post scarcity Concepts

Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson · 28 Apr 2024 · 249pp · 74,201 words

only thing that cannot be replicated is ‘gold-pressed latinum’ (which is why the Ferengi use it as money). Setting aside the hippy nonsense about post-scarcity and the end of economics, the Metaverse is the Star Trek version of the universe: almost everything can be copied, but the things that cannot

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

semiotic consumption is truly without boundaries, then the increases of productivity in the industry make little difference. Shattered are the hopes for a future of post-scarcity and the unfolding of democratic leisure. Furthermore, the demand of workers for increased purchasing power is emptied of some of its emancipating potential, and thus

What Would Google Do?

by Jeff Jarvis · 15 Feb 2009 · 299pp · 91,839 words

Googlejuice • Life is public, so is business • Your customers are your ad agency New Society • Elegant organization New Economy • Small is the new big • The post-scarcity economy • Join the open-source, gift economy • The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches • Google commodifies everything • Welcome to the Google

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. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order. New Economy Small is the new big The post-scarcity economy Join the open-source, gift economy The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches Google commodifies everything Welcome to the Google

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his blog (and he beat me to using it as the title of a book). “Get small,” Godin blogged. “Think big.” The post-scarcity economy We are entering a post-scarcity economy in which Google is teaching us to manage abundance, challenging the bedrock rule of economics, first written in 1767: the law of

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, 126–27 Platial.com, 33–34 politics, 51, 217–21 trust and, 83 Pope, Ivan, 206 populism, 84–85 pornography, 225 PornTube, 225 portfolios, 214 post-scarcity economy, 57–59 Potts, Mark, 56 PowerPoint, 64 Poynter, Don, 137 PPPs. See personal political pages Prezvid.com, 37 print-on-demand, 140 Prius, 164

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Googlejuice Life is public, so is business Your customers are your ad agency New Society Elegant organization New Economy Small is the new big The post-scarcity economy Join the open-source, gift economy The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches Google commodifies everything Welcome to the Google

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield · 29 May 2017 · 410pp · 119,823 words

that the psychology of everyday life, the structure of the economy, and the form of our cities all stand to be utterly transformed in a post-scarcity world. The ability for any individual to make more or less whatever they want, whenever they wanted it, would sunder the long-established circuit between

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using them, their very language, branding and framing confronting more than a few would-be users with an insuperable psychic challenge ramp. Any vision of post-scarcity utopia that is predicated on distributed, democratized production would require such sites to be not merely free and formally open but actively welcoming, and that

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of daily material comfort that would have been aspirational for most of history’s wealthy. In any raw material sense, we already live in a post-scarcity world, even before any particularly elaborate digital fabrication capacity is brought on line. And yet we still seem to suffer from a pervasive sense of

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way of which technology is actually produced in our world, or the powerful entrenched interests that are dedicated to preventing any such thing as a post-scarcity commons from taking root. It is only by understanding these factors from the outset, and learning to anticipate their influence, that our designs might have

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words

3.What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? II. New Travellers 4.Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour 5.Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy 6.Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources 7.Editing Destiny: Age and Post-Scarcity in Health 8.Food without Animals: Post-Scarcity in Sustenance III. Paradise Found 9.Popular Support: Luxury Populism 10.Fundamental Principles

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of the Industrial Revolution, marking an era in which machines are increasingly able to perform cognitive as well as physical tasks. This new situation of post-scarcity underpins what will be referred to as ‘extreme supply’, something not only limited to information, but – as a consequence of digitisation – labour too. Here, continuous

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vanquished. In 1930 Keynes speculated about something remarkably similar and, amazingly, even had the confidence to put a date on it – foreseeing the arrival of post-scarcity as soon as 2030. Other than Keynes’s stated disdain for Marx’s class-based politics in ‘preferring the mud to the fish’, what was

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of Gods on Olympus’, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing. Aristotle 4 Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour Productivity is for robots. Kevin Kelly When Capital Becomes Labour In 2011 the Economist, in circulation since 1843, posed its readers a question

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opportunities of the new world, rather than dwell on those technologies and social mores which are falling into the slipstream of history. 5 Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy It never ceases to amaze me how PV costs keep coming down … it is unparalleled in the history of energy use to have

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that under the Third Disruption it isn’t just information and labour which want to be free – it’s energy, too. 6 Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources The Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. Peter Diamandis A Finite World The issue of resource scarcity and depletion

