But can we really end scarcity?

We believe that the post-scarcity vision of the future is problematic because it reflects an understanding of technology and the economy that could worsen the problems it seeks to address. This is the bad news. Here’s why:

New technologies come to consumers as finished products that can be exchanged for money. What consumers often don’t understand is that the monetary exchange hides the fact that many of these technologies exist at the expense of other humans and local environments elsewhere in the global economy. The intuitive belief that technology can manifest from money alone, anthropologists tell us, is a culturally rooted notion which hides the fact that the scarcity experienced by some is linked to the abundance enjoyed only by a few.

Many people believe that issues of scarcity can be solved by using more efficient production methods. But this may overlook some of the unintended consequences of efficiency improvements. The Jevons Paradox, a key finding attributed to the 19^th century British economist Stanley Jevons, illustrates how efficiency improvements can lead to an absolute increase of consumption due to lower prices per unit and a subsequent increase in demand. For example, the invention of more efficient train engines allowed for cheaper transportation that catalyzed the industrial revolution. However, this did not reduce the rate of fossil fuel use; rather, it increased it.  When more efficient machines use less energy, they cost less, which often encourages us to use them more—resulting in a net increase in energy consumption.

Past experience tells us that super-efficient technologies typically encourage increased throughput of raw materials and energy, rather than reducing them. Data on the global use of energy and raw materials indicate that absolute efficiency has never occurred: both global energy use and global material use have increased threefold since the 1970s. Therefore, efficiency is better understood as a rearranging of resources expenditures, such that efficiency improvements in one end of the world economy increase resource expenditures in the other end.

The good news is that there are alternatives. The wide availability of networked computers has allowed new community-driven and open-source business models to emerge. For example, consider Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia that has displaced the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta. Wikipedia is produced and maintained by a community of dispersed enthusiasts primarily driven by other motives than profit maximization.  Furthermore, in the realm of software, see the case of GNU/Linux on which the top 500 supercomputers and the majority of websites run, or the example of the Apache Web Server, the leading software in the web-server market. Wikipedia, Apache and GNU/Linux demonstrate how non-coercive cooperation around globally-shared resources (i.e. a commons) can produce artifacts as innovative, if not more, as those produced by industrial capitalism.

In the same way, the emergence of networked micro-factories are giving rise to new open-source business models in the realm of design and manufacturing. Such spaces can either be makerspaces, fab labs, or other co-working spaces, equipped with local manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing and CNC machines or traditional low-tech tools and crafts. Moreover, such spaces often offer collaborative environments where people can meet in person, socialize and co-create.

This is the context in which a new mode of production is emerging. This mode builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies.  It can be codified as “design global, manufacture local” following the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes application that is small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled. DGML could recognize the scarcities posed by finite resources and organize material activities accordingly. First, it minimizes the need to ship materials over long distances, because a considerable part of the manufacturing takes place locally. Local manufacturing also makes maintenance easier, and also encourages manufacturers to design products to last as long as possible. Last, DGML optimizes the sharing of knowledge and design as there are no patent costs to pay for.

There is already a rich tapestry of DGML initiatives happening in the global economy that do not need a unified physical basis because their members are located all over the world. For example, consider the L’Atelier Paysan  (France) and Farmhack (U.S.), communities that collaboratively build open-source agricultural machines for small-scale farming; or the Wikihouse project that democratizes the construction of sustainable, resource-light dwellings;  or the OpenBionics project that produces open source and low-cost designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the RepRap community that creates open-source designs for 3D printers that can be self-replicated.  Around these digital commons, new business opportunities are flourishing, while people engage in collaborative production driven by diverse motives.

So, what does this mean for the future of tomorrow’s businesses, the future of the global economy, and the future of the natural world?

First, it is important to acknowledge that within a single human being the “homo economicus”—the self-interested being programmed to maximize profits—will continue to co-exist with the “homo socialis”, a more altruistic being who loves to communicate, work for pleasure, and share. Our institutions are biased by design. They endorse certain behaviours over the others. In modern industrial capitalism, the foundation upon which our institutions have been established is that we are all homo economicus. Hence, for a “good” life, which is not always reflected in growth and other monetary indexes, we need to create institutions that would also harness and empower the homo socialis.

Second, the hidden social and environmental costs of technologies will have to be recognized. The so-called “digital society” is admittedly based on a material- and energy-intensive infrastructure. This is important to recognize so as not to further jeopardize the lives of current and future generations by unwittingly encouraging serious environmental instability and associated social problems.

Finally, a new network of interconnected commons-based businesses will continue to emerge, where sharing is not used to maximize profits, but to create new forms of businesses that would empower much more sharing, caring, and collaboration globally. As the global community becomes more aware of how their abundance is dependent on other human beings and the stability of environments, more and more will see commons-based businesses as the way of the future.

Vasilis Kostakis is a Senior Researcher at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and he is affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Andreas Roos is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary field of Human Ecology at Lund.

Originally published at HBR.org

Photo by longan drink

The post New Technologies Won’t Reduce Scarcity, but Here’s Something That Might appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

It doesn’t get much more dystopian than this: what if all distributed manufacturing technologies are enclosed by the logic of netarchical capitalism?

This is no fantasy. In their 2017 report, 3D printing: a threat to global trade, Dutch multinational ING Group analyzes the potential impact of distributed manufacturing technologies. The text below, written by Peter Frase and originally published in his blog, paints a bleak picture of how the same patterns of capitalist enclosure we’ve seen in the Internet extend to physical manufacturing. Frase develops these themes further in his book Four Futures.

Peter Frase: In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.

