Post Post-Scarcity

Much of the science fiction with which you may be familiar tends towards the dystopic, or at least the pessimistic (unless, that is, you mostly read science fiction like that reviewed here on the site).  Maybe this has to do with the genre’s evolution from and roots in the horror genre, or maybe it’s because the current cultural mood is…challenged, let’s say, because that is a tangent I do not want to explore right now, or perhaps it’s simply that warnings about the future are more enduring and receive more attention than a positive approached, ala the cockroach in the bowl of cherries fallacy.  Whatever the underlying reason, there is still a subset of science fiction that takes the opposite tack.  Such works were more common during the mid-twentieth century, and a common feature was, and remains, the concept of a “post-scarcity society.”

Star Trek is and remains probably the most famous example of the concept, with its frequent assertions about not using money, although it becomes clear that they are not a true post-scarcity society, since there is an economy of sorts, and there are limited resources in the form of both energy, and complex resources that cannot be replicated, like dilithium crystals.  The idea grew out of a fascination with the unfulfilled promises of communism, or perhaps just a general disillusionment with what I will call day-to-day capitalism.  More broadly, though, it was a reaction against the conflicts that wracked the early twentieth century.  Historians favored blaming most of the world’s ills on the idea of scarcity, that all strife and unpleasantness derived from a struggle over finite resources.  In return, futurists predicted an eventual turn to post-scarcity, when technology would enable infinite resources available to all.

These thinkers devoted time to exploring human culture in such a hypothetical circumstance.  They predicted an end to large-scale conflict, to poverty, to illness, and they proposed a new currency of prestige and time, rather than one based upon finite material resources.  Rather than being motivated by money as a proxy for the means of survival, comfort, and securing for oneself limited resources, people would be motivated to accomplish by the desire for prestige.  Competition would be for time, since that alone would remain limited in supply.  No more wars, for there would be no need to fight over material, or land, or anything else.

It’s an idealistic vision with some significant flaws in reasoning.  The most obvious is the technical feasibility.  Foundational to most of these post-scarcity scenarios is the matter-energy equivalence, like Star Trek‘s replicator technology, which supposed that with the development of clean, limitless energy any material could be created from scratch, as it were, directly from energy.  Except that energy is not limitless.  I would not be surprised if the idea of types of civilization (type I, type II, and so forth) arose from pondering this idea and how to secure an adequate supply of energy for it to function properly.  Without limitless energy, which is most likely a physical impossibility, a true post-scarcity society cannot exist.

You can get close, though, if your civilization’s ability to produce useful energy vastly exceeds its capacity for consumption.  With that in mind, we can return to the sociological considerations, which I contend are more complex than simple material limits (or lack thereof).  Instead of fighting over land, or supplies, would we not vie over, say, the most prestigious artists, or those people who can best optimize processes (recalling that time would remain limited)?  Considering history heretofore, mere material satiation is unlikely to address all causes of human strife and human suffering.  This is not meant as pessimism – I believe that we as a species are capable of transcending such impulses – but I do not think that infinite resources are the answer.  For one thing, humans are terrible at grasping the realty of immense quantities expressed in the abstract.

No, the answer to our human ills does not lie with limitless energy or a post-scarcity society.  If anywhere, it lies within us.  There is not path to utopia; it is an individual quest that we each must forge ourselves, not a road that can be mapped and along which our benevolent dictators can march us at the gleaming points of their intellectual hubris.  A post-scarcity society could be as dystopic as any, even if it could exist.  That which we see as failing or inadequate in our world today is not merely a matter of insufficient or misallocated resources.  Post-scarcity is an seductive vision, a dream, but it’s neither utopia nor dystopia.  It’s just…different.