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present only 1 per cent of batteries are processed in such a way – and no doubt an improvement, that is still a long way from post-scarcity and permanently cheaper energy. That same report proceeded to outline how nickel and zinc, widely used in electricity storage, could face similar production peaks in

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be applied to outer space and celestial bodies. * In 1973 dollars it was calculated to have cost $25.4 billion. 7 Editing Destiny: Age and Post-Scarcity in Health We are as gods … we might as well get good at it. Stewart Brand An Ageing Species By 2020, for the first time

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that the genome of E. coli wasn’t sequenced until 1997, which represented the cutting edge of biotechnology at the time. 8 Food Without Animals: Post-Scarcity in Sustenance Cattle are very inefficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We actually lose a lot of food by giving it to

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Canada stepped up to become agricultural powerhouses, this might only serve to increase the possibility of resource conflicts with their more militarily powerful neighbours. Forget post-scarcity. Between rising populations, climate change, a dearth of fresh water and stretched bio-capacity, just avoiding widespread famine by the middle of this century would

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technology is already making us gods – so we might as well get good at it. Nevertheless, space must remain for ‘grassroots’ campaigns which advance the post-scarcity alternative while attacking a broken status quo. Campaigns around divestment from fossil fuels offer one example of how that will work. Rather than calling for

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it was socialism, still defined by scarcity and jobs, which became the North Star for hope across the world. The technologies needed to deliver a post-scarcity, post-work society – centred around renewable energy, automation and information – were absent in the Russian Empire, or indeed anywhere else until the late 1960s. Indeed

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. A politics appropriate to FALC understands that and inserts itself into each terrain, guided always by a simple motto: liberty, luxury and the pursuit of post-scarcity. 10 Fundamental Principles: The Break with Neoliberalism Burn neoliberalism, not people. Clive Lewis Carillion’s Collapse and the East Coast Line Although FALC is the

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local bus services for those over sixty – being extended to everyone. This is sensible – as we’ve already seen, transport sits at the intersection of post-scarcity in energy and labour with extreme supply from renewable power (energy) and autonomous driving (labour) meaning the cost of public transport will fall precipitously. This

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Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2001. Romer, Paul. ‘Endogenous Technological Change’. Journal of Political Economy, 1990. Part II. New Travellers 4. Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour When Capital Becomes Labour ‘Ford Factory Workers Get 40-Hour Week’. History.com, 2009. N. V. ‘Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy’. Economist, 4 November

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, Erik and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. 5. Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy Energy and Disruption Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books, 2016. Arrival of

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Solutions to Climate Change Are Here Rifkin, Jeremy. ‘Capitalism Is Making Way for the Age of Free’. Guardian, 31 March 2014. 6. Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources Finite World Ahmed, Nafeez. ‘Exhaustion of Cheap Mineral Resources Is Terraforming Earth – Scientific Report’. Guardian, 4 June 2014. Withnall, Adam. ‘Britain Has Only

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cost of storage technologies for, 105 disruption and, 94–6 free, 99–101 future of, 105–6 insulation of, 113–15 minimising consumption of, 220 post-scarcity in, 94–116 renewable (See renewable energy) solar, 101–5 wind, 111–13 energy transition, politics of, 218 Engels, Friedrich The Communist Manifesto, 51–2

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Guttenberg Bible, 241 Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), 205 Hayabusa spacecraft, 131 Hayek, F. A., 225 HDV (Haringey Development Vehicle), 205 healthcare Britain and, 213–14 post-scarcity in, 138–58 in UK, 215–16 United States and, 213–14 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 16 heme, 176–7 Henderson, Bruce, 46–7 Henderson

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How the Outer Space Treaty Will Impact American Commerce and Settlement in Space’, 129 Resolution Foundation, 58 resources asteroid mining, 119–20 globalism and, 197 post-scarcity in, 117–37 private space industry, 120–1 space, 119–37 Ricardo, David, 69, 233 rice production, 161–2 Richards, Bob, 124 Rifkin, Jeremy, 79

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meat, 170–5 egg whites, 177–9 food, surplus and disruptions, 159–60 meat from vegetables, 175–7 milk, 177–9 planetary limits, 160–4 post-scarcity in, 159–81 synthetic meat, 168–70 wine, 177–81 synthetic meat, 168–70 Syriza, 28, 30 TALEN (transcription activator-like effector-based nucleases), 150

