actually, this might be good.
it’s a prelude to postabundance: no more resource scarcity.
maksudnya?
it means the old game of status signaling, built on scarcity and competition, is becoming unsustainable. people don't need to prove they've got something others don't anymore.
it’s a prelude to postabundance: no more resource scarcity.
maksudnya?
it means the old game of status signaling, built on scarcity and competition, is becoming unsustainable. people don't need to prove they've got something others don't anymore.
https://twitter.com/vitraiol/status/1881667821752705293
anik-anik, altoid, etc are ingroup belonging *and* taste signals, a way to show you're part of a certain tribe or aesthetic or that you love them. but in a world of postabundance, those signals lose their weight. when everything is easy to get and mass-produced, the old ways-
-don't work anymore. why do people grift? Because they're naturally like that, yes, but also because there's a huge incentive in getting resources by grifting. or because they feel insecure. or want to be accepted. All of those dynamics are essentially rooted in scarcity.
those ingroup belonging signals function to defend against said grifters, social predators, people who only want the fun and will rot the subculture from inside.
but postabundance means that everyone has everything, thus less threats to communities and subcultures.
but postabundance means that everyone has everything, thus less threats to communities and subcultures.
nowadays, signaling has shifted a bit from "look at what i have" to "look at what i do with what i have" or maybe even "look at how i connect with others, or how i am valued by others"
but those are still rooted in scarcity. in this "prelude to abundance" era,
but those are still rooted in scarcity. in this "prelude to abundance" era,
mass production capability *and* horizontal custom markets increasingly force people to actually value what could not be faked: love of the subject. In literature circles, it might be that you've written a good book. In tech, you've got a lot of those green blocks.
but is that truly the end? No, because talented, hard-working, and "productive" people can poison the well of communities as well. Good shit being produced doesn't necessarily mean civilizational alignment or transformation. The scarcity curse is still a background incentive.
even if people produce good shit, reputation acts as a form of social capital, and social capital determines access to opportunities, leading to more social capital and actual capital etc—this creates inequilibria. Scarcity is still here b/c reputation is materially hackable.
to put it avtistically: reputation itself is a compression mechanism for trust and capability signaling in complex networks. And compression inherently creates information loss and exploitable patterns (and exploitable actors suffering from information asymmetry)
so for communities, even if we optimize for good shit/output/contribution, we might get social equilibriums that are fundamentally misaligned with what we actually want. But that's the crux of the question: in a post-abundance world, how would that look like?
Post-scarcity beda btw
Post-abundance = "We've internalized that we can make enough of everything and have changed our systems, including our meaning-making, virtues, and social dynamics, accordingly. But what does *that* looks like? Our terminal goals? Our creation? etc."
Post-abundance = "We've internalized that we can make enough of everything and have changed our systems, including our meaning-making, virtues, and social dynamics, accordingly. But what does *that* looks like? Our terminal goals? Our creation? etc."
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