There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks and months about the subversive effects of ‘Free’. Free videos from Youtube, free news from the Times of New York and London. Free software of every kind available at a click.

In a recently published book with the rather unoriginal title ‘Free’, Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson makes the case that digital technology is driving the price of nearly everything associated with it to zero. Anderson describes how services like Youtube are prevented from ever charging money to access their content because it’s trivially easy to get the same material for free from other sources. Adding even a single penny in cost creates a psychological barrier high enough to make your service unattractive to potential visitors.

Writer Tim Lee puts it like this: “It costs more than 10 cents to charge someone 10 cents. As a consequence, if the equilibrium price of your product is less than 10 cents, it’s stupid to charge for it because all the revenues will go to the credit card company.”

This has major media companies in a tizzy. If they can’t charge for their content online, and if online content is killing their real-world products, how can they compete?

Most people reduce it to this: ‘If I can’t make money at it, how can I do it?’ The assumption that time equals money is treated as axiomatic and goes unchallenged. If you need to spend time doing something in order to become good at it, then you have to get paid to do it. Which leads to the corollary: If you can’t make something pay, there’s no incentive to do it.

But watch what happens when we change just two words: ‘If I can’t make money at it, why should I do it?’ The answer is simple, and perfectly clear:

You do it because it’s important.

Cash value is an important measuring stick. The more tightly integrated the economy, the louder money talks. In Vanuatu, with its significantly un-integrated economy, money still talks, but we don’t always have to listen.

More accurately, money is not the only thing we listen to. Family and friends, church and community all demand our attention, effort and even wealth. We don’t make any money by contributing, but they’re important nonetheless.

The hardware platform we need to stand on to access the Internet is still far from Free. It will be years before the entire population can log in with the same ease and convenience as a roadside chat with a tawian. But it will inevitably drop into reach.

It’s useful and necessary to take steps to ensure that the cost of communications continues its descent toward Free. But it’s equally important that get ready to make use of the wealth that it bestows.

The philosophy of Free on the Internet meshes nearly perfectly with some of the core tenets of community and kastom. Vanuatu, with its natural bounty, has long traded in a gift economy. Traditionally, a person’s rank in the community is measured in terms of the wealth they can bestow on others.

But how do we translate a decidedly rare resource like pigs into Internet terms? Wisdom, insight and information all fit the bill. Specialised knowledge, expert insight and that rarest of rarities, true wisdom will always be in short supply. By developing an online culture where this knowledge is shared and applied responsibly, we can transpose one of the most desirable aspects of real-world Vanuatu onto its virtual counterpart.

Sharing information and knowledge is an often tricky task. It’s never enough simply to dump a bunch of arcane details into someone’s inbox. Unless the meaning is clear, it’s just noise. But filtering information, culling the digital wheat from the chaff, requires a degree of subjectivity and bias. It’s unavoidable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if the result is that we get some keen or unique insight into the matter.

Public knowledge should serve the public good, and that requires that we put aside our personal rivalries and agendas, or at least only indulge them to the extent that the community as a whole can profit. The best way to mitigate the blinder effect that arises from writing from your own perspective is make sure you’re not the only voice. When fact and counterfactual are placed side by side with one another, it becomes easier to see what’s what.

Readers need to be critical, even skeptical, of the material they find online. There’s got to be a little editor – and author – in everyone. Making comment threads and a ratings system available go a long way for engaged and interested readers to have a hand in improving the system.

If this is going to work, it requires that we all be able to participate. This requires a concentrated collective effort. Building a public forum is one thing, but we also need to be able to access that forum and, once we’re there, we need to play an active role.

If it does work, Free will help us rebuild our intellectual and cultural freedom.