Post-Scarcity May, Paradoxically, Resemble Comfortable Poverty


Kyle Glenn via Unsplash

The happiest and most carefree I’ve ever been in my life was when I had almost nothing. Crucially I had everything I needed for safety and reasonable comfort, but not much else. I was in my twenties at the time living in Florida as a consequence of a series of poor life choices, which as I understand it is how most other Floridians also wound up there.

I had an apartment paid for by student loans I’m still paying off now, but was not yet concerned with at that time. I had an electric bicycle, which in the Sunshine State™ can do just about everything you’d need a car for anywhere else in the US except maybe California. It got me to class, it hauled groceries home, it took me to cafes on weekends to enjoy the pleasant weather and being alive.

I had a computer, which covered all my media/entertainment needs. A sufficiently powerful computer emulates anything, and fast internet access (borrowed from neighbors during a more innocent time, before normies understood the need to password protect their routers) meant I could pirate movies, games or music in minutes. Almost nothing actually cost me anything.

I had fuck all disposable income but it was enough for a daily sandwich, taco or iced coffee from those cafes. I lived immediately adjacent to a beautifully landscaped bike trail which led to an architecturally pleasing cluster of businesses seemingly designed as a single piece to be lowered into place by helicopters or something.

Florida is full of resort and theme park-like architecture, I suspect as a consequence of Disney being the biggest employer of architects, construction firms and engineers in the state. So many developments are internally cohesive, aesthetically, while still looking hopelessly out of place when viewed from afar.


Jorge Fernández Salas via Unsplash

I did a lot of thinking and writing during those days about the state of the world, being a twenty something who naturally imagined he understood more of it than he really did. During this time I deepened my love for futurism, for utopian design and thinking. I became enamored with the Venus Project, despite smelling a rat in their economic philosophy pretty much right out of the gate.

This is also when I learned of Marshall Brain and his influential short story Manna. At the time, it set off a flurry of discussions in futurist circles about technological unemployment, nearly a decade before the general public would get wind of that term from the pop documentary Humans Need Not Apply.

The gist was, at the rate that industrial automation is advancing, before long the billionaire class which owns all those robots will have no more use for any of us. They won’t need our money, because there won’t be anything they might wish to buy with it that their automated industrial base of generalized fabrication facilities, farms, mines, etc. won’t be able to make for them.

There’s not really a compelling reason for that super wealthy elite to cut the rest of us in on the automated post-scarcity utopia. Out of the goodness of their hearts? Restrain your laughter. It seemed as if we would soon be cut loose, like the spent booster of a rocket as only the tiny capsule on top with the billionaires in it actually goes to space.

This spawned many different schools of thought about how we might avoid this outcome, most of which were just thinly disguised Communism. Many pointed out Marx predicted an eventual condition of functionally inexhaustible material abundance (or at least the effortless fulfillment of all essential needs) that he believed was the logical end goal of Communism, once technology caught up to the vision.


Maximillian Sheffler, via Unsplash

Futurists have flirted with crypto-Communism before, with Technocracy being perhaps the most successful and well remembered example, despite having been defunct for more than a century now. The problem of course was the need for a bloody revolution in order to implement any of these, against the wishes of capitalists and modern day kulaks.

On a blank slate planet yet to be colonized, no such problem exists. You just set up your Communist government and never allow any competitors to arise. I do not have high hopes it would survive in the long term, even under these unrealistically ideal starting conditions. Still, this illustrates the unsolvable problem with any alternative to the current modus operandi which is so fundamentally incompatible as to require its forcible abolition.

This proved to be a recurring problem with many of the other, non-Marxist solutions. They were ambitious, carefully designed and conceptually grand, but all of them could only be implemented by way of violent revolution. In most cases because they all disempowered, looted and sometimes killed off the current oligarchy, which is easier said than done when money equals both sociopolitical and military power.

Thus, post-scarcity economic thought spun its wheels fruitlessly in the sand as the Marxist faction did not want to move forward with any solution which would not in some way punish the wealthy. This kept discussion focused on doomed revolutionary approaches rather than more pragmatic evolutionary approaches.

