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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book?

Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.

I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. Highly highly unlikely, but I hope for it nonetheless. At the very least I'll get to see the "oh fuck what do we do with all these truck drivers" problem get tackled, probably.

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I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity...Highly highly unlikely...

Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? Perhaps it is just going to be a moving target, like AI seems to be? Once a chess playing program that could beat the world champion was a pipe dream. The same goes for Go playing programs. Once a pen was a specialized instrument that had to be handcrafted for certain professionals. Now, they are practically free. Once, getting water involved significant personal effort for almost everyone. Now almost everyone one in the industrialized world thinks of it as something practically free.

One of the things which might throw a monkey wrench into the futurist/sci-fi idea of a post scarcity society is the Pareto Principle combined with the perception of relative poverty. Across all of history, productivity has been unevenly distributed. Even people who are wealthy on global/historical scales will feel poor if confronted with wealthier neighbors. Psychologists have concluded that the feelings of relative poverty are very real, and it's this relative poverty which is most strongly correlated with criminality, not absolute poverty.

So why not give it a try? Why not let the libraries lend an unlimited number of digital copies and see what happens? Some constraints are real, but if scihub is any indication then some of those eternal truths might actually be mostly groupthink, fear and vested interests.

In the case of publishing scientific research, there is already funding in place. It's definitely vested interest there.

> Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual?

There cannot be a post-scarcity era as long as one man is able to impregnate more than one woman.

Most industrialized societies already have birth rates well below replacement level.

What if several men choose not to impregnate any women?

Woops there goes your one-liner dismissal of an entire concept?

How so? If you have 10 men and 10 women, and 8 of the men kill themselves, the remaining two can still fight over all 10 women.

How does this tie into post-scarcity?

> what is population control

The more usual idea with population control is that one married couple will have multiple children. If they have more than 2.1 on average then the population will expand.

This particular comment seemed to focus on the man impregnating more than one woman, while saying nothing about the total number of children born per capita.

I thought they might have been talking about access to mates as a scarce resource, but to be honest that's just a wild guess as it's not clear to me what they intended.

> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity.

When people talk about "post-scarcity", they are talking about the basic necessities of life becoming so cheap they are basically free. But, even in such a "post-scarcity" world, we will always still have finite resources, and human aspirations will always exceed those finite resources, and so we will always need some mechanism to arbitrate access. Either we use market-based mechanisms (which implies the existence of currencies), or else we turn to socialist-style central planning, in which the government gets to decide who has their aspirations fulfilled and who misses out.

Suppose a billion people all want to live in Venice. Sorry, just can't be done, there isn't enough room, it would totally destroy the city if we tried, we'll have to say "No" to some of them. You might say "we'll just give them a simulated Venice which is indistinguishable from the real thing" – but as long as they know it is not the real thing, they'll want the real thing instead. "Authenticity" is one of those things that humans desire.

Agree with most of your post except: as long as they know it is not the real thing, they'll want the real thing instead.

The way both video gaming and social media have exploded as cultural forces makes me think inauthenticity won't be a problem for the majority at some point. Many people already seem more than happy to judge themselves by their friend counts, Instagram likes, and go on voyages and have experiences online rather than meet up in real life.

I personally think simulated Venice could well be better than the real thing for most, as long as the real world remains relatively expensive, dangerous, and uncomfortable (compared to sitting in your house). There will always be people who prefer real experiences, but I think that group will continue to shrink.

I think so too, in as much as I noted elsewhere I think a large part (not the whole picture, but a large part) of why authenticity is a big deal today is the perception (though not always, true) that what is authentic is better in some tangible way. While it may be wrong sometimes, that idea persists because it often is true.

But at some point the virtual Venice will be better than the real thing: the temperature will never exceed what you find comfortable even if your travel companions have different preferences; there will never be too many tourists; your hotel room is more luxurious than anything you could hope for in real life; somehow you always find what you were looking for even when you read the map wrong. You always get a seat at your favorite restaurant. The buildings are cleaner. The "flaws" are just at the appropriate level to make you feel it's authentic.

More importantly, virtual plain-old Venice will have to compete with virtual Space Venice, where canals float between islands floating in space, or Renaissance Venice, or Black Death Venice for the horror fans, or Vegas-style Venice, or Godzilla-attack Venice, or Lego Venice, or any number of crazy variations.

Places like Venice are also important to us now because it stands out so much. But to people growing up with higher and higher quality virtual environments it will seem more and more boring and bland when compared to modern re-interpretations.

To put it another way: "My" Superman movie was the first Christopher Reeve one. It's the "authentic" one. I measure the new Superman actors against that one. I measure new Zod's against that one. But it was not first Superman movie, and I haven't even seen the older ones. And to many in my sons generation, it's some old movie that's far too slow-moving that most of them have not seen or heard of.

To take another example: The painting Scream, that to some already is "that painting that looks a bit like the Scream mask".

To generations growing up with virtual Venice 2100 with taller, more impressive buildings, more dramatic bridges, and other "upgrades", real Venice may soon enough become "that boring city that looks a bit like virtual Venice 2100 but isn't as nice".

