Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.
Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
Perhaps we live in a post DATA scarcity society. But information is still a scarce commodity
I think that we do live in a society where information is not scarce because the ease of replicating any information has increased significantly.
That does not mean everyone has access to it
The idea in relation to capitalism is referring to information from a physics standpoint, not from a data analysis standpoint, as in Information Theory and it’s laws as opposed to the laws that govern matter / energy.
Your premise is wrong in like… A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn’t say everything is post-scarcity.
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.
Yeah my mistake. I’m gonna fix the title.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
lol. Tell that to the scientific papers you have to pay for otherwise they’ll run out and the researchers won’t be able to research.
A post-scarcity society doesn’t mean a post-resource society. We have enough resources to make sure everybody has what they need. None of it is scarce in the slightest. We just need to distribute it equally.
Or sufficiently equally to eliminate scarcity.
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I like this view of parallel structures
Best we can do is fascism and climate apocalypse.
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Even Socialism seems transitory to me. Much better than Capitalism, but once labor can be more broadly automated, we need to think of something other than money quickly.
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Shhhhh, im trying to lead them to that conclusion without the big scary C word.
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As capitalism itself has demonstrated, people and money can operate just fine when others are doing the work.
Hopefully earth finds harmony after humans.
Harmony with what?
Harmony without 150 species being driven to extinction every day by one organisms population.
Okay that’s “without”. In harmony, with what?
Are you stupid? Without humans destroying the environment.
Everything is unsustainable. So far, nothing has been observed to last forever.
Fascism tends to collapse a lot faster than capitalism though, because of its inherent drive to rework the world into something new. Fascism cannot abide non-fascism existing, and contains the implicit imperative to invade and impose fascism.
Just want to add this is not unique to fascism. It is an emergent property of all systems that seek to reshape the world.
Yeah I totally agree. I’m trying my best to integrate these things into my life today.
I’d be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn’t even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
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And what’s the problem with owning, buying and selling things? We’ve been doing that for millennia. Obviously, unregulated American style capitalism is very broken, but there are better ways to do business. It’s just that those ways are not that appealing to the greedy.
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I think the simplest way to put it is “an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital”
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A monarchy can be capitalist as long as peoples property rights are respected. The moment the monarch decides to lop somebodys head off and take their stuff you’ll be back to the old-school feudalistic “might makes right” societies.
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I would call monarchism a form of religious capitalism where the ruling class claims divine right as the methods to accumulate capital, rather than using financial means to accumulate capital
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Does the exchange of land between kingdoms via wedding dowries/treaties/violence fulfill the definition of a “market for capital”?
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That’s pretty fair. It may feel impossible for me today to afford any capital, but if I were somehow able to accumulate enough money I would be legally allowed to own capital. Under monarchy, even if I got that much money, it would be illegal for me to purchase capital as an individual. That’s enough of a distinction to make them different for me, thanks for bringing it up.
Kinda. It’s not a very efficient market, but a market doesn’t have to be efficient to be a market.
I guess technically any system of trade could be thought of as a capital market, as long as capital is for sale.
What’s “exclusionary ownership” mean here?
It’s the idea that because you own something, you’re the only one who is allowed to use it, whether you’re actually actively using it right now or not. You can contrast it with usufructuary rights, which are based on the idea that you only have rights to something while you’re actively using it
So that would be like one of those rental scooters, or a set of scuba gear if you lived and worked on a ship? It’s yours while you’re wearing it, or maybe while you have it checked out?
Yep! I wouldn’t say it would be “yours” exactly because you would never have actual ownership of the thing while you’re using it, but it would be your right to use it and profit from it so long as you don’t destroy it. A good example would be the way Native Americans viewed land use, following herds of wild animals wherever they went and moving from depleted areas to more fertile ones. This clashed heavily with European and American colonialists, who enforced their views of exclusionary ownership with barbed wire fences and violence.
Like territory. Your crew sets up camp somewhere, that’s your property until you move. You walk into a bar, you take over a corner. It’s your corner for the night.
Don’t see the problem in that
The problem comes in what you define as “capital”. Food and housing are the biggest issues for the modern world but there still exists the problem of PEOPLE being considered capital that can be owned by other people.
Food isn’t capital. Capital is wealth used to produce other wealth. A house definitely is. Foods just consumable.
Classic “capital” is a hammer owned by a laborer (that situation is one person playing both roles). The classic capitalist separation of layers is a guy who owns a truck full of tools, and he hires other guys to work on things using the tools, but he retains ownership of the tools.
You should be able to own a house. Everyone should be able to own a house. Food of course needs to be owned to be consumed.
Capitalism: The best system for harnessing the greed inherent in humans for the benefit of others. Capitalism produces the most wealth, and it’s spread more evenly, than any other system.
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Not to disagree, but what examples are there of a different system being practiced which have a more even distribution of wealth?
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In response to the food crisis, communities rallied together, giving rise to social movements and calls for change, as a sense of solidarity developed among the people. These interconnected issues eroded public trust in the government’s ability to fulfill the basic needs of its citizens. It, in turn, fueled public dissatisfaction and ultimately led to widespread calls for political and economic reforms. The downfall of communism in Eastern Europe was, therefore, not solely a consequence of political factors but also deeply rooted in the economic challenges and fundamental survival concerns faced by the population.
https://calxylian.com/food-scarcity-and-the-fall-of-communism-in-eastern-europe/
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Because the comparison is between systems. In other systems some people often end up with nothing, as in not even enough food to survive. That happens less under capitalism, hence there’s a more even distribution of resources.
