All Good All Free
Free is not a lesser version of good. A great deal of what is genuinely worth having has no price attached, and the only real barrier is that nobody ever pointed at it.
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Free is not a lesser version of good. A great deal of what is genuinely worth having has no price attached, and the only real barrier is that nobody ever pointed at it.
Start with a small experiment. Draw a circle on a map with your home at the centre and a walk of twenty minutes as the radius. Inside that circle, for most people in most towns, there will be at least one park with actual trees, one building full of borrowable things, one noticeboard, one stretch of water or bushland or open ground, and one space that a public body maintains for anyone who turns up. None of it asks for payment. Most of it is quiet on a Tuesday. The gap between what is available and what gets used is enormous, and it is not a gap of money.
It is worth being clear about what this publication is not. It is not a lecture about spending less, and it is not an argument that buying things is a moral failure. Buying well is a real skill and a good one. Somewhere else, someone can write that. Here the interest is narrower and, we think, more interesting: the category of things that carry no price and are still excellent. Not adequate. Not a substitute. Excellent on their own terms, and in some cases better than the paid equivalent, because they are older, larger, better maintained, or simply not designed to sell you something afterwards.
Public lending institutions stopped being only about books a long time ago, and most people never got the memo.
Ownership is the default setting, and for a large class of objects it is the wrong one.
Instruction at a genuinely high level is now freely published, and the difficulty has moved elsewhere.