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.
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.
Perhaps we live in a post DATA scarcity society. But information is still a scarce commodity
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.
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
Capitalism won’t overthrow itself.
It’s collapsing by itself but I don’t think that’s fast enough. (And a hard crash will mean a lot of trouble, we need a transition)
Do you see any clear paths forward for a transition?
Someone else on this thread mentioned parallel structures and that is probably what is going to be needed.
Side topic, how did you get your username to do that?
Edit: It was @Cowbee@lemmy.ml
Yeah, I read his take and yeah I agree with need that, thats not going to stop the billionaires from killing us though 😔
Username: I edited the DB directly on my Lemmy instance with Zalgo text. I also set my join date to somewhere far off in the future 😋
Ooh I like that idea.
Do you use your own instance for browsing? Does using another instance for browsing mean your own instance does less caching?
Yeah I use Sync for Lemmy connected to my own instance that myself and friends use. I have a VPS that I run it on, and it catches everything I’m subscribed to, it’s the only instance I “browse” on. I have accounts on other instances which I’ll fall back to if I CBF hosting Lemmy anymore.
I see, thanks!
And for the accelerationists in back - no, a crash doesn’t imply anything nice will come later. We could end up back at feudalism.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
Your premise is wrong in like… A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
Yeah I was confused by this. The world is pretty far off post-scarcity! Might need more context here
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn’t say everything is post-scarcity.
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.
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.
Yeah my mistake. I’m gonna fix the title.
So you’re saying that everyone has sufficient and easy access to information? How does that relate to capitalism?
Some people say that if we lived in a post-scarcity society we would move on from capitalism. I am pointing that out as not true since there is an aspect of our lives that is already post-scarcity yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
Also post-scarcity doesn’t mean everyone has sufficient and easy access it means that everything can be produced in great abundance.
Edit: would to wouldn’t; Most to Some
Edit 2: Rephrased some words so that my meaning comes across better.
Because you can’t eat ideas.
We can have all the free information in the world, the people who control the bare necessities still control the bare necessities and they can use that to keep people down and divided.
Exactly. Information is a luxury - you could go your entire life without learning even a shred of information, but you’d still need to eat.
Some people
Who?
if we lived in a post-scarcity society we wouldn’t have a need for capitalism anymore
yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information
Do we? I mean, some information, maybe. But all information? As a concept?
We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
Markets aren’t Capitalism. You can have non-Capitalist markets, such as ones made up of Worker Co-ops.
You can have a market-based economy without exploitation a la Capitalism.
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
No.
All tools are Capital. If Workers collectively share ownership of industry, there is a free flow of labor to where you wish to apply it. Are you under the mistaken impression that Socialism is when someone picks where you can work? You sure you aren’t talking about Capitalism?
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can’t meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it’s because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don’t create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
What positive effects has it had?
The only reason I pointed out the age is that markets and currency often are, and were being confused/conflated with capitalism.
I actually advocate for a system 100 years newer than capitalism. And even then I push for a version of it that has been modernized to fit current realities.
yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
…they posted, on the fediverse… 🙄
Either way, your framing of the existence of media and information exchange free from capitalism, as something that would somehow invalidate or contradict the existence of capitalism, oozes yet you participate in society vibes…
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.
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.).
deleted by creator
Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
Capitalism incentivizes production so well that the mere charity of individuals provides more for free than all the redistribution the government can manage under a controlled economy.
Capitalism’s primary activity is commerce, with a tiny sliver of charity on the side. That tiny sliver of charity is the biggest pool of resources made available for free under any system.
In what unicorn world are you living in? There are so many subsidies for so many sectors that it isn’t even funny. Capitalism is parasitic at its core and the only reason there is charity from the rich is for the good publicity.
The society is already wealthy, but all the wealth is drained in the hands of a few.
Capitalism will collapse eventually, whether planned or not. The best we can do is build up parallel structures that can weather that collapse, like complex networks of Mutual Aid, strong Unions, FOSS software, and more.
