I feel somewhat churlish for taking issue with “abundance” when most people who have ever walked the Earth never once had nearly enough. But the whole discourse, in all its variants, still feels marked by a scarcity mindset to me. I’m trying to articulate what truly getting past scarcity would look like, and I strongly suspect it is not that.
Discussion
Loading...
Post
@adamgreenfield I only ever interpreted it as code for "pro-growth" with the implied assertion that the growth does indeed trickle down, or at least that the rising tide lifts all boats.
@adamgreenfield What if we end scarcity by simply making infinite paperclips? Not only will people never run out of paperclips, if they have any problems in their lives, they can solve them by throwing enough paperclips at the problem.
Oh, you're worried we'll run out of birds and trees? Don't worry, you can make fake trees out of millions of paperclips.
@skyfaller [You’re joking, but there’s a vein of art I despise that’s essentially that: reproduced or simulated ecosystems in museum settings.]
At very best, it feels orthogonal to everything that’s actually important. Do you feel seen? Do you feel loved? Do you feel like the things you do matter?
@adamgreenfield I live in one of the richest places on earth and also we literally can’t house everyone who graduates from high school here, much less the people who want to move here for the opportunity to do self-actualization.
Abundance (flawed as it is) comes from that core observation: we’ve often made it unnecessarily, counter-productively hard to provide things at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid to have-nots, in the name of protecting the top of the pyramid for haves.
@adamgreenfield @luis_in_brief My personal ism (aside from anagorism) is negative utilitarianism, so I go by the logic that nobody should get luxuries until everybody gets necessities.
And as childlike as it may sound, I actually think these are the ends we should be designing shared systems and structures to achieve. Everything else is secondary.
The way the wisest folks I know frame the challenge is that just about everything good in a culture is downstream from decent, affordable shelter and cheap space for cultural experimentation. *These* provisions seem to entrain the psychic time and space in which we can get to know ourselves, develop vibrant relations with one another, and produce work we’re proud of. I do hear some left abundance talk about these concerns, so it’s not like the discourse is worthless tout court.
@adamgreenfield
> just about everything good in a culture is downstream from decent, affordable shelter and cheap space for cultural experimentation
This. As an observer of the slow death of San Francisco the cultural hotspot, will point out that each of the countercultural developments the city nurtured so well in the 20th C. - beatniks, the psychedelic revolution, gay liberation, the punk and rave scenes - tended to be centered on a neighborhood in which it was affordable to live and/or congregate.
This is why SF's days as a superpower cultural metropole are over. Not only has the urban cleansing forced out most of the artists and activists and erased much of the diversity, but there are simply no more cheap neighborhoods for cultural movements to gravitate to. In these circumstances the liberation struggle is a battle to claim and hold physical space itself
@adamgreenfield I'm not sure this particular childlike observation is the relatively childish one. Like, the case for "abundance" that is "life would be nicer if we could reasonably expect a free bus home from staying too late with a friend because it was nice" is pretty mature compared to the version we are seeing which is closer to "we could have so so so much more stuff if we were to simply care about as few things [that also matter to people] as possible and move with minimized deliberation"
@adamgreenfield A big part of what rubs me the wrong way about the word is it's a sheer lack of ambition, marketing itself as ambition. Like all these mainstream "big ideas" people have ideas that seem quite small to me. I think it's a lot like Christian nationalists calling themselves "Moms for Liberty" - they're for all kinds of things, none on which are liberty. Abundance makes me picture the world of Wall-E, you're given a common slop and expected to be satisfied with that.
@adamgreenfield "Abundance" - we know exactly what you want, and we're gonna give you a lot of it
"Anarcho-Transhumanism" - we don't know what you want, and are frankly kinda afraid of asking, and will fight to death for you to have it, as long as it's not something evil
bonfire.cafe
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
Automatic federation enabled