Kinda like two pieces of paper are both thin, but one of those pieces can be thicker than the other one, despite still being considered thin.
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third person checking in here
The reason you are post scarcity is because other people around the world are not. This imbalance in wealth is because of capitalism
Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
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The rubes need something to collect so they can lord over you. They don’t want an intelligent society. They want something they can game to get big numbers.
In 1980, ‘middle class’ was still defined as one job paying for a family of four. In those days $1 million was still considered a vast fortune. By the time Bush Sr. left office ‘middle class’ was two salaries to support a family and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
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When you’re discussing politics you have two choices. You can avoid highly specific terms and focus on real world problems, or you can parse out the meaning of every single word and win a meaningless argument.
99% of the people in America know exactly what I mean when I say ‘middle class.’ Maybe 5% know what ‘petite bourgeoisie’ means. Probably less. You don’t win elections by arguing the difference between the Social Democrats and the socialists, you win them by talkign to people about how much a gallon of gas costs.
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Education is important, but not all knowledge is equally important.
I liken it to a carpenter who uses Imperial units instead of metric. You can argue that metric is more exact, but if the carpenter can do the work why ‘correct’ them?
It’s not the job of the people to be better educated, it’s the job of the leaders to find a way to speak to them that they understand.
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“Tax the rich.” Anyone can understand that.
I think the argument is that creating these definitions ruins class solidarity. You are working class if you have to go to work every day to live period.
Or you can present people with actual plans written in terms they understand and are comfortable with.
I used to work in public health. One of the first things I learned is that a patient needs to be approached on their own level. Some people can handle exact medical terms, and others blank out when they hear terms they don’t understand.
If you have someone’s ear for five minutes, are you going to waste three of them trying to bring them up to your level, or do you change your terms to fit their point of view?
Depends on how much distortion is required to get the concept to their level. If the concept doesn’t map to there, then giving them the impression that they understand is misleading them.
In those case middle class is just fine for petty bourgeoisie. But there’s always a distortion in swapping out terms for similar terms, and that needs to be paid attention to and recognized as a potential source of misunderstanding and trouble.
Read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ Malcolm came from the streets and had been in prison. He could break down complex idea into terms the people could understand. Don’t assume that because someone lacks your vocabulary they are ignorant. Like I siad, it’s on the leader to reach out.
Well, there’s the concept of group consciousness, and that definitely depends on a good working set of definitions.
Probably just autocorrect but it’s “Petty Bourgeoisie”, referring to those who own a shop or restaurant or something, often joining in the running of it. We call them small business owners in the US.
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The problem is that while we have infinite information we do not have infinite energy/resources yet. The shift when we get it to remove power from the structures will be larger but reminiscent of the piracy/copyright battles lately
We absolutely have enough to shower every single person in lavishness. Its just not distributed. We arent post resource, but we are post scarcity.
You’re confusing wealth with resources. If we evenly distributed wealth everyone would be wealthy but it turns out farmers would still have to farm etc.
We don’t have the resources to give everyone on earth a palace. We don’t even have the resources on earth to give everyone a western lifestyle sadly.
Infinite resources/energy is waaay past what you’re thinking. Think startrek and replicators
we do not have infinite energy/resources yet.
And we never will. At least not in the hands of the general public.
It’s FAR to dangerous.
Eh not really. Lock replicators from weapons. More resources means adequate mental health support. No scarcity will remove most war justification.
Religion will be the last thing we need to kill for peace. It’s inherently divisive and anti science
How exactly would you lock replicators from making weapons?
With the lock setting
Ah I see!
I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.
dojng
Oh great wise one of infinite information, what does this new word mean?
What’s the alternative then?
Firstly, capitalism isn’t going to just “poof” away just because there are more resources available. The rich will just hold them back to create artificial scarcity - like is done with diamonds.
Secondly, even discounting that, there are plenty of resources that are genuinely scarce no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
But if you’re referring to just the scarcity of information - then you’re still not quite right as not all that information out there is good information - a lot of it is misinformation (i.e. propaganda, etc.)…
And even that discounts the fact that for many people, they don’t have the tools/capability to access the information, or simply can’t access the information full stop (I.e. due to censorship, etc.).
ITT : People who want to argue about dictionary definitions and ignore the topic of the post.
Well I think it’s normal since the common meaning of the central word is misrepresented. Post-scarcity means there is no scarcity, which is not the situation right now. Also the title says “post information scarcity” which i didn’t now was a thing and that we still don’t have. Factually correct information is not very easy to come by nowadays, and not easy to verify. And if we talk about scarcity of goods and services we certainly have a shitload of factories but some key jobs are not automated yet and in case nobody noticed we have some serious problems with natural resources.
We’re in a post information scarcity society and there are still people out there who think the Earth is flat.
Simply providing people with the answers is not enough you actually have to make them believe those answers, and there’s always going to be people who are desperate to not accept those answers because doing so would make them the same as everyone else, and of course that’s not possible because they are special. And they are special, just not in the way that they want to be.
Lol
