of the great things about Anderson’s book is its broad look at the idea of “free.” As an armchair read, it’s hard to get bored by all the fascinating examples and stories Anderson shares. However, this breadth is also a trap, because each invested community will tend to read Free narrowly, complete with its own predispositions, seeing holes in Anderson’s arguments as a result.

I see two faults in it as a book, one minor and one major. Minorly, it feels padded: Anderson repeats himself often. (I assume this is because he feels much of his audience will skim the book, not read it in full in order.) Majorly, it feels overreaching: while it’s true that “free” is a game-changer, Anderson occasionally lapses into what an economist might call “irrational exuberance” over his thesis. I think this happens because Anderson wants to fit Free into a category of business book that we all know well from airports and conferences: the “how to think about, recognize, describe, and potentially monetize a current cultural trend” book. This is, of course, a category owned by Gladwell, which is why it’s so fun to see them locking horns here. With this book, Anderson may have triggered the Tipping Point of Free. We don’t get much intellectual bloodsport like this these days.

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With the recent rebranding of Pepsi, I found myself thinking back to New Coke. Conspiracy theories about the product abound. Was the soft drink built by Coca Cola in order to fail? Some think so. Reasons include: 1) Changing the flavor of sugar-sweetened Coke dramatically in order to be able to change it back to its “original” flavor—albeit one now sweetened with the much-cheaper high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar—without having consumers notice the change; 2) Creating a new Coke category in order to make Pepsi’s array of products on supermarket shelves look small by comparison; 3) Preempting a forthcoming product called Pepsi Supreme, which tasted more like Coke, by creating a product that instead tasted more like Pepsi; and 4) Providing PR cover for Coca Cola while they secretly removed the last remaning coca derivatives from their product in an attempt to help the DEA stamp out the illicit plant. See also: Crystal Pepsi, and Malcolm Gladwell on the Pepsi Challenge.

Malcolm Gladwell on the rise and fall of the American shopping mall, and especially on its inventor, Victor Gruen: “Gruen’s most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. He began work on it almost exactly fifty years ago [1954]. It was called Southdale.” I grew up just a short bike ride away from Southdale.