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“Post-scarcity” is a myth. There will always be some limited-supply thing humans will value. Consider how utterly dissatisfied people are with abundant cheap f

“Post-scarcity” is a myth. There will always be some limited-supply thing humans will value. Consider how utterly dissatisfied people are with abundant cheap food, clothing, water, fuel, housing, etc. today vs not all that long ago, having integrated new norms into mundane sustenance making abundance seem unattainable. An hour’s minimum wage today buys medieval luxury but for regulations demanding even better.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
It's more complicated than that. People are dissatisfied with abundance today because they're being made dissatisfied, in several ways: - Creating fake dissatisfaction is literally the cornerstone of sales and marketing. To get someone to buy stuff where they otherwise wouldn't, you have to create in them the state of being dissatisfied with what they already have (e.g. make them desire something else, or make them afraid of something). I'm not sure we can blame regular folks for being whiny if the richest industry on the planet is making them whiny on purpose. - Value engineering means things that were good and cheap, like food and clothing, keep getting worse over time, as companies keep trying to squeeze extra margins. Besides competitive pressure, this is also driven by inflation. Overall result: things that were good before are barely usable today, despite being abundant. - Related, some people recognize this abundance is being turned into a play to chain and exploit people. The more things are becoming services instead of products, the more people become dependent on providers. It's becoming clearly visible in developed countries: to make use of abundance, you need to keep running the rat race to exhaustion. We're reaching a ridiculous point that, in order to have the good fruits of our civilization, you have to be busy working so hard you that don't have time to enjoy them. - We're barely few generations into a subset of population having some sort of decent life. Call it being biased by time and place of birth, but frankly, I consider the average quality of life before late 20th century West to be tragic and unacceptable, and current one to be barely scratching the surface of how people should live. I see no reason to assume that people wouldn't stop consuming obsessively in a post-scarcity economy, if said economy would be able to guarantee actual high-quality goods to meet everyone's needs, without bullshit strings attached (no "X as a Service"!), and without marketers constantly trying to ruin everyone's mood.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

It's more complicated than that. People are dissatisfied with abundance today because they're being made dissatisfied, in several ways: - Creating fake dissatisfaction is literally the cornerstone of sales and marketing. To get someone to buy stuff where they otherwise wouldn't, you have to create in them the state of being dissatisfied with what they already have (e.g. make them desire something else, or make them afraid of something). I'm not sure we can blame regular folks for being whiny if the richest industry on the planet is making them whiny on purpose. - Value engineering means things that were good and cheap, like food and clothing, keep getting worse over time, as companies keep trying to squeeze extra margins. Besides competitive pressure, this is also driven by inflation. Overall result: things that were good before are barely usable today, despite being abundant. - Related, some people recognize this abundance is being turned into a play to chain and exploit people. The more things are becoming services instead of products, the more people become dependent on providers. It's becoming clearly visible in developed countries: to make use of abundance, you need to keep running the rat race to exhaustion. We're reaching a ridiculous point that, in order to have the good fruits of our civilization, you have to be busy working so hard you that don't have time to enjoy them. - We're barely few generations into a subset of population having some sort of decent life. Call it being biased by time and place of birth, but frankly, I consider the average quality of life before late 20th century West to be tragic and unacceptable, and current one to be barely scratching the surface of how people should live. I see no reason to assume that people wouldn't stop consuming obsessively in a post-scarcity economy, if said economy would be able to guarantee actual high-quality goods to meet everyone's needs, without bullshit strings attached (no "X as a Service"!), and without marketers constantly trying to ruin everyone's mood.