One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. Aliens who still believe in hoarding money and material acquisitions, like the Ferengi, are viewed as barbaric anachronisms.

The technical condition of possibility for this society is comprised of of two basic components. The first is the replicator, a technology that can make instant copies of any object with no input of human labor. The second is an apparently unlimited supply of free energy, due to anti-matter reactions or dilithium crystals or whatever. It is, in sum, a society that has overcome scarcity.

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

• Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

Economists like to say that capitalist market economies work optimally when they are used to allocate scarce goods. So how to maintain capitalism in a world where scarcity can be largely overcome? What follows is some steps toward an answer to this question.

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the (libertarian) economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine point out:

Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea – this is a right that . . . does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea. This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.

This is the quality of intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you “own”. In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea. (Presumably some other company owns the rights to cold tea.)

This solves the problem of how to maintain for-profit capitalist enterprise, at least on the surface. Anyone who tries to supply their needs from their replicator without paying the copyright cartels would become an outlaw, like today’s online file-sharers. But if everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this brings up a new problem. With replicators around, there’s no need for human labor in any kind of physical production. So what kind of jobs would exist in this economy? Here are a few possibilities.

1. The creative class. There will be a need for people to come up with new things to replicate, or new variations on old things, which can then be copyrighted and used as the basis for future licensing revenue. But this is never going to be a very large source of jobs, because the labor required to create a pattern that can be infinitely replicated is orders of magnitude less than the labor required in a physical production process in which the same object is made over and over again. What’s more, we can see in today’s world that lots of people will create and innovate on their own, without being paid for it. The capitalists of anti-Star Trek would probably find it more economical to simply pick through the ranks of unpaid creators, find new ideas that seem promising, and then buy out the creators and turn the idea into the firm’s intellectual property.
2. Lawyers. In a world where the economy is based on intellectual property, companies will constantly be suing each other for alleged infringements of each others’ copyrights and patents. This will provide employment for some significant fraction of the population, but again it’s hard to see this being enough to sustain an entire economy. Particularly because of a theme that will arise again in the next couple of points: just about anything can, in principle, be automated. It’s easy to imagine big intellectual property firms coming up with procedures for mass-filing lawsuits that rely on fewer and fewer human lawyers. On the other hand, perhaps an equilibrium will arise where every individual needs to keep a lawyer on retainer, because they can’t afford the cost of auto-lawyer software but they must still fight off lawsuits from firms attempting to win big damages for alleged infringment.
3. Marketers. As time goes on, the list of possible things you can replicate will only continue to grow, but people’s money to buy licenses–and their time to enjoy the things they replicate–will not grow fast enough to keep up. The biggest threat to any given company’s profits will not be the cost of labor or raw materials–since they don’t need much or any of those–but rather the prospect that the licenses they own will lose out in popularity to those of competitors. So there will be an unending and cut-throat competition to market one company’s intellectual properties as superior to the competition’s: Coke over Pepsi, Ford over Toyota, and so on. This should keep a small army employed in advertizing and marketing. But once again, beware the spectre of automation: advances in data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence may lessen the amount of human labor required even in these fields.
4. Guard labor. The term “Guard Labor” is used by the economists Bowles and Jayadev to refer to:
   

   The efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel . . . directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.

   In other words, guard labor is the labor required in any society with great inequalities of wealth and power, in order to keep the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. Since the whole point of anti-Star Trek is to maintain such inequalities even when they appear economically superfluous, there will obviously still be a great need for guard labor. And the additional burden of enforcing intellectual property restrictions will increase demand for such labor, since it requires careful monitoring of what was once considered private behavior. Once again, however, automation looms: robot police, anyone?

These, it seems to me, would be the main source of employment in the world of anti-Star Trek. It seems implausible, however, that this would be sufficient–the society would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment. This is particularly true given that all the sectors except (arguably) the first would be subject to pressures toward labor-saving technological innovation. What’s more, there is also another way for private companies to avoid employing workers for some of these tasks: turn them into activities that people will find pleasurable, and will thus do for free on their own time. Firms like Google are already experimenting with such strategies. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn has specialized in developing “games with a purpose”: applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions, but which also perform a useful computational task. One of von Ahn’s games asked users to identify objects in photos, and the data was then fed back into a database that was used for searching images. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this line of research could lead toward the world of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game, in which children remotely fight an interstellar war through what they think are video games.

Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.

Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the late André Gorz put it, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed”. This is particularly true–indeed, it is necessarily true–of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on value based on labor-time.

But here the class of rentier-capitalists will confront a collective action problem. In principle, it would be possible to sustain the system by taxing the profits of profitable firms and redistributing the money back to consumers–possibly as a no-strings attached guaranteed income, and possibly in return for performing some kind of meaningless make-work. But even if redistribution is desirable from the standpoint of the class as a whole, any individual company or rich person will be tempted to free-ride on the payments of others, and will therefore resist efforts to impose a redistributive tax. Of course, the government could also simply print money to give to the working class, but the resulting inflation would just be an indirect form of redistribution and would also be resisted. Finally, there is the option of funding consumption through consumer indebtedness–but this merely delays the demand crisis rather than resolving it, as residents of the present know all too well.

This all sets the stage for ongoing stagnation and crisis in the world of anti-Star Trek. And then, of course, there are the masses. Would the power of ideology be strong enough to induce people to accept the state of affairs I’ve described? Or would people start to ask why the wealth of knowledge and culture was being enclosed within restrictive laws, when “another world is possible” beyond the regime of artificial scarcity?

Originally published in Peter Frase’s blog. Republished with the author’s full permission.

Photo by JD Hancock

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