I like this view of parallel structures
Yeah I totally agree. I’m trying my best to integrate these things into my life today.
Best we can do is fascism and climate apocalypse.
Fascism is similarly unsustainable, if we fail and can’t achieve Socialism from Capitalism then fascism will take its place, and will also collapse. Same with climate, if we fail to properly handle it we will almost certainly go extinct, but the door remains open for life in millenia.
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.
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.
Communism is just that, same with Anarchism (though Anarcho-Communism skips Socialism). You’re correct, but that is for after Socialism.
Shhhhh, im trying to lead them to that conclusion without the big scary C word.
Haha, I gotchu.
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.
What’s the alternative then?
The reason you are post scarcity is because other people around the world are not. This imbalance in wealth is because of capitalism
You fail to understand in your eagerness to jump on a soapbox.
The numbers simply do not lie:
There is not one reason for anyone, anywhere, to go without food, water, or shelter. That some regions lack the production is irrelevant, others over produce and still refuse to meet the needs of their own, much less others.
It’s because we’re bad at distributing resources equally. Don’t really care if you don’t like the fact I used the word capitalism.
The question is; is it capitalism that causes our inability to properly allocate resources or is it just the fact that humans are bad at allocating resources? What economic system would incentivise the equal distribution of said resources?
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
Can we stop posting about communism every single day?
Yeah, probably when the system changes.
How about no? We already tried Communism and many people died and it fell apart.
Part of the reason Capitalism sort if worked in the 60’s was because it had to globally compete with communism. We seem to forget how hard the red scare had to be pushed to silence the growing American Communist constituency.
Wages were high for low education workers because they had to be to stave off the communist political movement.
The second the Soviets collapsed, capitalism started its more evident decline. Capitalism only works with competition, even from a meta perspective.
We didn’t try shit but bowing to a succession of neoliberals.
Go live in china bro. Noone stopping you…
China is yet another capitalist cryptofascist country
We do not live in an post information scarcity society. Also information doesn’t work like electricity, so even if we did this is still stupid.
We live in a world where it costs essentially nothing to replicate a piece of information 7 billion times and distribute it everyone on earth.
A world where the pirate bay does that for the couple of grand that they get from some porn banner ads.
We live in a world where there is no reason for information to be scarce. The entire systems of copyright and patents and IP are hamfisted ways of creating artificial scarcity so that information retains value in a world where it could be ubiquitous.
I see what you are saying but it’s somewhat different from resource scarcity. There is no scarcity in the ability to transmit information, but there is still information scarcity.
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
This doesn’t even factor in the costs of filtering through misinformation and disinformation.
Edit for clarity / sentence structure
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
It’s actually valuable in a real world sense yes, but the point is that the mechanisms of capitalism say that if it’s completely unscarce its value should be $0. So in a world without IP Law, the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it’s value rapidly drops to $0 since it costs fraction of a penny for someone to make a personal copy off the closest person / server to them.
We could easily afford to let information be replicated and distributed freely, except for this problem that it doesn’t fit neatly in the mechanisms of capitalism because we would stop rewarding first discovery.
So what did we do, did we come up with a new system that rewards first discovery but still allows information to flow freely?
No. We decided to reward first discovery by inventing made up concepts like patents, copyrights, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all of which function by creating artificial scarcity, just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.
Okay give me this mythical system that rewards first discovery without those ‘made up concepts’
(By the way whatever you type next is a made up concept by your own definition just so we’re clear)
The point about made up concepts is to point out that there is nothing fundamental, foundational, or intrinsic about IP law. It’s just an arbitrary system that we made up that we can replace with a different arbitrary system.
It’s really not hard to imagine a system where a certain portion of the government budget is devoted to rewarding artists and inventors and then the number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc means that they get rewards from that pool of money. We spend billions on creating systems of artificial scarcity, you put all those people and all that money to work and you can come up with a feasible system that catches most edge cases.
So here’s the problem with that idea: it means that you would need to keep the entire IP system operating and add more layers on top of it. For example, you would still need to file patents, it is just that the way that it is monetized by the creator would change.