Abundance

by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 18 Mar 2025 · 227pp · 84,566 words

in development right now—artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and gene editing—at the center of a post-work, post-scarcity vision.11 “What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time—from climate change to

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen · 13 Sep 2021

purpose-filled lives? Would any economic theory apply anymore? This story, set in Australia, explores a futuristic society that has introduced two currencies for a post-scarcity world: a card that provides for citizens’ basic needs, and a new virtual currency for building reputation and respect through service to the community. In

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, in which all people are entitled to a comfortable life, as goods prices approach free, and work becomes optional. Others have called it “abundance” or “post-scarcity.” But in “Dreaming of Plenitude,” a society that at first seems like it might possess all the ingredients of a utopian paradise, in which everyone

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wait. So, with nearly free energy, inexpensive materials, and AI-automated production, we will usher in the age of plenitude. PLENITUDE: A TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED INEVITABILITY “Post-scarcity” describes a world where nothing is scarce, and everything is free. In “Dreaming of Plenitude,” we encounter a future world in which countries are moving

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toward post-scarcity, although at different paces. In the last story, Australia, a highly developed country, is wealthy enough to give everyone basic necessities and comfortable living (through

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story, would reach a state of plenitude sometime later. Because the timetable will vary for different countries, I prefer the term “plenitude” rather than “post-scarcity.” Also, strict post-scarcity will never be achieved. For example, no matter how much technology improves, there will never be more than twenty paintings by Leonardo da Vinci

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five hundred years ago. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here—it is just not very evenly distributed.” ECONOMIC MODELS FOR SCARCITY AND POST-SCARCITY For millennia, human economic systems have evolved under one fundamental premise—scarcity. Scarcity exists when human wants for goods and services exceed the limited supply

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

by Peter Marshall · 2 Jan 1992 · 1,327pp · 360,897 words

specifically human life is a struggle against outside nature, and every forward step is adaptation, is the overcoming of a natural law’.32 In our post-scarcity society of relative abundance, the objective conditions are there (in the West at least) to enable us to pass from the historic realm of economic

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reigning orthodoxies of Liberalism and Marxism seemed exhausted and irrelevant, but there was no clear alternative. The old class analysis did not seem to fit post-scarcity society and the notion of vanguard parties had been sullied by the Soviet experience. It was not long however before the New Left began espousing

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saw the need for the ‘conquest of nature’ and industrial progress in order to eradicate poverty, social ecologists argue that in our post-industrial and post-scarcity society the principal concern must be to overcome the drive to conquer and master nature. As Murray Bookchin has argued, the very idea of dominating

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capitalist State. Their actions only made it all the more vigilant and repressive. In the meantime, the world-wide economic recession of 1973–4 checked post-scarcity utopianism; the vast majority of rebellious youth put away their beads and tried to make it once again in straight society. They reverted to type

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Marx and Engels, and in the sixties he emerged as a powerful and controversial anarchist thinker. The first book to bring him to prominence was Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), a collection of essays inspired by the revolutionary optimism of the sixties which argued that for the first time in history the prospect

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. The citizens’ assembly should foster autonomous selfhood as well as civic virtue. It was in his essay ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ (1964) which appeared in Post-Scarcity Anarchism that Bookchin first clearly argued that a free society should be an ecological one. He took up the theme in Toward an Ecological Society

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and guilt. The immediate prospect of material abundance however has outdated earlier socialist theories, including Marxism, which saw the primary goal as overcoming scarcity. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin argued that for the first time in history the ‘technology of abundance’ has created the necessary preconditions for a free society, a society

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basic needs can now be replaced by the fulfilment of desire. Utopia is no longer a dream but an actual possibility. Bookchin has stressed that post-scarcity does not mean mindless affluence, but a ‘sufficiency of technical development that leaves individuals free to select their needs autonomously and to obtain the means

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the same time, he identifies freedom more with personal autonomy than material abundance, with greater choice rather than more goods. But while the conditions of post-scarcity provide a real possibility, the recent thrust to increase production in both capitalist societies and communist States has led to a new crisis, the threat

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highly sensible Utopia in which there is little room for extravagance, ostentation, or creative awkwardness. Bookchin maintained that we are on the ‘threshold’ of a post-scarcity society. He also argues that the United States is at the centre of the social revolution that can overthrow ‘hierarchical society as a world-historical

