~/jeffreymoro/blog/2026-11-08-everything-is-free
I’d like us to read something together. I’ve been listening to a lot of old-time, bluegrass, Americana-type of music as of late. I’ve always felt a call to this musical tradition. I can’t really explain why. I think it has something to do with its sound, which is neither major nor minor in its tonality, but rather something that crosshatches between the two, a “lonesome” sound, as its practitioners term it. It also has something to do with its lyrical quality, which prizes a kind of oblique directness, in which things are said plainly that upon closer examination are not necessarily plain at all.
What I’d like us to read together is not especially old but it has old bones. It’s a song by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings called “Everything is Free,” from their 2001 album Time (The Revelator). It begins with its refrain:
Everything is free now.
That’s what they say.
Everything I ever done,
gonna give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out:
that we’re gonna do it anyway,
even if it doesn’t pay.
Songwriting has never been an especially lucrative niche in the music industry. Welch says she wrote “Everything is Free” not necessarily as a direct riposte to Napster, but certainly out of the fear and frustration that, thanks to unasked-for technological change, she would no longer be able to pursue her chosen vocation. I expect this may be a familiar feeling for you; it certainly is for me. The song has experienced something of a revival over the past few years, as artists like Courtney Barnett and Phoebe Bridgers recaster–perhaps simply lightly update–the song in response to music streaming services devaluing songs to essentially nothing.
To begin with the first line: I am most struck by its last word, “now.” To say that everything is free now articulates temporality: everything wasn’t free before, but it is now. “Now” suggests “then,” a past to a present. But “then” isn’t simply the inverse of “now,” a past rejected and overridden by a charging present. “Now” contains “then,” never as “now” might protest that it is not “then,” or a rejection of “then,” or a break from “then.” The distinction between “now” and “then,” between the present and the past, is especially salient for artists like Welch and Rawlings, who work in a self-consciously antiquated tradition. Our culture is not especially interested in the old anymore. I don’t think this statement is incompatible with our more reactionary strains of thought: the past to which some are attempting to return is not in fact a past (in its fully historicized sense) but rather a fantasy of a past. But I want to stay with the text. The second line, “that’s what they say,” recasts the first line as a quote, paraphrase, attribution. At the very least not something the lyric’s speaker would alone suggest. “They” constructs a second dualism: reductively one might read it as “us” versus “them,” but I think it’s looser than that. I read it as hearsay, as a notion circulated around the bar an hour or so before closing. But it’s also an imposition, even a thread. It’s not that everything could be free or will be free: it is free, it’s free now, it wasn’t free before but, like a switch, it has been made so.
How has it been made free? The next lines, “Everything I ever done, / gonna give it away,” answer. It’s going to be free because those who made it are going to give it away themselves. We’re going to do it willingly.
What does it mean to give something away? The modern English “to give” collapses a few senses and verbal roots that were, in earlier versions of our language, distinct. It has a very old etymology, merging the Old English “giefan” and the Old Norse “gefa,” the two words likely sharing a root in Proto-Germanic and, farther back, Proto-Indo-European. In its most ancient sense, “to give” means to make someone else the recipient of something that is in the original possession of the subject. It is a transfer, not necessarily of ownership, because things can be given that cannot be owned, like ideas. What distinguishes this original sense is that the gift must be given and received freely, both in the sense of without compulsion and without compensation. If the latter enters into the picture, the word was “sell,” “sellan” in Old English, “selja” in Old Norse. “Sellan” was occasionally used in the sense of “giefan,” but it retained a few other meanings as well: to give up for money, to betray. Some of these older senses are still latent in our modern English: think of the phrase “to sell someone out.”
That’s on the Germanic side. On the Latinate side, we have a few other meanings worth tracking. The Latin “dare” encompasses several senses of “to give”: to offer, to present, to grant, to bestow, but also to concede or surrender, but also yet again in a more nebulous sense as something that is “a given.” It is from this latter sense that we derive the word “datum,” plural “data,” that which is a given fact upon which we can make inferences and reasonings. A datum is a fact, something actual and real. What I find especially interesting is that “dare” was never, in its time, translated as “giefan,” but rather only ever as “sellan.” Eventually, however, “sellan” became obsolete, and the etymological tangle collapsed all of the meanings above into “to give.”
“To give” is thus full, perhaps over-full, with contradictory meanings. I think Welch is well aware, if not of the specific meanings themselves, then at least the word’s heaviness. I am reminded of Marx’s observation that those who sell their labor in the marketplace are free in a “doubled” sense: we are all free to sell or not sell; we are in turn free or not free to starve.
What’s new, then, in the relations that Welch is sketching, the “big score” that “they” figured out, is not the intrinsic nature of music or creative endeavor towards freedom of circulation; nor is it even the technical infrastructure that permits the production of services like Napster or Spotify. Rather, it’s that “they,” c.f. record executives, tech companies, and even, in a sort of final betrayal, listeners, have discovered that an artist’s drive to create is not reducible simply to a profit motive. We don’t do it for the money. We do it for the love of the game. We’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.