Since that time most thinkers in that space have converged onto an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, solution: Taxing automation, with the tax paying into basic income. The idea being that the revenue generated by the tax would increase as automation continued displacing workers, so that it was always exactly enough to support the growing ranks of the unemployed.


Lenny Kuhn, via Unsplash

This seems like the way to go at first blush. I still feel more confidence in it than I do in any of the revolutionary approaches, having fraternized with revolutionaries of various kinds in my youth. I learned from the experience that many revolutionaries want a revolution for the revolution’s sake, with few giving thought to what comes after victory.

Yet, more and more holes appear the longer I think about it. How do we quantify robotic labor? It’s not like automated factories use humanoid automatons such that we can tax by the number of robots. A single room sized robotic sorting and packing machine can do the work of a dozen people. But is it exactly a dozen? Humans perform very inconsistently compared to machines.

Then there’s the potential to game the system, depending what metrics they use to calculate taxes. If it’s by the number of robots, you just build them all into a single building sized unit, thus you only employ a single robot. If it’s calculated by labor time per robot, you massively parallelize your production lines, but have the individual robots work more slowly, etcetera.

These seem like solvable problems, but the time to solve them was many decades ago, before technological unemployment became such a serious problem. Not now, certainly not during implementation either. That’s more or less where I left the problem, putting it up on a mental shelf while I focused on developing redundant online revenue streams like Medium so I could pay the bills.

While I was doing that, I’ve also been following the efforts of two long time friends of mine to establish off grid homesteads. Both came to me for advice about solar panels, charge controllers, micro hydro turbines, batteries and all the electrical gubbins that are second nature to an electrical engineer’s son but confusing nonsense to people whose expertise lies in other fields.


Jeremy Zero via Unsplash

One of them remarked to me how far solar panel prices have fallen, just in the past couple of years. Batteries too. And if you buy or machine your own Pelton wheel, you can make your own micro hydro turbine for a couple hundred dollars. If you’re on land suitable for micro hydro, that buys you an indefinite source of clean energy at the cost of periodic maintenance.

Another buddy sent me deals on 3D printers around that time, though I already have one, the basic models now come in around $170. It stuck in my mind because that’s also when I began my deep dive into the current state of 3d printed housing. A technology with the potential to burst the housing price bubble and make living indoors affordable again.

The enormous bulk of a house’s price is the man hours of labor that go into building it. A house printing robot eliminates nearly all of those man hours. There’s still some, mostly an electrician and plumber who install utilities as the house is additively constructed from countless layers of rapidly curing cement, but it’s still an incredibly steep reduction in the single most expensive area of home construction.

Probably it won’t be any cheaper, and may in fact be more expensive early on, because it’s currently a futuristic novelty. Plastic furniture is now a couple bucks at Wal Mart, but it used to be expensive in the 60s when plastic and injection molding were considered futuristic.

Eventually shit will even out, though. Simply because traditional housing will now face a competitor with a tiny fraction of the operating expense, prices across the board will be forced down. Not as low as they could potentially go, as nothing really stops the 3D home printing companies from pocketing much of the difference in cost between their homes and traditional ones. They’d still dominate sales at, say, 20% below average market value of traditional houses.


Tom Claes via Unsplash

But it isn’t only traditional housing they will be competing with. As 3D printing a home requires only a supply of cement, electricity and a robot small enough to tow on a trailer behind a pickup truck. Also because the printing process takes between a few hours and perhaps two days depending on the size of the structure, it will eventually reach consumer hands.

3D printers were in widespread industrial use for rapid prototyping decades before we plebeians got our hands on the home version. But eventually 3D house printers might be something you can rent for a weekend, like an excavator, bulldozer and so on. You’d buy the plans online, get them approved with the local authorities, tow the robot and cement mix to your property and set it going.