> Either we use market-based mechanisms (which implies the existence of currencies), or else we turn to socialist-style central planning, in which the government gets to decide who has their aspirations fulfilled and who misses out.

There's nothing in socialism that requires central planning. In fact, there are forms of socialism (e.g. market communism) that explicitly include market mechanisms as one solution for allocation of resources.

So I tend to agree with you that currencies won't disappear until we're well past "basic post-scarcity" aka. nobody needs to go hungry or homeless. To get rid of currency entirely we likely need much more fundamental cultural changes and far more extensive abilities to create what we want.

I don't think "authenticity" will survive as a major driver that long past meeting sufficiently good virtual environments, because while it may have a certain charm, with "good enough" virtual environments, reality can be trounced in other factors. E.g. the real Mona Lisa is utterly unimpressive in person: It's tiny. You can't get really up close to it. Many people who have seen it - me included - mention being left thinking "that's it?" A "virtual Louvre" could easily present a "better than real" version of it that I suspect would quickly seduce people away from caring much about that authenticity.

A large part of why authenticity matters today is that we perceive it as better. But if the "authentic" experience consistently becomes drab and dull and trite compared to the copies, the appeal will gradually diminish.

Even so, in the intervening period, we can certainly move product and services between two categories: One where we merely care about tracking consumption to allocate resources to manufacture and distribution efficiently, but otherwise people can consume what they want, and one where we need to mediate and restrict use because we can not yet meet the full, unconstrained demand without sacrificing something else.

I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting that everyone should get everything they want. Everyone should be entitled to a small apartment reasonably near their preferred location, clothes, food, medical care, and a small stipend for necessaries, without having to prove their worthiness through labor. If you want an apartment in Venice, or a New York penthouse, or a Lamborghini? Then you need to get a job.

I feel like this could work really well for artists. Live on UBI, produce as much as you like, and put it on the internet. If people like it, and you want more money to play with, start a Patreon or similar. Everybody wins.

The venice example would actually work pretty somewhat week with a socialist-style central authority: Make sure everyone can live in Venice for a time, then pass on their flat to the next on the list.

> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity.

I would only want to see that if we were already post-scarcity. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot of bloodshed as people figure it out and realize they don't have any way to continue buying the things they require to live.

Post-scarcity is great, but I fear the road that leads to it.

Marx agreed with you:

> For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced

(The German Ideology, first chapter, section 5)

Though he was writing about the pre-conditions for socialist revolution, a central tenet of his writings was this idea that redistribution in any form first becomes tenable under advanced capitalism, because never before have we been close to be able to produce so much that we could conceivably reach a stage where redistribution doesn't simply make everyone poor (or feeling poor).

And unfortunately we got to see the consequences of ignoring that warning many places where attempts at forcing through socialist revolutions in places that did not meet the preconditions failed spectacularly.

Globally, we are pretty much post-scarce on anything anyone "requires to live".

The struggle will be to find out how all the rest gets divided when controlling distribution of the right to live is no longer a bargaining position and discovering if we can still provide for everyone without servitude.

There are plenty of poor places with people starving, even though we have enough food to give it to people. But even in the usa, there are people who don't get enough to eat. in Seattle I often see news stories about the food bank.

> There are plenty of poor places with people starving

No, actually there's not. Starvation is mostly linked to conflict zones nowadays. In normal conditions starvation is pretty much a problem from the past. Look at the WHO report on poverty and how things have clearly improved since, let's say the 70s or 80s.

Where I live is not a conflict zone, yet there are people who are starving. The monetary system is not coping with rationing the resources to all in a just manner. People don't have jobs. They don't have the capital to put their ideas to action. Those who have done so, still discover that they need money to market their products and services.

But that's not caused by SCARCITY. Scarcity means there isn't enough food. That's not the problem we have. There is enough food to feed everyone. It's just owned by the wrong people.

Scarcity in economics doesn't mean "not enough" right now, it means that if it were free there wouldn't be enough. If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.

> If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.

I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.

Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are partially there.

It would be a small shift in our mentalities: food is a necessary item to live, we must all contribute equally for it (as a society) and have easy access to it.

If anything I would be more worry about increasing the quantity of food wasted. Paying, even a little, can be necessary to signify that food is not infinite and growing from nothing, and thus, should not be wasted.

> free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.

Definitely, we already heavily subsidize farmers, if the sole source buyer became the federal gov't we could cut out the middle men (Kroger, Walmart, the distribution warehouse chains, food staple speculators) and create a stable food supply for everyone.

Perhaps charge a piecemeal amount beyond a certain quantity, to reduce waste.

> the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization

Well, when you come in and break up the existing communes at gunpoint, you can't be surprised that their output drops to zero, combined with forcing the remaining peasants you haven't killed to form farming collectives.

Locally organized farming communes are quite productive, but you need buy-in from members, which takes time, effort, and proper economic incentives.

And the idea of government-run stores ironically already exists in some of the most conservative parts of the US -- not for food, granted, but in several states (North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Utah) liquor stores are state-run in order to control sales. Amusingly, the lack of a profit motive means that often they have better prices than private liquor stores (generally worse selection though).