This means that you still need the same amount of money to keep doing what we’ve been doing, then you need more money because if things like pixiv uploads are eligible you need way more people to track way more things.
Then you have to actually assess performance of a given thing, be it number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc, meaning that we have to basically track everything happening in the entire economy as well as the entire internet.
Sounds like a bureaucratic black hole to me, but I will grant you that if it was feasible it would probably lead to more innovation.
One thing I will add to the end here is that the current IP laws specifically are currently ridiculous, fuck Disney.
If you have enough information you have noise, and hence less information. It actually does not work like electricity or any other physics phenomenon.
Is a library noise just cause there’s a lot of information in there? We’re talking about a user being allowed to reach out and copy and modify information, presumably from a curated source they trust.
Yeah but that doesn’t get rid of the fact that the information it self is still easily reproducible. What you are saying is that there still needs to be effort in curating information, but you aren’t saying that there is a cost of reproducing information.
Old knowledge is abundant, new is not. If takes effort to discover/create new knowledge. Patents and copyright are there to allow the inventor/creator an opportunity to monetize their invention.
Patents and copyright are there to allow the inventor/creator an opportunity to monetize their invention.
Yes, and they’re a dumb way of doing that because they are systems based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual need for it. The only need for creating scarcity is because capitalism requires things to be scarce for them to have value. Rather than looking at a system other than capitalism to reward creators, we spend billions of dollars and waste thousands of peoples lives dedicated to creating systems that enforce artificial scarcity.
How do you reward inventors then?
Create a system of attribution, where by new products and inventions acknowledge the work they’re based on (and they acknowledge the work they’re based on etc), and then have a system that takes total sales volumes etc and splits a portion of government money to all the inventors / creators based on how popular their product was. Fund it with a small increase on sales tax for all products, then there’s no incentive to not provide attribution since it doesn’t effect your take home pay regardless, and have a system for applying for attribution when you think it wasn’t fairly given to you.
We spend billions and billions of dollars on our current patent system and the legion of lawyers required to maintain it, there’s more than enough resources to build a system that’s not based on scarcity.
You pretty much described the current patent system but instead of the market determining license fees some buerocrat does.
No I did not. In the current patent system, once a piece of knowledge is discovered, only a single person or entity is legally allowed to use it for 20 years.
In the system I described, anyone is allowed to use it, modify it, and improve on it, immediately. Discover something great that can improve lives? Great! You’ll be rewarded for your efforts, but we’re not going to wait for you and you alone to figure out how to setup a global manufacturing and distribution supply chain to get it to everyone, and we’re not going to prevent anyone else from daring to improve upon it
it’s not just inventors, there are so many other people. Even if food is free who is going to keep or ship it to someone who needs it? and how do you reward them?
I feel like most of the comments here are written by people who have never worked full time job and don’t know how hard it is. Most likely bunch of kids.
This was reported for being hostile. Please keep your comments focused on the topic being discussed and do not attack the other people in the discussion.
I’d be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn’t even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
I think the simplest way to put it is “an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital”
Technically, Monarchism falls under that definition as well, which is why it gets a bit more complex than that.
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.
Sort of. Monarchism is more about respecting a family’s right to rule, than a claim on economics, though usually Feudalism goes hand in hand historically. The British parliamentary system with a vestigial Monarchy is an exception, not the rule.
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
Certainly more hierarchical than Socialism, but also more than Capitalism. Fundamentally, the lack of a market for Capital separates Capitalism from Monarchism, the class dynamics of today are different from before. This is helpful to understand IMO when trying to see how to solve it.
Does the exchange of land between kingdoms via wedding dowries/treaties/violence fulfill the definition of a “market for capital”?
Not really. Capitalism allows anyone to buy and sell Capital, whereas these more primitive exchanges aren’t the same. The Bourgeoisie are fundamentally different from the Aristocracy.
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.
Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.
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.
Markets aren’t Capitalism, Capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
