Free ≠ Free. (Edited/Expanded)

First a free summary/background... Jake on Free. Seth on Free. Wired on Free.

I find, personally, that I've been burned by so much freeness that really isn't, that I've grown skeptical of that word. Everything free comes with strings attached. The few things that don't have strings, generally don't advertise the fact they are free. Like, when Jake invited me to this here blog, he didn't say "Hey, I've got a FREE blog you could join..." Had he said that, I'd a gotten worried.

It's like free doesn't mean free anymore, it means "for the small price of a tiny piece of your soul you probably weren't using anyway" which goes doubly so since we live in the Land of the Free, and self-righteous center of the Free World.

From that Wired article:

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

Disposable, like their freedom.

A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

So that's the dude to blame. Noted. Odd that a utopian anticapitalist would revolutionize the way big businesses fool / trick / addict the public. Consider him on my time-machine hitlist: King Gillete, feel the Frag.