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no longer Marx’s proletariat but the déclassé elements he despised such as the blacks, hippies and students. What unified the essays of Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism was the belief that ‘man’s most visionary dreams of liberation have now become compelling necessities … hierarchical society, after many bloody millennia, has finally

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‘In our own time, in the era of the final, generalized revolution, the general interest of society can be tangibly and immediately consolidated by a post-scarcity technology into material abundance for all.’70 In this respect, he remained unconvinced by ecological arguments about the limits of growth, the dangers of overpopulation

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that a planned, centralized society is necessary in order to make an aeroplane has been scotched by the success of private aerospace companies. In the post-scarcity world of advanced industrial societies, it can no longer be said that anarchism implies a low standard of living. ‘Unless there is some unpredictable change

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be extremely unlikely if there were not enough able-bodied people to satisfy the basic needs and elementary comforts of the entire community. In our post-scarcity society in the West, the need to work is far less than it was in the nineteenth century. With the development of modern technology we

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‘primitivity’, which he saw as a projection of irrational nostalgia by misguided romantics on allegedly pristine primitive society. Still believing, as he had written in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), that maximum consumption with minimum effort could be attained through modern technology, he derided the primitivists as retreating ‘into the shadowy world of

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Quattrochi and Nairn, The Beginning of the End, op. cit. 19 Ibid., pp. 36, 79 20 See Murray Bookchin, ‘May - June Events in France: I’, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Wildwood House, 1974), p. 254 21 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Deutsch, 1968

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of Murray Bookchin’s Remaking Society (Montréal & New York: Black Rose Books, 1989) 2 Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 280 3 Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 68–9 4 Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 4 5 Ibid., pp. 94, 127 6

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, op. cit., p. 21 7 Bookchin, ‘Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach’, Our Generation, 18, 2 (March 1987), 11–12 8 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 64; Ecology of Freedom, op cit., p. 237 9 Ibid., p. 11 10 Ibid., pp. 353–4 11 Toward an Ecological

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edn. (Montreal & New York: Black Rose, 1987), pp. 55, 71 14 Bookchin, ‘Social Ecology versus “Deep Ecology”’, Green Perspectives, 4–5 (Summer 1987), 20 15 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 10, 69 16 ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., 9–10. See also ‘Recovering Evolution: A Reply to Eckersley and Fox’, Our Generation

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a criticism of Bookchin’s view of human nature, see my article ‘Anarchism and Human Nature’, For Anarchism, op. cit., p. 148, n. 32 18 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 39, 138 19 Ibid., p. 167n 20 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 318 21 See ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., pp

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–4 22 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 102. See also Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 130–3 23 Ibid., p. 251 24 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 40 25 Ibid., p. 70 26 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 352; cf. Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p

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. 60 27 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 276, 278, 272. See also The Modern Crisis, op. cit., p. 25 28 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 78 29 See ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., pp. 3–4; ‘The Crisis in the Ecology Movement’, Green Perspectives, 6 (May 1988

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), pp. 1–5 30 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 19 31 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 26, 93, 70 32 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 276, 279

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the Ecology Movement’, op. cit., pp. 5–6 34 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 218 35 ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., p. 10 36 See Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 71n; Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 59 37 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., pp. 35–6; Remaking Society, op. cit

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Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 320 39 See ibid., p. 218 40 Ibid., p. 312 41 Ibid., p. 344 42 Ibid., p. 266 43 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 81 44 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 29, 193 45 Ibid., pp. 201, 202. See also Remaking Society, op

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. cit., p. 136 46 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 188. See also Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 208, and The Modern Crisis, op. cit., p. 168 47 Toward

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an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 222 48 Ibid., pp. 126, 118 49 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 167 50 Ibid., pp. 19–20, 221 51 Ibid., p. 21 52 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 259, 245

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53 Ibid., pp. 264, 274 54 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 119, 115 55 Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), p. 75, quoted in

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Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 315 57 Ibid., p. 342 58 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., p. 36; Remaking Society, op. cit., p. 203 59 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 116 60 Ibid., p. 119 61 Ibid., p. 130 62 See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964). For

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a broader discussion of the issue, see Carnes & Zerzan, eds., Questioning Technology, op. cit. 63 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 134 64 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 339 65 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 23 66 See ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., p. 17; ‘The Population Myth, I - II

