(2010-07-23) Rosenbaum Tech Vs Psych Scarcity

Benjamin Rosenbaum doesn't believe that Technological Determinism leads to the Economics Of Abundance. (Whuffie, Network Economy)

Real-world high tech production is not actually getting more distributed at its core... The amateurization of everything from hardware-hacking to media creation is predicated on Moore's law, and Moore's law is effected -- and can only be effected -- in vast clean-room factories using vast amounts of energy and water and ever more exotic materials, like the niobium pillaged from the Central African killing fields... In the real world, the labor that the bored sysadmin contributes to Apache (Open Source) is surplus created by the hyperefficient operations of state-mediated market capitalism; it does not exist without container ships and their oil spills, without tons of cyanide poured into open pit mines, strikebreaking goons (or, yet more efficient, rogue paramilitaries) running those mines and factories, without stock quotes and hedge funds, without middle-managers and tech support people and sales reps worried about saving for their kids' college tuition.

The second problem with technologically hand-waving an end to scarcity and a world of abundance, is that scarcity and abundance are not properties of the physical world. They are psychological effects.

There are niches in the modern world which keep the operations of the money economy mostly outside their borders -- families, kibbutzim, communes, monasteries, some aspects of academia. There are dumpster-diving squatter freegans now living sort of outside the money economy, giving away what they have instead of hoarding it. There is open source and freecycle and the kinds of sharing projects profiled on shareable.net. What would it take for these scattered pockets to coalesce and snowball, to become the dominant forms of social organization... and to be good at it? (Because let us not kid ourselves; it is our centralized, ruthlessly efficient money economy that enables so many of us to inhabit the world at the population densities we do. I am a big fan of buying the goods of little family-run organic farms at the local farmer's market, but it is the vast agribusiness farms with flotillas of giant combines harvesting selectively bred grain with computer-orchestrated timing that make it possible for most of the over six billion people in the world to eat). More to the point -- for this is SciFi we're engaged in, not Futurism -- what sfnal device could we posit to make such a shift plausible -- at least for the suspension of belief of a skeptical reader, at least for the length of a story?

Update: Charlie Stross considers the Complexity of modern Civilization to be irreducible. Implications for Resilience?