https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/sharing-the-surplus-vs-engineered-scarcity/2010/02/11 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:18:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/sharing-the-surplus-vs-engineered-scarcity/2010/02/11/comment-page-1#comment-421981 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:18:49 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=7353#comment-421981 Rephrasing it differently – what people want is rare things and companies provide them with these rare things, even if they need to destroy some part of similar things to make them rare enough. Can we have an economic system that would not produce what people want but something that would be more valuable in some other abstract way and not be evil?

]]> https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/sharing-the-surplus-vs-engineered-scarcity/2010/02/11/comment-page-1#comment-421974 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:57:32 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=7353#comment-421974 So why companies do that? Ask them and they’ll answer that giving out stuff devalues the products they are selling – and this is true. People value things that are scarce (this is explained by the mimetic desire theory – but I think it is also very well understood intuitively), not because of their objective nature – but because other people cannot have them. Taking something that is not much valued and turning it into something valued by other people and then selling it to them is the core of our system, can that be changed? The communism experiment, that I experienced personally, showed that it will not be easy.

]]>