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(July 1988), pp. 1–6; 15 (April 1989), pp. 1–8 67 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., 31, 34n, 32 68 Ibid., pp. 36, 26 69 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 27 70 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 256 71 ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., pp. 19–20. See also ‘New

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Rose, 1997) 54 Bookchin, Interview with David Vanek, Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology, 2, 1 (Spring, 2003), p. 2 55 Bookchin, Introduction, third edition, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004) 56 Brian Morris, Ecology and Anarchism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Thought (Malvern Wells: Images, 1996), p. 5. See also

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, 1997) Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) Bonanno, Alfred, Armed Joy, trans. Jean Weir (Elephant Editions, 1998) Bookchin, Murray, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) (Wildwood House, 1974); 3rd edn. (Edinburgh: AK Press 2004) Bookchin, Murray, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936 (1976) (New York: Harper

Automation and the Future of Work

by Aaron Benanav · 3 Nov 2020 · 175pp · 45,815 words

driving cars). With the exception of the exoskeleton jumpsuits, all of this is possible now if we fight for it. We can already achieve the post-scarcity world that the automation theorists invoke, even if the automation of production proves impossible. My interest in this topic arose from two distinct sources, one

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my own, which by comparison with theirs was still of the dullest-possible grey. In the pages that follow, I explore possibilities for achieving a post-scarcity future without the full automation of production: by sharing the work that remains to be done in a way that restores dignity, autonomy, and purpose

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discuss the policy alternatives that aim to resolve this market failure—neoliberal structural adjustment, Keynesian demand management, and universal basic income—and sketch out a post-scarcity world against which they should be measured. Writing this book has only further convinced me that turning the tide toward a more humane future will

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testing out as a possible response to the present recession. We should not be fighting for this modest social goal, but rather to inaugurate a post-scarcity planet. I could not have written this book without the support and friendship of many people, including: Perry Anderson, Arielle Angel, Elyse Arkind, Marc Arkind

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Instructions,” which he lifted from the names of spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. Banks’s ambiguously utopian science fiction novels depict a post-scarcity world in which human beings live fulfilling lives alongside intelligent robots—called “minds”—without the need for markets or states.9 Politicians and their advisors

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government would actually be able to fulfill the promise of full automation by creating a post-work or post-scarcity society. In Four Futures, Peter Frase thoughtfully explores the alternative outcomes for such a post-scarcity society, depending on whether it were still to have private property or to suffer from resource scarcity,

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is defeated, maybe the best we will get is UBI, but that distributional reform should not be our aim. We should be reaching toward a post-scarcity world, a goal that advanced technologies will help us realize, even if the full automation of production is not achievable—or even desirable. The return

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while away our time in dead-end jobs, playing video games on smartphones. We need to slip out of this timeline and into another. A post-scarcity future—in which all individuals are guaranteed access to whatever they need to make a life, without exception—could become the basis on which humanity

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create, to learn and to teach, unhampered by the fear of where the next meal is coming from.”31 To find our way toward this post-scarcity future requires not only a break between work and income, as the automation theorists recognize, but also one between profit and income, as many do

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over the course of three generations.14 By contrast, radical Keynesians like British economists Joan Robinson and William Beveridge knew that to get to the post-scarcity world of Keynes’s dreams, it would be necessary to socialize investment levels and legislate shorter working days.15 Beveridge’s 1944 plan for “full

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labor has been rendered largely or even fully obsolete. UBI is the technical solution that transforms the nightmare scenario of automation into the dream of post-scarcity. On this basis, automation theorists often present UBI as a neutral policy instrument—appealing to left and right—that solves the problem of global un

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of which will not bring us closer to a world of human flourishing.27 A critique of the automation discourse’s market-based vision of post-scarcity will help reveal the contours of a nonmarket alternative. UBI proposals long predate the advent of the automation discourse. Some trace their origin to Thomas

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participate in the world of private property. In his proposal, which anticipates the concept of basic income, payments are not a way to create a post-scarcity world, but rather to secure the moral foundations of a private-ownership society. Twentieth-century neoliberal economists supported a basic income for similar reasons. Both

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enjoyable, or to automate them out of existence.39 UBI becomes a means not of stabilizing the late-capitalist economy, but of pushing toward a post-scarcity world, in which the “economic problem” has been solved and people are free to pursue their passions. Past that point, the major questions concern humanity

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efforts to raise a modest UBI to a higher level would quickly push the economy into crisis, forcing UBI advocates to press forward toward the post- scarcity world long before they were ready to make the leap, or else to back down. Facing such a salto mortale, reform parties typically have blinked