Consumer goods in general have always fallen precipitously in price since their introduction. Remember how much a PC cost in the 90s? Remember what flat screen televisions used to cost? This is true of basically all appliances, from refrigerators and microwaves to washers, dryers and water heaters.

The tangent about 3D house printing was really just to demonstrate that this trend can extend even to the truly big ticket items, the most expensive purchase most of us will ever make. In the current housing market and depressed economy due to Covid restrictions it can seem like wishful thinking to imagine cheap housing is on the horizon, but only until you’ve personally seen a robot print a two story home in 48 hours.

So far in this analysis we have two intersecting factors: The first is a steady reduction in the availability of skilled labor (and now even managerial positions) as a consequence of ongoing improvements in the fields of industrial robotics and AI. The second is the steady, ongoing decrease in the price of consumer goods, with automated manufacturing very likely being a major contributor to that trend, at least since the mid 2000s.


Bernd Dittrich

We’re earning less money, on average, with wage increases not tracking with inflation since 1971. But we also need less money, because all the things we want to buy keep getting cheaper. What is the logical endgame of these two trends, advancing in tandem?

To answer that, I need to invoke Covid. Probably a tiresomely common refrain these days, in the way that climate change is implicated (usually correctly imo) in all the wildfires, fish depopulation, coral bleaching and so on. Not for no reason though, among its many knock-on effects, Covid has forever changed our relationship with work.

Millions of white collar workers in the US, for the first time, had the option to telecommute because the government forced their employers to learn what Zoom is and how to use it. Something they were disinclined to do before simply because the money kept rolling in anyway, and deeply entrenched assumptions of corporate culture include the maxim that employees will work harder, with greater focus, if you remove them from the home environment.

If you require them to dress up in a special business costume, commute through traffic each morning, sit in a neon lit felt lined cube and then commute back through traffic at the end of the day, leaving basically no time for anything other than work, eating and sleep.

Covid abruptly enlightened both employees and employers alike to how wrong those assumptions always have been. In fact, the only purpose all that rigmarole ever served was a sort of perverse power move, to reinforce for employees who was in charge by making them jump through a series of uncomfortable, inconvenient, unnecessary hoops every day, eating up time that they could be getting work done.


Alex Kotliarskyi via Unsplash

Naturally this has resulted in a sea change in the American public’s attitude towards office life. Telecommuting with Zoom worked during the pandemic. Why should it not continue? All the metrics I’m aware of indicate that it significantly increased productivity and diminished unhappiness over the traditional brick and mortar, 9 to 5 workplace experience.

This is one of the few silver linings to the Covid mushroom cloud. We now have a white collar workforce which has learned telecommuting was always feasible and consequently refuses to go back to the 9 to 5 daily grind. They have tasted the good life of working from home, and will not readily relinquish it.

Those who don’t have this option are increasingly just declining to return to work. They earn more from unemployment than their boss was paying them, pre-Covid. They’re the stones who were being squeezed for the last few drops of blood they contain, that the pitiless vampires who sign their paychecks might drink of it.

For them, the deal offered by our society is so unappealing, there’s little to recommend it unless the only alternative is death. Which explains in large part Republican opposition to universal healthcare, but I digress. This confrontation over the raw deal workers get in this country couldn’t come at a better time.

It’s coinciding with great, bounding strides in automation. An explosive increase in the scope of what robots are able to do, not only in factories, but in mines, on farms, and at power plants. So the billionaires may yet have their peace of plenty. However, it’s also coinciding with a steep decline in the price of the technologies regular people need to (more or less) opt out of the economy.


Alex Bierwagen via Unsplash

I have asked you what need billionaires have for our money if they own robots that can make them whatever they want. Now I’ll ask you what regular people like you or I need with apartments in a world where you can print houses with a robot that fits in a van. What need of utility companies, in a world where you can make your own clean electricity at home with minimal maintenance or moving parts.

A world where you can grow most of your own food at home in a computer regulated, closed loop aquaponic greenhouse which also raises delicious tilapia. Where your car, bike or whatever else runs on free electricity your solar panels or hydro turbine generate, and you can fabricate most of the parts you’ll need to replace over time using home 3D printing.

