(FORTUNE Magazine) – As politicians and economists wring their hands over the profligacy of the American consumer and the decline of his personal-saving rate, the business community has quietly stepped forward with an elegant solution: the end of purchasing. Want to buy a computer? Your money's no good here, pal! Want to pay for a phone call? No, no, our treat--we insist!--but first, a word from Blockbuster. Less interested in your wallet than in your attention, a rash of advertising-supported businesses are declaring that the days of making money by, like, selling stuff to people are way over.

Take FreeWay, an advertiser-underwritten, free long-distance service launched nationally by BroadPoint Communications in January. Wish you had a dime for every time some jerk tried to sell you something over the phone? Well, wish no more! FreeWay customers earn two minutes' domestic calling time for every ten- to 15-second spot they listen to (while BroadPoint collects introductory ad rates of 6 cents to 24 cents per listen). About 80 advertisers, including Blockbuster, TGI Friday's, and PolyGram, have signed up, taking advantage of FreeWay's interactivity: callers can "cut through" to request catalogs or samples, take online surveys, or place orders (which, says executive vice president Jim Pagano of the Flower Club, beats pitching an 800 number to a customer with "a drawerful of pens that don't work"). Users must request ads one at a time (no bathroom breaks while your phone stockpiles credits) and are required to provide extensive demographic info when registering (which lets FreeWay sell itself to advertisers as a finely tuned consumer-delivery system). FreeWay, says BroadPoint's president and CEO, Perry Kamel, is taking "a tired commodity, long distance, and...transforming it by turning it into a hot, new, powerful medium for advertisers."

It's enough to make an old-school capitalist feel reactionary, or at least rude, for actually charging customers. And FreeWay is hardly alone: Blue Mountain Arts, which gives away lovely e-cards--that's "gives away"--at www.bluemountainarts.com, was recently declared the Internet's largest commerce site by audience-measurement gurus Media Metrix. This through-the-looking-glass definition of "commerce" notwithstanding, Blue Mountain inspired a media frenzy, including a cover story in the New York Times business section. It may sell nothing, but it sells more of it than anyone else on the Web!

So how to move from mere commerce to actual moneymaking? Blue Mountain is--like FreeWay, certain wireless-phone services, and perhaps your local public school--venturing into selling advertising. It thus joins Free-PC (see FORTUNE, March 1), which gives away personal computers that permanently display onscreen ads, and Onsale.com, which actually charges customers for computer equipment but sells it nearly at cost--and sells onscreen ads to make up the difference. Even Amazon.com, which has the audacity to sell retail products to paying customers, has famously gone into the red by selling books and CDs at rock-bottom prices; it's funding its efforts through creative advertising, selling premium placements on its home page to publishers for $10,000 a pop.

Granted, when so many agree that there is money to be made in e-commerce and new infotech, and so few agree on how to make it, it's understandable that the windfall of the future might look like the boondoggle of today. Still, it's hard to believe that deep discounts and giveaways--for the sake of harnessing "traffic" and "reach" and "loyalty"--would seem so visionary offline. (Here's the pitch: We sell Rolexes at cost, but we get so much foot traffic that we plant a treadmill in the doorway, hook it up to a turbine, and generate electricity!)

So if you can get a computer free, receive Internet access free, and buy a book online at below-market rates, thanks to ads, why should it stop there? Books and CDs are media: why pay for them if advertisers will? Why should you pay for your refrigerator--an antiquated, industrial age artifact like the telephone--if it could show you an ad for Kraft before you make a Swiss on rye? (And what if it kicked you back five bucks for switching to a Kraft single?) And if someone could stamp an ad for the new Austin Powers flick on the bread, well, is your attention worth nothing?

The problem is that presumably, at the end of this daisy chain of ad revenue, someone, somewhere, eventually has to buy something. Perhaps our purchases, like our corporations, will simply merge. In this advertiser-supported future, there will be two for-pay products--say, Pepsi One vs. Soylent Green--and everything from our titanium alloy braincases to our personal jetpacks will be underwritten by ads for them.

In the future that Perry Kamel envisions, FreeWay will change the "underlying business model" of telecommunications, making it like television or radio (though AT&T, Sprint, and MCI WorldCom say they have no plans for such a service). But what's truly interesting about all these freebies is that they change--or clarify--the underlying model of consumerdom. Receiving ads, we're learning, is no mere annoyance; it's a job. Soon we may be able to choose between buying telephone, cable, and even videophone service, and moonlighting for it, ad by ad. We're not yet living in the "subsidized time" of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, where calendars read "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment." But the Minute of the TGI Friday's Pizzadilla is now.

--James Poniewozik

JAMES PONIEWOZIK writes about media and culture for Salon, an online magazine.