More Words, Deeper Hole

Just as a clarification: Cory I weren't arguing that our society today WAS a post-scarcity society. Indeed: hollow, bitter laughter. Rather, the point was that if you *described* the details of an average American existence today to a 14th century peasant, they would THINK -- wrongly -- that it was a post scarcity society, because the details would be so amazing. Like: "and if you lose your job you are forced to live in a small apartment with only cold water, heating that works intermittently, and you have to stand in line for hours to fill out paperwork in order to be able to buy a meager amount of groceries -- pasta, cans of tomato sauce, pop-tarts -- which you heat at home on the range because the oven is broken, not answering your cell phone in case it's your ex-wife demanding alimony, watching the most stupid reality shows on a flickering black-and-white TV and drinking crap beer in order to dull the pain caused by being treated by society as a pariah; you can't afford to fly by plane but once a year you scrounge enough money by recycling old cans to afford a Greyhound bus to see your sister..." ; "wait, WHAT? I can READ? Writing on papers causes people to give me food for NOTHING? Food comes out of magic metal boxes that last forever? I have a device in my home that can heat it at a touch of a button? I have another device that can let me speak as if by magic to people all over the WORLD? And another that shows me bards performing all day and night? People pay me money for things thrown away, which lets me travel many leagues in a day in a magic carriage? Even if I don't farm a year's quota for the lord of the manor, no one will beat or imprison me?"

The point is not that we live in a post-scarcity society. We live in a world of enormous inequity and misery. We do however actually live in a world where if we DID share all the things we produce fairly, everyone would have enough to eat; and that in itself would be a staggeringly utopian vision for a 14th century peasant.

The point was precisely that instant matter fabricators or whatever other hand-wavy technological macguffin you want to introduce don't produce "post-scarcity". We create scarcity ourselves, by what we do to each other and how our desires and imaginations outstrip our resources... and since the almost unimaginable increase in technological sophistication and production capacity of the last millenium hasn't changed that, there's no reason to think that future technological advances will either. Indeed, Cory and I later wrote a far-future story in which the characters can convert entire planets to pure computronium, live forever, create arbitrary virtual environments, etc., and (the point is) there's STILL scarcity, and it's in some sense even worse (being able to make a quadrillion instant copies of yourself when there's only room to run a trillion in the available process space means brutal competition for resources).

"That door does not lead out" is the point we were making.