At the time, I it was a positive sentiment. Government secrets would leak out (which they have). Rare or impossible to find books, films, and music would become freely available. If governments or corporations tried to restrict access to those books they would fail, etc.
These days, I often find myself using the phrase more as an ethical warning. Any information you gather or create will eventually become freed. So if you're gay and live in the middle east, don't post it on Facebook because eventually that information will be freed. Don't collect personal information of dissidents in countries were they may be persecuted. Don't collect information about your customers that you don't want eventually going public (e.g. do stupid things like store credit card numbers and social security numbers when you don't have to)
Things are going to get very bad over the next decade or so as we as a society realise the implications of this.
Any information we create, collect or store will become public knowledge, one way or the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free#H...
The real idea here was that the internet would be a game changer. Not only would information be available immediately - but you could actually find it. When it became cheap to find "correct" information the idea was that would dominate. The implicit assumption was that people actually wanted correct, accurate and truthful information.
In practice it turns out people prefer information that validates their opinions, regardless of accuracy.
Quotes abound including Ben Franklin about how people will believe what they damn well want to. This isn't a new revelation by any means save for some technocrats that probably were too autistic to understand human nature.
On the otherhand Information wants to be free has always been able to make a non moralistic statement that is true without respect to human behavior. The cost of information is not due to anything human. The reason why this is still a powerful statement is that it makes it clear that outside of totalitarian control (from SOPA to real jackboot dictatorships) you can't control the dissemination of information even amongst the peasantry. Of course if this information is news.. it could be garbage.. and often is.
You need to look at who the original people using the internet were. Generally speaking they were the students of research Universities who would be naturally inquisitive. Their bias for learning blinded them from the realities of most people who simply don't care. The truth has no direct use for them.
I also don't think seeking out validating information is the wrong choice for most people. If you weren't going to do anything with the information anyways you might as well get the endorphin rush validation brings.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
That was said by Stewart Brand, something of a 1960s-era hippy-turned-businessman, to Steve Wozniak, of Apple Fame. Brand's previous ventures were the Whole Earth Catalog and Global Business Network. He went on to found the WELL, among the first online communities, and the Long Now Foundation.
The fundamental notion contrasts's informations high fixed costs with its low marginal costs, as well as the sometimes high use value.
For both psychological and economic reasons (marginal analysis), there's a strong incentive to keep information's price low. Much of the general conflict over content creators and consumers concerns this. Many economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, argue that information is a public good. See p. 308:
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
With copyright and printed media, an effictive moat and gate were created by which higher prices could be sustained for some goods (books, periodicals, record albums, film), as well as advertising-subsidised publiction (periodicals, broadcast).
Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909) gives a good run-down of the trade-offs in mass-market advertising-subsidised media vs. small-market, intellectual products. The same dynamics continue to apply.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holt#page/4/mod...
There was a strong tradition, especially on the U.S. West Coast, of an open-access, technologically mediated information regime. Brand and John Perry Barlow ("Wine Without Bottles", "Cyberspace Manifesto") reflected much of this.
https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Unfortunately, this vision failed to address a few realities:
1. Changing the costs and prices of an activity fundamentally changes that activity. It wasn't just the then high-quality contributors who joined in the party, but kooks, crazies, terrorists, scammers, opportunists, etc., who had previously been priced out (or otherwise largely excluded).
2. As a medium grows in use and importance, it becomes ever more attractive to those who would seek to exploit it for personal, or political, gain. We're well into that phase of Internet use now. It's a history that's been pressaged by earlier major communications developments: cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, cinema, phonograph, public-address systems, printing, speech.
3. If it's possible to make money (or seek other non-didactic reward) through a medium, then that incentive will tend to drive out truth-seeking activities. Evolutionary systems are exceedingly good at evolving toward what is incentivised for, and extirpating competing forms.
I still subscribe to parts of the original concept: information really ought be fairly freely available, perhaps paid on a tax basis. But our epistemic systems should also be, substantially, guided by epistemological criteria.
Like water it seeks-out a hole through which to flow to freedom.
And the more valuable the information the more pressure it exerts upon people to make that hole for it.
As a legit inquiry, can someone explain this phrase to me? I've heard it mentioned tons over the years and have seen a bunch of different inconsistent interpretations people have applied. Which meaning of 'free' is being used? How is it's meaning reached from the phrase? I legit don't understand it.