Thread by @doctorow

My latest podcast is a reading of my 2017 @locusmag column, "The Jubilee: Fill Your Boots," which investigates the nature of scarcity and abundance, and the relationship they have to coordination, the internet, and our economic system.

locusmag.com/2017/03/cory-d…

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The thesis of the essay (also explored in my novel Walkaway) is that we might someday reimagine what we mean when we think of luxury: not being able to get everything when we want it, but rather great outpourings of materials and leisure tied into the rhythms of the world.

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Maybe we'll all be summoned to work when renewable energy is available ("make hay while the sun shines") but we'll also be furloughed with all the food, friends and fun we want when it's not (and someone else will be called to work).

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It's a very old kind of abundance, one that we only gave up because industrial production required that we trade our individual autonomy for efficiency in producing material goods that made our lives, on balance, much better.

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But with networked computers, we can have a post-industrial world that marries our pre-industrial rhythms to our industrial production efficiencies. After all, the thing networked computers do is make it cheaper and easier to coordinate our work.

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This was speculative in 2017. Now, in pandemic lockdown, we're learning just how much of our synchronized labor - the things we all do in the same place at the same time - was the result of inertia and habit, and how much it can be jettisoned to allow us to work as we will.

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It's a bizarre and amazing time. Terrifying, yes. But the dislocation is also redefining what we think of as possible, desirable, and necessary.

Here's the MP3:

archive.org/download/Cory_…

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And here's my podcast feed:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca…

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