, Columnist
Nothing Is Free (Unless You Sign Up)
This capitalism is so refined that it consists of giving people free stuff in exchange for their willingness to take it.
All you have to do is sign up.
Photographer: JB Reed
This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.
We talked last month about the weirdly common Silicon Valley business model of “rapidly growing a business by selling its products below cost, subsidized by huge venture-capital investments, in the hopes of one day flipping to profitability once you’ve achieved scale.” One way to think about that model is as a cold-blooded rational economic calculation: The financial benefits of entrenching your company into everyone’s digital lives are so big that losing even billions of dollars to get there can be worth it.