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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.
in reply to Adam Greenfield

𝚝𝚓𝚠
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𝚝𝚓𝚠
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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.
in reply to 𝚝𝚓𝚠

Alberto Cottica
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Alberto Cottica
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and yet abundance is a useful concept: a constraint that does not bite. In economics it relates to public goods (non-rivalrous, non-excludable). But indeed, I learned that there is a sense of the word as a term of trade of US social science. Pretty confusing!
in reply to Alberto Cottica

𝚝𝚓𝚠
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𝚝𝚓𝚠
• •
@alberto_cottica that might be part of what I dislike about the term being used as basically marketing. One way of eroding discourse is taking a word for a useful concept and misusing it for something else, thereby tainting it and making it difficult to bring up the concept. A sort of sideways way to memory hole ideas.
@Alberto Cottica
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield
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Adam Greenfield
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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?
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield
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Adam Greenfield
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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.
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Preston Austin
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Preston Austin
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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"
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield
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Adam Greenfield
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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.
in reply to Adam Greenfield

ophiocephalic 🐍
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ophiocephalic 🐍
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> 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

in reply to Adam Greenfield

Luis Villa
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Luis Villa
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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.

in reply to Luis Villa

Lorraine Lee
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Lorraine Lee
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My personal ism (aside from anagorism) is negative utilitarianism, so I go by the logic that nobody should get luxuries until everybody gets necessities.

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in reply to Lorraine Lee

Adam Greenfield
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Adam Greenfield
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@lori @luis_in_brief I cannot imagine a mechanism I could affirm capable of deciding what counts as a luxury for whom.
@Lorraine Lee @Luis Villa
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Nelson
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Nelson
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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.

in reply to Nelson

Adam Greenfield
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Adam Greenfield
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@skyfaller [You’re joking, but there’s a vein of art I despise that’s essentially that: reproduced or simulated ecosystems in museum settings.]
@Nelson
in reply to Adam Greenfield

Lorraine Lee
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Lorraine Lee
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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.

n8chz 🩎 reshared this.

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