>It's a place where everything is taken care of for you, not through the thoughtful allocation of resources for mutual benefit, but because it's trivially easy

>It's a place where everything is taken care of for you, not through the thoughtful allocation of resources for mutual benefit, but because it's trivially easy for a machine to just give you everything you ask for. It's trivially easy for the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to provide for the needs of tens of thousands of people without any appreciable dent in their own wealth, but it doesn't happen because of the political structure of our society. The Culture could easily be a society of near-infinite potential wealth which enforced scarcity the way legal & economic systems in our world enforce scarcity beyond what is naturally present now - from John Deere increasing the costs of agriculture to extract profit to the enforcement of intellectual property laws. Our society has more than enough wealth and industry to provide a home for every person, but we choose to organise our economy in a way that requires homelessness instead - I'm not making a moral judgement, just pointing out that that is in fact a decision our society makes and not just a natural fact of the universe. The Culture is politically organised to provide for the needs of its citizens, using the labour of those able to provide what is necessary. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is communism, it's not just a state of things that falls out of a coconut tree once you have enough production.