I’m not describing a perfectly self sufficient bubble here. That’s still a pipe dream. What I am describing is a realistic near-future homestead using technologies which exist today, which are already cheaper than they’ve ever been but still falling in price. You could not totally replace all the amenities of industrial civilization but you could displace or offset many of them with at-home, DIY alternatives.

This is hardly a new idea, hippies have been building Earthships and checking out of society since the 1970s. All that’s changed since then is a reduction in the number and severity of sacrifices you have to accept in order to live that life. The more energy you can generate and store at home, the more luxurious, energy hungry amenities you can enjoy off the grid.

Hot showers were already doable with solar water heating via black pipe loops on the roof. AC on meager power was already possible with ground source or mini split heat pumps. Stuff like clothes washers and dryers were a little more tricky though until recently, with high energy density home electrical storage ala the Tesla Power Wall becoming available.


Kumpan Electric, via Unsplash

This is not Star Trek. There are no replicators in sight. There’s still many things you might want, which cannot be had except with money. Everything I’ve so far described has to be paid for, to begin with. Probably mortgaged as homes are now, just for far less, as they cost less to build.

So, this isn’t the Wall-E future where nobody works. There’s still work, just less of it, performed on your own time and terms. In part because all work eventually can be done remotely as robotics and VR improve, but also because making all the essentials by yourself, at home, gives you bargaining power that dependent apartment dwellers today just don’t have.

If you don’t like what food costs online, you eat what you grow at home. If you don’t like what a new gadget costs, you print a messier, bulkier open sourced version which nevertheless performs the same function. You can say “no thanks, that doesn’t cut it, I can do better” to things you used to have no alternatives to.

These same technologies also open up a great deal of land to settlement which was formerly uninhabitable, or at least extraordinarily unpleasant and inconvenient to live on. Really good solar power plus cheap heat pumps and indoor aquaponics makes desert dwelling a much more appealing, feasible prospect for the average person. The US has an awful lot of unpopulated, undeveloped deserts.

This brings us to the nature of work in such a world. One of the objections levied against those who say “automation will create new, undreamt of jobs” is that after you subtract all manual labor and midwit managerial positions, what remains is a pretty short list of mostly creative work.


Eddie Kopp via Unsplash

Can we really have a workable economy where everybody’s a Youtuber, a Twitch streamer, a Soundcloud musician, etc.? Probably not, but very nearly: There will likely still be roles for skilled labor, in virtual control of remotely operated robots.

Renting out your own “human level AI” by the hour is likely to be a common form of work. The high end of this would be telesurgery and the like. The low end, entry level form of this would be gig laborers working from home, remotely piloting security robots, identifying and documenting infractions, controlling servant robots at parties, intervening as needed to help confused/stuck delivery robots and so on.

This would be gig labor which has no set schedule, where you work as much or as little as you want in a day, depending on how much you’re looking to earn and how quickly. This is a harrowing way to live, having to hustle constantly or be homeless, under the current model.

It’s a liberating experience instead in the world where housing is cheap, energy is nearly free, growing your own food is the norm, fabricating tools, replacement parts, etc. at home is standard and so on. This world has already abolished the office, physical commuting and so on, instead united in our demand to work remotely. So the only remaining jobs all conform to this format.

This is how we’ll still have an economy, despite matured industrial and agricultural automation. It’s how we’ll earn what little money we need for whatever items we can’t make at home. That’s why we’ll still work, but also why work will suck tremendously less than it does now. These changes will not come by bloody revolution, but organically.


Yasmina H via Unsplash

It will come as a consequence of technological improvement bringing down the prices of the specific technologies needed to live comfortably off-grid with minimal sacrifice. It will come as a consequence of Covid normalizing remote work, and giving workers enough time to breathe and think that they realize they can’t, won’t, go back to how things were before.

