Information Was Never Free. And It Never Will Be.
The gatekeepers of knowledge didn't disappear. They got smarter.
It’s 2 AM and you’re Googling “how to price my SaaS product.”
You find 47 blog posts, 12 YouTube videos, and a Reddit thread with 200 comments. Three hours later, you’re more confused than when you started. You’ve consumed a mountain of free information and learned almost nothing useful.
Sound familiar?
Stewart Brand said it best at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984:
“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.”
Forty-two years later, we only remember the second half of that quote. And it’s costing us more than we realize.
The Great Cost Shift
In the old world, the deal was straightforward. You wanted knowledge? You paid for it. Buy the book. Subscribe to the journal. Hire the consultant. The transaction was clean. Money for insight.
In the new world, the cost didn’t disappear. It shapeshifted.
Algorithms learned something publishers never figured out: your attention is worth more than your wallet. Every scroll, every click, every rage-share. That’s the new currency.
And unlike money, you don’t feel yourself spending it.
The gatekeepers of knowledge didn’t vanish. They evolved. They went from charging at the door to mining the room.
The Three Hidden Paywalls
The truly valuable information - the kind that actually changes how you build, sell, and think - hides behind three paywalls.
1. The Paywall of Time
There’s a founder I knew who spent six months trying to learn sales from free content. Podcasts, Twitter threads, blog posts, the works. She consumed hundreds of hours of advice.
Then she hired a sales coach for $5,000. In two sessions, the coach identified three specific mistakes in her demo that were killing her close rate. She doubled her revenue in 60 days.
The free content wasn’t wrong. It just couldn’t replace twenty years of pattern recognition distilled into two hours of focused feedback.
Expertise takes years to develop. You can access the information for free, but you can’t shortcut the time it takes to know which information actually matters for your specific situation.
2. The Paywall of Trust
Anyone can publish anything.
A 22-year-old with a Canva account and a ChatGPT subscription can produce content that looks indistinguishable from someone who’s built three companies.
This is a trust crisis.
The challenge is knowing who actually knows what they’re talking about.
When everyone sounds credible, trust becomes the scarcest resource.
The old gatekeepers - publishers, universities, professional credentials - were imperfect filters, but they were something.
We tore them down without building anything to replace them.
Now the filtering burden falls entirely on you.
3. The Paywall of Critical Thinking
Here’s a number that should scare you: the average person consumes 34 gigabytes of information per day. That’s roughly 100,000 words. The length of a novel. Every. Single. Day.
But consumption isn’t comprehension. Reading isn’t reasoning.
The ability to filter signal from noise, to synthesize contradictory viewpoints, to know when a framework applies to your situation and when it doesn’t. That’s a skill. And it’s one the free-information economy actively works against. Algorithms reward engagement, not understanding. They serve you more of what you click, not more of what you need.
The Algorithm Tax
There’s an invisible tax on every piece of “free” content you consume (including this one).
Call it the Algorithm Tax.
It’s the 20 minutes you spent reading a LinkedIn post that taught you nothing but felt productive. It’s the podcast episode that rehashed the same advice you’ve heard six times but had a great title. It’s the Twitter thread that was optimized for virality, not accuracy.
The Algorithm Tax is paid in fragments of attention so small you never notice any single payment. But compound it over weeks and months and years, and the bill is staggering.
Every hour spent consuming mediocre free content is an hour not spent building, selling, or thinking deeply about your specific problems.
What This Means If You’re Building Something
If you’re a founder, this isn’t just philosophy. It could be a strategy, if you’ll do something with it:
Curation is a product. In a world drowning in content, the person who can reliably separate signal from noise creates enormous value. If you can become a trusted filter for your niche, you’ve found a moat.
Experience beats information. Stop trying to learn everything before you start. The founder who ships a mediocre v1 and talks to 10 customers learns more in a week than the founder who reads 50 blog posts. Information is a complement to experience, not a substitute. (And get a good mentor already, for goodness sake, even if you have to pay for it).
Build in public if you must, but build something. The “learn in public” trend is valuable, but only if you’re actually building, and only if the people you’re building it for are watching. Sharing your lessons has diminishing returns if you’re not generating new lessons to share.
Pay for what matters. The ROI on the right mentor, course, or consultant dwarfs the cost. The expensive thing is cheap when it saves you six months of wandering.
The Bottom Line
Stewart Brand was right - both halves of the quote.
Information wants to be free. It’s in the nature of digital goods to be copied, shared, and distributed at zero marginal cost.
Information also wants to be expensive. Because context costs. Because expertise costs. Because knowing which information to trust, when to apply it, and how to adapt it to your situation - that will always cost something.
The founders who figure this out, who invest wisely in expensive information while being ruthless about filtering the free stuff, have an enormous advantage.
The rest are still Googling at 2 AM.
What’s your experience? Has “free” information made you smarter, or just busier? Reply. I read every response.