Should-Read: Eric Rauchway: From Scarcity to Abundance

Should-Read: Eric Rauchway: From Scarcity to Abundance: “The recent burst of writing on the roboticization of labor… http://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/09/from-scarcity-to-abundance/

…has brought home the imminence of an era in which most of us will be economically surplus. Keynes had an idea that the abundant society would be one of leisure and widespread artistic endeavor… a fetching optimism, which appears to have no purchase on the zero-sum, inequality-hugging societies of our time….

Abundance, and the values that recognize it, is where Doctorow wants to go… a utopia that takes the blogosphere and wikis and other online communities (probably not metafilter though) as the basic model for how an abundant society might organize itself…. The key move in establishing such communities is, in Doctorow’s imagined future, turning passive-aggression into a virtue—if someone has screwed up, someone else will just fix it; don’t bother trying to hold the erring party responsible…. Walkaways—self-deportees… real-world spaces, as easily pioneered as a new WordPress blog. They would be just as easily infested by trolls, too—but Doctorow seems to think that community norms could quite readily expel such infestations. My own experience of trying to moderate comments sections makes me less optimistic than I take him to be…