For the past few years I have been hanging around at the edge of London's Free Culture scene. I built a currency system for WSFII, organised Dorkfest for Node London and attended a bunch of other gatherings. I was quite into it, but could never quite believe.
Nothing is ever really free. There is always a cost somewhere, someone always paid in some kind of currency. We can hope that social network value might pay for some of this, but, after a while, the costs add up. My attachment to free culture slowly faded. Last week however, things changed.
For a long time Russ Vandeberg has been chanting his mantra, "Before you can be free, you must be cheap!". For a long time I did not actually listen, but then over breakfast in Sheffield, Andy and Sebastein Mary showed me the simplicity of Russ's wisdom, it's not free culture that we want, it's cheap culture.
The whole idea with free culture was that everyone can get involved, there is no money making incentive - the reward is in the culture and the experience. But, bit by bit, the experience was turned sour by the fact that there were real costs involved, the "free" was a lie. So, if we get rid of the false freeness, and accept that there are costs... then we are onto something.
It's time to get cheap. Culture needs to abandon it's high pretentions, and get down and dirty. Forget freeculture, the thing you want is cheapculture.