I wrote everything above a few weeks ago, after I first heard “Everything is Free.” I haven’t been able to finish the thought, for reasons that I think are ironically contained within the song itself. Not everything is free but many things are, perhaps now even more so than when Welch wrote the song a quarter-century ago. Words, especially. They were never worth much before but the bottom has fallen out of the market, so to speak, and we are now flooded by them. “Words, words, words,” said Hamlet, and he didn’t know how good he had it.
Not only do we have a profusion of cheap words, we have a profusion of cheap readers. I have no analytics on this website. I don’t think you deserve to be tracked, and I don’t think I have anything to learn from tracking you. But it does mean that I can’t tell whether or not you, my reader, are human or not. This is a non-trivial concern for any of us who write words for the internet. The majority of activity on the internet is now non-human. I am much more likely to be read by a machine than a person: a crawler ingesting the words on this website, which I have so helpfully rendered in transparent, machine-legible code, integrating those words and the relations between them into the weights of a model, such that my words become part of its training data, available for regurgitation and reconstitution. To publish words on the internet in any capacity today, from the smallest post to the longest essay, is to offer oneself up to be devoured. It is a choice I make freely. Again, in a doubled sense: I am free to publish or not publish to the internet; to refuse is simply to refuse being read. There are offline options, of course, but these options have atrophied after two decades of migrating all aspects of culture into the computer.
I have found myself paralyzed by this state of affairs. I mean that quite literally: my hands hover above the keys, frozen trying to think a thought, and to put that thought into words, while knowing I am providing free training data for machines whose current existence I believe is antithetical to the practice of moral life. I’m giving it away.
This may not worry you the way it worries me. We have always, you may say, given it away. What’s only different now is that we’re giving it away to non-humans as much as humans. We were never able to predict to what uses our words would be put; every act of publication is an act of faith. I would agree with you on that. Perhaps I am too old-fashioned in my thinking; perhaps I am clinging to a meaning of the word “to sell” that is not quite operative anymore in twenty-first century culture: the sense of “selling out.”
But I do think something is lost when we no longer distinguish between giving and selling, or between freedom and compulsion. One of the great under-articulated material shifts of the computer age is the transformation of distinct things–music, language, and emotions, but also goods and services–into one thing, that is, data. At their most fundamental level, all our arts are now the same thing: electrical charges inhered in silicon. This has enabled extraordinary flexibility in both the production and distribution of things, broadly construed. Indeed, it has enabled things that were not previously things to become things. Take, for instance, the idea of being someone’s friend, which has passed from social relation to an entry in a social media company’s database.
Perhaps this makes me an idealist, rather than a materialist. Perhaps I am arguing something metaphysical: that there is something called a “soul” that we can neither see nor measure through our available technological means. If I am, then by the current rules of the game I have already lost, after a fashion: I can’t prove to you that the soul exists, that human–or at least living–endeavor has special value, that the efforts of that endeavor have an intrinsic worth not imputed into the efforts of an autonomous machine. And given the increasing sophistication of those machines’ efforts, there is nothing I can point to in the fruits of those efforts that would indicate whether or not that “soul” is in them.
Is there any way out?
“Everything is Free” gives (freely) a solution: refusal.
Every day I wake up
humming a song.
But I don’t need to run around.
I’ll just stay at home.
Sing a little love song,
my love and myself.
If there’s something that you wanna hear
you can sing it yourself.
And the final refrain, inverting the pronomial perspective of the first:
‘Cause everything is free now:
that’s what I said.
No one’s gotta listen to
the words in my head.
Someone hit the big score,
and I figured it out.
And I’m gonna do it anyway
even if it doesn’t pay.
What we’re refusing is not to create, but rather to circulate. Welch’s narrator reserves the power and pleasure of creation for herself–not alone, but for “[her] love and [herself].” (That Welch and Rawlings are companions both in songwriting and love feels not unimportant here.) To refuse participation in systems of extraction–and make no mistake, the internet, and by extension the culture machine it has refined, is now an enormous technology for the extraction of novel information from human beings for the purposes of enriching and refining machine models, which without our creativity would never be able to further improve themselves–does then entail cost. In order to refuse the machine my words, I would have to not only refuse to publish to my blog but to the internet more generally; and even more than that, I would need to ensure that no one else, no editor nor copyeditor nor reader, ever fed my words into a model. This is, in our current media ecology, impossible to guarantee.
So we need to build something else. Easier said than done, of course. But it’s something I think Welch’s song anticipates. I don’t think she offers refusal as a permanent solution. Indeed, she and Rawlings have released a handful of albums since 2001; clearly, they’ve continued to make it work. One thing about Time (The Revelator) worth noting: it was the first album on Acony Records, an independent label that Welch and Rawlings founded themselves. All of their subsequent work has been published through Acony. Musicians have long been especially sensitive to the value of owning one’s work and its conditions of production: think of Taylor Swift buying back her masters, or Prince’s efforts to retain even his name. And more than a century ago, Virginia and Leonard Woolf recognizing that to publish the work they believed in, which no other publisher would take a chance on, they needed to set up a printing press in their dining room and get to work.
After all, as Welch sings, “I never minded working hard: it’s who I’m working for.”
Listen for yourself: