Wealth and Abundance
What to do when everyone can have everything, and why that threatens some people
Like a lot of people who grew up at the edge of the Information Age, I grew up in a home where we taped shows from TV and radio.
My father prized his cassette tapes of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that he had recorded from BBC radio, and my mother had video tapes of the old Addams Family sitcom reruns from TV. Many of these tapes were sacred texts in my household, treasured media that we would return to often.
I had no shortage of shows that I had taped as well, from bootleg copies of MST3K episodes to compilations of Nobuo Uematsu’s masterful music from Final Fantasy 2 and 3 (now better remembered as FFIV and FFVI). But one irreplaceable set of tapes were the recordings I made of a local radio show: WKMZ Saturday Night with Bill Hutton.
Living in the rural area around West Virginia, most of my local stations played nothing but country and oldies tunes, but on Saturday nights, Bill would take over 97.5FM for three hours and play strange novelty and comedy songs, along with weird new wave and punk-adjacent gems, all interspersed with a very specific brand of fake ads and deliberately-cheap prize giveaways. Not being a terribly social teen, and living in the middle of nowhere, that show was often the highlight of my Saturday nights. It was my own, local version of the Dr. Demento show, and it was precious to me.
So I recorded entire shows, perfectly fitting on two 90-minute cassette tapes. I’d listen to them on long drives or while drawing. I’d return to favorite songs and sketches until they were etched into my brain. I even took a handful of my favorite tapes with me when I went to college, as a taste of home.
To my knowledge, none of Bill Hutton’s shows were officially recorded anywhere else. I’ve rarely even seen evidence of anyone else who ever heard him — he resurrected the bit for a while on satellite radio, but even that has passed by now.
Those tapes are, in a very real way, irreplaceable. That doesn’t automatically make them valuable. Except to me.
The Economics of Scarcity
One of the defining features of the Information Age, compared to previous ages in human history, is that digital goods don’t have the same rules of scarcity.
As a reminder for those who don’t overthink complex systems all day like I do, “scarcity” is the economic term for having a limitation on something that people want. And while economics isn’t nearly as dismal as people assume, the effect of scarcity on supply and demand can be pretty dire, indeed.
But with digital goods, you can bypass many effects of scarcity completely. Taping a copy of The Addams Family off TV doesn’t remove a copy from the broadcaster’s library. There are just now more copies of it available. You can repeat this as many times as you want, with no cost other than a blank tape and maybe a little degradation of the copy’s quality. Digital goods can have abundance, the opposite of scarcity.
Economically, when scarcity of a resource is removed, and copies are potentially infinite, the per-unit price of that resource rapidly drops towards zero. Information, as they say, wants to be free.
That's a tremendous boon for most of the world in a lot of ways - as long as someone has a device to access digital goods, they have a wealth of knowledge and media available to them for all-but-free. Free educational material, widely-shared and duplicatable knowledge, a digital Library of Alexandria for everyone, for free, forever.
For decades, futurists have extrapolated this trend into a potential future where we overcome scarcity in more and more areas, eventually reaching a Star Trek style "post-scarcity" utopia. Or at least one where there’s abundance enough to come close.
It's a long way off, but not an impossibility. Let's come back to that later.
Risks of Abundance
As you'll recall from all the anti-piracy freakouts of the '80s onwards, when you copy a digital good for free and lose nothing in the process, it throws a huge monkeywrench into the idea of selling copies of those goods for a profit. That abundance can cause ripples in many of the established structures of capitalism in general.
Entire industries wobbled and sometimes toppled once information and digital goods were no longer subject to scarcity. Home recording was killing the music industry, don't copy that floppy, et cetera.
It should be no surprise that most of us would, absolutely, download a car if we could.
And yeah, I’m acutely aware that, since I’m a professional creator of digital media, digital abundance is a threat to the sales of my work. But frankly, that’s not how developers get paid, that’s how our publishers gets paid.
Developers in a studio generally get paid by publishers in speculation for the work we’ll make (and that they’ll then sell). Digital creators could, instead, get paid directly by patrons without needing to go through a publisher — as no shortage of indie developers have shown.
Music publishing was hit especially hard in the early age of piracy, and has never really recovered to its previous heights since then. But musicians are still around, creating new music — they just make most of their money from performances, crowdfunding, and associated licensing, rather than mega-stardom from getting a publishing deal.
Abundance doesn’t kill creative industries, but it can kill the parts of the industry that rely on limiting access to those creative works.
The Threat of Post-Scarcity
Since seeing the results on the music industry, there have been decades of attempts at creating a form of copy-protection that reinforces the scarcity of digital goods, from proprietary formats and devices to DRM to streaming-non-ownership of data. Indeed, you can cut through all the NFT and cryptocurrency jargon to get to the essential invention behind them all: the blockchain is an innovative way to enforce scarcity of a digital good.
The smartest minds of our generation have been focused on finding ways to protect the distribution methods and revenue streams of various multi-billion-dollar digital media industries. And as our society moves more and more into a digital realm, the prospect of a post-scarcity world that optimistic futurists once predicted threatens more and more of the established wealth.
The Long Path to Abundance
I mentioned the path to a Star Trek style post-scarcity world earlier. And there lot of steps on the path, and smarter minds than mine have delved the subject, but the big ones on the foreseeable horizon are:
Renewable energy (more abundant energy)
Home 3D printing (more abundant manufactured goods)
Advancing automation and AI (more abundant labor)
Asteroid mining (more abundant physical materials)
Advanced space travel (more abundant space for building and possibly living)
Now, those last two are definitely a long ways away. And none of these would lead to complete post-scarcity. But each would certainly mean less scarcity and more abundance, in ways that would hit as hard as the Information Age did on the scarcity of digital goods. Each would mean seismic changes in the economies of each of those areas.
The thing is, we already have a whole lot of artificial scarcity that’s created for the profits of various industries, from food to diamonds. Overturning these limitations would realize huge benefits for most people in the short term — long before we could see widespread renewable energy or asteroid mining.
And more to the point, all of the above steps towards post-scarcity only work towards that goal if their benefits are shared widely. If they’re only in the hands of a few, as the colonization plans of some privately-run space exploration companies promise, then they just multiply the owners’ wealth and let them maintain artificial scarcity of resources for their own benefits.
Because the entire concept of wealth depends on scarcity. And as we progress (slowly) towards abundance, that promise of post-scarcity is a direct threat to the wealthy.
Wealth Depends on Scarcity
We all know how the concept of money falls apart if that money is no longer scarce -- that's why bitcoin’s blockcahin lets it work as a digital currency and why gold-duplicating bugs ruin the economies of MMOs (or counterfeiting in real-world economies).
Similarly, the reason works of art and NFTs are such highly-prized commodities of wealth is because they are absolutely unique and irreproducible — the height of scarcity, like my old radio cassette tapes — which makes them excellent vehicles for being worth whatever one person is willing to pay for them. For most people, one of those tapes would barely be worth the material it’s made of, but for me, it’d fetch a much higher price.
This subjective, undisprovable worth is also why they're one of the preferred methods of high-end money laundering — and you can be sure that's what has been behind 95+% of those big sales of NFTs, and countless record sales of artwork. It's no coincidence that the original and still-leading use of cryptocurrencies was to act as an untraceable form of wealth for illicit transactions.
When NFTs and similar web3 schemes are applied to common physical goods, they’re often just a way of attaching a blockchain to mass-produced and reproducible goods to enforce scarcity on them. You may be able to make your own printer ink for cheap, but that won’t stop the printer company’s profits if they’ve set up a subscription system that tracks your ink usage and automatically bills you for replacements.
In fact, subscription systems are increasingly popular forms of artificial scarcity.
The Gatekeepers
When Adam Smith extolled the virtues of capitalism in The Wealth of Nations, he praised the promise of capital investing in the creation of new inventions and techniques for improving goods and services, and thus creating abundances that would make their societies more materially rich.
Conversely, Smith had dire warnings about “rentiers” — people who made their profits solely by renting out existing land and property to others. He called them parasites who added nothing to the economy while draining those who needed those artificially-scarce resources to create — and when Smith coined the term “free market”, he meant a freedom from rentiers, rather than a freedom from government.
Today, entire major economies are built around rentiership. Landlords are only the most obvious case, but everything from IP ownership to service subscriptions to healthcare insurance operates in the same fashion: control the scarcity of a needed service and charge whatever you can get away with for access to it.
A more modern economist agrees with Smith’s warning: the economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has served as both the Finance Minister of Greece and as Valve’s in-house economist.
Varoufakis has described this widespread move to rentiership as Technofeudalism, an era where corporations (mostly tech-based) find it’s much more profitable to rent out their existing services and IPs to others, rather than to invest their capital in making new services or IPs.
For these companies, there’s much more wealth in maintaining scarcity than in building abundance.
Wealth versus Value
All kinds of physical and digital goods, from necessities of life to the most decadent luxuries, still work just fine if everyone has a copy. A loaf of bread still fills my belly even if others have bread; a tape of my favorite show is no less enjoyable if other people can enjoy it too. These things have value because of what they can provide or produce to meet people’s wants and needs.
But wealth is only useful if there are people who aren't wealthy — the needy poor who are willing to do things for a sliver of that wealth, with which they can buy the things of value that they don’t have. If everyone has infinite wealth, then wealth itself is no longer meaningful.
In that light, the massive investments of billionaires into blockchain technologies and technofeudalist business models are obvious for what they are: investments by the wealthy in protecting the concept of wealth itself.
Investments in preventing a post-scarcity world where their wealth is meaningless.
Investments in keeping things the way they are, with them on top.
Do you still have the 97.5 tapes? Would love to re-listen to some of them.
I had a lot of fun with this. First, the Hitchhiker's tapes were actually given to me, rather than recorded by me. Second, I still have about 100 cassettes of Bill Hutton's shows. I'd like to share them on youtube, but copyright restrictions would require me to extract only Bill Hutton's "in-between bits", since the music is all copyrighted. Third, I learned a Dutch phrase, "Er is niet nenoeg vraag naar dit product", meaning "there is not enough demand for this product". I immediately thought of my band's first album. It was plenty scarce, but nobody cared. Therefore, I would suggest that it is the combination of demand, coupled with scarcity, that elevated prices, resulting in what some people call "wealth". In the absence of any Demand, Scarcity is irrelevant. As for actual wealth, I find it to be illusory, a human creation based on agreements. Confederate money started off having some value, then became worthless, but now has value again for collectors. It's the same money, but its value is assigned by people. A piece of land might have been poor for farming, but suddenly became "valuable" when a demand for petroleum emerged. I suppose it could be said that it is the illusory "system" of "agreements" that the "wealthy" wish to maintain.