Frisbees tossed on mossy yards

The Internet is full of free stuff. Between the world’s open-source g33ks, the guys at Google, and other up and comings like Doodlebug and Flickr, I am very hard-pressed to find a reason to spend my time on the Internet doing things that cost money. There’s just so much fun and useful free stuff out there, it just doesn’t make sense.

And the more programs out there that allow me to share my creative side with other people (and vice versa) the more interactive the Internet becomes, because “interactive” no longer means that you’re playing a video game and the creatures found within are talking back to you and shaking your hand or fighting you or whatever, but now interactive is such a giant term for how I have friends all over the world, ideas flowing in from all corners of the planet, and so on. We post pictures of our lives, our travels, our interests on line. We draw silly pictures of what we’re thinking about, or record drunken audio clips about what is distressing us. We play games, exchange opinions on religion and politics and even fall in love. And we’re allowed to do it all for free.

And all of this, of course, opens up the wonderful reality that as more and more things found on the Internet are free, and more and more of our lives are spent commuting, banking, shopping, communicating and playing on the Web, the more likely we are to arrive at an alternative solution to the current form of monetary compensation for goods/services. The Internet is seeping into our real lives and it’s only going to continue to do so. Who buys CDs anymore? The music is all free now. And even those people who do buy music online, well, they pay very little for it. Netflix revolutionized DVD rentals, so much that the US’s largest video store is now offering the same service after watching their profits drop. So how long will it be before we’re allowed to watch movies for free in theatres? We’d still be making a transaction: You let me watch this movie and I’ll sit through these bullshit previews. That’s what Google does, and at some point we’ll get sick of paying for movies because we can download them all for free and so on and so on. Of course, movies are just one aspect of this all…

More about free stuff can be found here.

Up Next: Camouflage Lizards and the Big Bright Sun that gives us the light that doesn't help us see them all that much anyway