III. Hard Hat Required: Area Under Construction
I've said this since the earliest days of Free Refills, but it still matters: I am building something here. I am using what's already here to build something lasting. I intend that process to build a more solid foundation going forward. But beyond that, I am also building something that is Free Refills as a whole, an online … something. We don't actually have a word for it yet.
Free Refills is supposed to support the work and be a container for the work, but in a certain sense, it is also the work itself. Obviously you can read my writing here. You can watch it be built here. You can even watch as I find may way to what exactly it is that I am building, be it piece, book, or website. But there's an underlying philosophy guiding everything I do. It derives from the nature of the Internet itself, but has at best just barely begun to be explored, despite twenty-seven years having passed since Tim Berners-Lee gave us the first browser, ushering in the mainstream Internet Age.
Everything I do here is predicated on the idea that, when it comes to content creation and dissemination, there is something radically different about the Internet era from what came before, and Free Refills is an experiment in a new way of doing things, built on a foundation of abundance rather than scarcity. Once we were given a machine that allowed infinite and essentially costless perfect copies, the whole idea of the scarcity implicit in the sell-the-next-unit approach no longer really made sense. The only thing that's kept it alive is momentum and an unwillingness to imagine something better. We saw the demise of scarcity already take down the old music industry, but because of the furious, politically connected denial of the previously powerful, what's arisen in its place kind of sucks. We're far better served in choosing to embrace abundance. I express this intent and hope right here in the Free Refills name. And if--actually, let's instead say when--I pull this off (with your help, of course), it will be seen as one way (but not the only way) of doing things that's vastly better than what came before.
And this matters. Without trying to be too highfalutin about it, the very core of everything ill that afflicts us is the sense that there simply isn't enough, and so we must struggle. But there is enough. I'm sure of it. There is enough for everyone.