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the power to control investment decisions away from capitalists, hence rendering the capital strike inoperative, can clear the way for us to advance toward a post-scarcity future. CHAPTER 6 Necessity and Freedom EVEN IF ONE DOUBTS automation theorists’ account of technological progress—as I certainly do—their attempt to imagine and

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chart a path toward a post-scarcity future remains their thought’s most attractive aspect, because it allows us to pose the question of how the pieces of this defunct world can

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no one has gone before,” without having to worry about how they are going to earn a living. The question is: Can we envisage a post-scarcity world without the replicators—that is, even if full automation turns out to be a dream? By focusing on technological progress rather than the conquest

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of production, automation theorists end up largely abandoning what has been seen as the basic precondition for generating a post-scarcity world, from Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia to present-day Trekonomics. This precondition is not the free distribution of money, as the most recent wave

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out of it, we could begin from a world of generalized human dignity, and then consider the technical changes needed to realize that world. The Post-scarcity Tradition What if everyone suddenly had access to enough healthcare, education, and welfare to reach their full potential? A world of fully capacitated individuals would

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that serve as the foundation for all our other activities.6 Whereas automation theorists place their hopes in technology, many of the original theorists of post-scarcity—such as Karl Marx, Thomas More, Étienne Cabet, and Peter Kropotkin—did not need to call on a deus ex machina to solve this riddle

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. They claimed that post-scarcity was possible without the automation of production. Instead, they argued, we needed to reorganize social life into two separate but interrelated spheres: a realm of

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inspired the exiled Rousseauian republican Étienne Cabet, who read More’s Utopia in the British Museum and was immediately converted to the social ideal of post-scarcity. He wrote his own treatise, titled Travels in Icaria (1840), advocating for what he called “the community of goods.”10 To More’s call for

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, coming into contact with revolutionaries like Peter Kropotkin, who went on to write detailed accounts of how democratically organized post-scarcity societies could be constructed. Kropotkin emphasized the role of voluntary associations in post- scarcity life. He argued that voluntary associations would flourish in a world where money and private property had been abolished

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in “menial service” so that others might make art, he said, we would “all be artists and all serve.” To many people, this vision of post-scarcity was what “socialism” and “communism” had come to mean, before their later identification with Stalinist central planning and breakneck industrialization.16 I will take each

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, common intermediate and final goods, sanitation, water, electricity, healthcare, education, child and elder care, means of both communication and transportation, and so on). Theorists of post-scarcity generally estimate that these common labors would take anywhere from three to five hours a day—about one-third to one-half of a standard

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capacitated world, these specialisms would themselves be more evenly distributed. Utopian writer Edward Bellamy proposed one way to organize the division of labor in a post-scarcity society in his novel Looking Backward (1888). There, the supply and demand for labor determine how many hours people work, rather than how high a

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be performed by food replicators and cleaning drones, so that people can get on with their scientific research unimpeded, remains to be seen. In the post-scarcity tradition, the reorganization of necessary labors makes possible a world of free giving. Everyone can go to the social storehouses and service centers to get

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the night without having to prove that they qualify for access. There would be no possibility of excluding someone from these social goods. For a post-scarcity society to come into being, a literal cornucopia is not required. It is only necessary that scarcity and its accompanying mentality be overcome, so people

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starship Enterprise tells a financial mogul, who had been cryogenically frozen in the twenty-first century only to be revived, to his horror, in a post-scarcity world).25 In such a world, there could still be sanctions to ensure that necessary work is actually undertaken. However, inducements to work would not

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ideas: feelings of autonomy, mastery, and purpose are what generate the best work, not higher levels of monetary reward.27 The successful organization of a post-scarcity world would require that its denizens solve, to their satisfaction, the problems posed by the twentieth century’s socialist calculation debates. They would do so

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standards. Again, there is likely to be no single best way to deal with these crucial problems.28 Free Time for Everyone For theorists of post-scarcity, the reconstruction of the realm of necessity is not an end in itself; the solidarity it engenders also expands the realm of freedom and ensures

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oppressive personal relationships within households or workplaces, or to renegotiate the terms of those engagements.31 What will people do with their expanded free time? Post-scarcity has been called “post-work,” but such framing is inadequate.32 After a period of rest and recovery, even the most work-weary people become