It will come as a consequence of those disillusioned workers, at last unshackled from the office, moving away from burdensomely expensive cities they only lived in to begin with in order to shorten their commute. Cities themselves may become obsolete, the new ghost towns of the coming century.

The newfound standard of working from anywhere, plus affordable technology that lets us live anywhere in comfort, equals abrupt, total disruption of the rigged, exploitative game by which the ownership class has, for too long, coerced anybody who works in or near cities to swallow unbearably high housing costs. Pardon that whopper of a run-on sentence.

It’s akin to the freedom of living aboard a sailboat. Go anywhere you want. Go where you can get the best deal on land, without having to consider the proximity to population centers or access to utilities. Even access to highways may grow unimportant once batteries become energy dense enough that electric manned multicopters can cover usefully large distances on a charge.

Obviously this wouldn’t eliminate the need for ground transport of goods, but it would free up homesteaders to consider parcels of land which might’ve otherwise been off the table due to difficulty of access by car (undeveloped, mountainous terrain for example).


Chris Leipelt via Unsplash

What all of this translates to, fundamentally, is an atomization and de-centralization of civilization itself. Breaking down our large concentrated population centers into spread out networks of semi-self sufficient homesteads, where we’re no longer economically coerced into living as ants, termites or bees, waiting hand and foot on the queen for the privilege of living in the hive.

I have no crystal ball, but the Rule of Boring has done pretty well by me. It assigns a higher likelihood to gradual change than to big, sudden changes. It frowns on dramatic black swan events, and smiles on organic developments that follow from basic human motivations intersecting with market forces.

The rule of boring would have us move past capitalism not by bloody revolution but simply by trying to escape 9 to 5 drudgery by any means we can devise, because it sucks ass.

Probably by using cheap, simple, elegant off-grid solutions to grant ourselves bargaining power we’ve never had before. The power to wean ourselves off the centralized, coercive, exploitative teat of the mother pig that is the ownership class and its multinational corporate masters.

Building for ourselves an alternative to the current system that we can independently maintain, is how we escape the current system. It is how we atone for the original sin of cities, centralization and the exploitation of labor they facilitated, so that we might return to Eden.


Jonas Ducker via Unsplash

The transition won’t be visibly dramatic. It will look as it does now, regular people making plans, saving pennies, researching how to live off-grid. Cities are leaking in a slow trickle at the moment, but soon the floodgates will open when various inflection points are passed.

When PV cost hits a certain number of watts per dollar. When battery cost hits a certain watt hours per dollar. When the novelty of 3D printed homes wears off and their prices consequently self-correct. When the robots which print those homes are something regular Joes with home 3D printing experience can rent.

Monkey see, monkey do. Everybody wants out of the current system, but they’re afraid. Once they see more and more people like them doing it, once it’s proven to the average city prisoner’s satisfaction that the total cost is now something they can finally swing, I predict we will witness a mass exodus.

Worker bees descending out of their rectilinear urban hives of steel and glass. Climbing out of their business costumes, and onto electric bicycles. Leisurely riding out of the sweltering, stinking cities, towards their freshly completed solar powered, 3D printed dome in the desert, the mountains, or some other wilderness.

No longer inside the instant gratification Skinner box where they can have any little thing they desire delivered to their doorstep overnight. Instead having secured the few amenities they truly need to be comfortable and happy, with the option to remotely trade their labor for whatever else they want on top of that.


Michael Brawn via Unsplash

This doesn’t sound like Wall-E. It doesn’t sound like Star Trek. There are no enormous, impressive, gleaming cities in this future. We’ve scaled down, not up. Decentralized, rather than centralizing further. Compared to the opulent heights of luxury that some post-scarcity economists promise us, the future I’ve described sounds like poverty, doesn’t it?

But so was much of my twenties, in Florida. With nothing but my computer, apartment, electric bicycle and enough money to enjoy an iced coffee in the outdoor seating of a nearby cafe, on a sunny day.





H2
H3
H4
3 columns
2 columns
1 column
7 Comments
Ecency