This past Monday I was fortunate enough to attend the first ever Free Summit held in San Mateo, California. Organized Hosted by TechDirt.com founder Mike Masnick with help from the folks at and organized by Sagescape, who also organized the Tech Policy Summit, the event sought to analyze and understand the business of free. The keynote speaker for the event was Wired editor Chris Anderson, whom I had seen deliver the same presentation a year earlier here in Toronto.

While I wrote a detailed report on the event for my clients, as well as a few CBC radio spots on the subject, I wanted to share some personal thoughts on my blog.

At one point during the day, Chris Anderson wondered aloud why it took 15 years to start talking about free in the context of business, and I feel the answer is that we've been focusing on the wrong things. The obsession with making money online has distracted us from the fact that people are where the real value lies.

Social media is finally teaching us to look at social dynamics and understand social relationships. It is rapidly becoming clear to all who care to notice that the moral taught to us by the web is "free."

When everything online is free, value is recognized as being in the user, a/k/a the human. Yet we live in a hierarchical society, where social capital via the reputation/attention economy is now being recognized as a means of determining which users are more valuable than others.

Status is worth more than money, but old school monetary capital will help people who have the means to simply buy status online. This is the connection between the old economy and the emerging economies. The reputation and attention economy inherits the power dynamics of the old era, which then fosters a neo-feudal set of property relations, that then control reputation and attention.

Which is not to say that it's all set in stone, as the messy masses are at the castle gates, and the battle (or rather the siege) is underway. I found it rather ironic to learn from Anderson that the word free comes from words used to describe the weak and strong social ties in medieval England.

I've been refining the metaphor of a neo-feudal society, and this conference depicted a vision of the forces of free versus the old regime hiding away in their castles of copyright.

Yet where does the concept of freemium fall into that metaphor? Is it the new model of the old city state? Freemium as the walls of the city to give constituents the safety and stability from the wild jungle and the barbarians at the gate.

Unfortunately one of the primary problems with the Free Summit is a problem with authority and power that continues to be the blind spot for people analyzing the (economics of the) internet. The event did not have enough interaction, and too often we depend upon authorities, when the wisdom is in the user at the periphery, or rather with the shaman aiding and inspiring the siege of the lords and their castles. Host Mike Masnick did do his best as MC to include the crowd and reply to folks via twitter.

This is one of the big reasons that newspapers and the mainstream media in general are failing. They do not understand the anti-authoritarian nature of the "free" phenomenon. The free economy is anarchic and resistant towards authority. One needs to be both nimble and legitimate, constantly seeking the mandate of the constituents in order to continue.

The key to success is in embracing humility while fostering harmony. These are new qualities for the western mind to grapple with, but nothing new for the sage who seeks the path less traveled.