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be determined by the profit motive, or dictated by the interests of the wealthy. What we call “capital” in the society of scarcity would, in post-scarcity, be recognized for what it is: our common social inheritance.34 Built up over generations, belonging to no one and to everyone, it is that

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resource scarcity or abundance, as long as certain fundamental conditions of sustainable material security were met. The first thing people would actually do in a post-scarcity world—alongside insuring everyone’s basic needs were met—would be to put a large portion of humanity’s collective resources and intelligence to work

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technologically advanced society, so that everyone has the right and the power to decide what to do with their time. This brief sketch of a post-scarcity world can perhaps serve as a benchmark to evaluate the various pathways that are supposed to get us to that place. From this standpoint, it

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as both a dream and a nightmare, that is because it has no innate association with human dignity, and because it will not generate a post-scarcity world by itself. Nor will universal basic income. Perhaps if access to education and healthcare were dramatically widened, communities revitalized through cooperative sharing of the

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sources of energy—then, a basic income could form one part of a larger project aiming at human freedom.36 But the path to a post-scarcity world could also take some other form entirely. Without a clear vision of this coming world, it is easy to get lost along the way

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. Postscript: Agents of Change IF NEITHER TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT nor technocratic reform leads inevitably to a post-scarcity world, then it is only the pressure of social movements, pushing for a radical restructuring of social life, that can bring it about. One of

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alone dream. Movements without a vision are blind; but visionaries without movements are much more severely incapacitated. Without a massive social struggle to build a post- scarcity world, late-capitalist visionaries will remain mere techno-utopian mystics. Notes Chapter 1. The Automation Discourse 1 See Edward Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward, 2000

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, Revisiting Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, MIT Press, 2008. See also Mike Beggs, “Keynes’s Jetpack,” Jacobin, April 17, 2012; Robert Chernomas, “Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society,” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 18, no. 4, 1984; James Crotty, Keynes against Capitalism, Taylor & Francis, 2019. 15 Robinson admonished the “bastard Keynesians” for

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, and Herbert Marcuse, who essentially suggested that the collapse of spheres could be achieved by turning all work into play. Single-realm conceptions of a post-scarcity world are, in my view, both totalitarian and hopelessly utopian (in the bad sense of the term). 8 Quoted in Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p

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, 2000 [1935], pp. 37–60; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon, 2001 [1944], pp. 257–68. See also Marcel van der Linden, “The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement for a Democracy of Content (1947–1964),” Anarchist Studies, no. 9, 2001, pp. 127–45. The socialist calculation debate

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account of the place of the realms of necessity and freedom in democratic socialism that is similar to my account of their place in a post-scarcity world. 25 Saadia, Trekonomics, p. 40. 26 Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 138–9. 27 Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

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Woods, 25 British National Health Service, 69–70 Brynjolfsson, Erik of labor-productivity growth, 17 The Second Machine Age, 2–3, 45 Cabet, Étienne on post-scarcity, 83, 84–5 Travels in Icaria, 84–5 call center sector, 118n48 Capital (Marx), 8, 47–8 capital disinvestment, 71 “A Capitalist Road to Communism

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, Herbert, 8, 132–3n7 Marx, Karl Capital, 8, 47–8 Communist Manifesto, 85 concept of relative surplus population, 120n8 political development of, 133–4n13 on post-scarcity, 83, 84–5 stagnant economic sector concept, 57 Mason, Paul, 96–7 McAfee, Andrew of labor-productivity growth, 17 The Second Machine Age, 2–3

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sector employment in, 56, 58 Minijobs, 52 mining industry, 117n45 MNCs (multinational corporations), 27 money, free, 72–6 Moore’s law, 40 More, Thomas on post-scarcity, 83, 89 Utopia, 82, 84 Morris, William, 132–3n7 mudsill theory, 132n6 multinational corporations (MNCs), 27 Murray, Charles In Our Hands, 74–5 Musk, Elon

The Social Life of Money

by Nigel Dodd · 14 May 2014 · 700pp · 201,953 words

Cryptology: Proceedings of Crypto 82. D. Chaum, R. L. Rivest, and A. T. Sherman, Eds. New York, Plenum Publishing Corporation. Chernomas, R. (1984). “Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society.” Journal of Economic Issues XVIII (4): 1007–26. Chick, V. and S. C. Dow (2013). “Financial Institutions and the State: A Reexamination.” Monetary Economies