One of the biggest drivers of the disaster that was Soviet collectivization was a big fear that Lenin was wrong (he was) in his early claims that peasants would support the Bolsheviks.

Classical Marxism is based in part on a hypothesis that a socialist revolution has a number of preconditions, one being an advanced capitalist economy (Russia of course did not meet that), and a second one being that as a consequence of that, a society with a large working class majority (Russia did not meet that either).

Lenin "worked around" this with a pamphlet published in the early 1890's where he argued that Russia was special: In Russia the large number of landless peasants would come to the support of the socialist revolution and make it possible for a socialist party to take control. Coupled with his idea of a "vanguard party" leading the masses, he believed this would allow Russia to basically "skip capitalism".

The big problem with that, of course, was that it never happened: In the elections for the Constituent Assembly arranged by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks got a minority, with almost all their support in the big cities, while the peasants largely voted for more moderate parties - including the socialist SR/Left SR and Mensheviks. So the Bolsheviks went into their coup (the October "revolution" was a coup against the socialist-led Provisional Government; the Tsar had already been in house-arrest for months) in a situation where they must have known that the odds were most peasants would oppose their regime.

Collectivization then must be seen against a backdrop where the Bolsheviks not only had theoretical reasons to want to minimize the peasantry (trying to "leapfrog" capitalism), but also had very practical reasons to want to try to forcibly mold the peasantry into working class: they were afraid that leaving the peasants be would sow the foundations of further opposition.

Lenin relented a bit after the civil war, with New Economic Policy (which allowed limited market economy), but as soon as he died, Stalin pushed collectivization much harder and further, basically on the basis that while he couldn't eradicate farmers, he certainly could do whatever he could to try to turn farming into an industrial job.

So while they undoubtably also hoped to find ways of increasing productivity, it's worth realizing that a lot of decisions they took also had another purpose of basically trying to find a way of "farming without farmers" that was politically important especially for Stalin, and that made many possible concessions that might have mitigated disastrous outcomes completely politically unpalatable for the Bolsheviks because they especially early on feared for their power base. E.g. even the concession they did make under Lenin (NEP) were unpalatable enough for Stalin to reverse them.

It doesn't excuse what they did in any way, of course, but it goes so way towards explaining why they persisted in at times disastrous policies even after they'd clearly learned about the consequences - maintaining power remained more important for them than getting good outcomes.

If you are paying the farmers, the food isn't free. Its just that the people using the food aren't the ones paying for it.

Whether or not that's good thing, food is still scarce in the economic sense.

Exactly. We could feed, house, and care for everyone, if we wanted to. The main problem is that we're still stuck on the agricultural notion that the moral right to live must be purchased through labor or capital.

Does this "we" include yourself, personally?

How many have you fed, housed and cared for this past month, and is it completely with no strings attached (no capital or labor of any kind expected from them --- only from yourself?)

Or if not, what is the blocker?

I'd be happy to pay more taxes to get, at the very least, better social services for those who can't support themselves. I want to live in a world that cares for those people. If you prefer a selfish motivation, I also want those services to be available for me and my loved ones, should they be needed in the future.

The blocker is that I don't have the time, expertise, bargaining power, or economies of scale to efficiently turn my money into social services. Governments are much better suited to that task, and some do so reasonably effectively. (e.g. universal health care, in countries that provide it.)

Take how much extra tax you are willing to pay. Pay it to charity that best supports those ideals.

If you're not already doing this people will suggest talk is cheap and posturing has a negative value to society at large. Good luck with it!

I do give to charity, actually. That hardly precludes me from wishing my money, and others', was used more efficiently.

I feel like this isn't going how you were expecting. I was supposed to be exposed as a hollow "progressive" who's free with other people's money but is secretly a grasping hypocrite. You shouldn't assume everyone is selfish just because you are.

To add to your point - and not a detractor from your point, just because you don't have the means to solve a problem doesn't mean your not qualified to point it out.

You may not know how to fix it, but you can probably point out when you've got a compound fracture. If it isn't you with the broken bone, you're probably qualified to suggest that it probably is quite painful.

I've donated a fair sum already this month. I'm no more entitled to opine about the system than you are. It doesn't work like that.

Like you, I don't mind paying taxes. Hell, I look forward to seeing my tax bill. I also acknowledge I can pay more.

Err... I'm not kidding. I don't mind paying my taxes. I kind of like paying back to the system that enabled me to be where I am. On the other hand, I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values.

I grow weary of seeing functional equivalents to, "You're not solving the problem, your opinion is invalid." You don't have to contribute significantly to the solution to notice the problems. I feel that sort of thinking is just an excuse to maintain the status quo.

Re: "that enabled me to be where I am". There is no evidence-based way to determine where you would be in a parallel universe with different rules.

"I don't mind paying taxes." ... "I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values".

It's irrational to say, "I don't mind that money is being coerced from me by people who are squandering it and using it in ways that are not in line with my values."

I don't think that your position is actually conflicting, but perhaps misstated. That is to say, maybe what you don't mind is the concept of taxation as such. Yet you acknowledge that the actual people who, today, are charged with coercing money out of you are not spending it wisely or in line with your values. So of course you must mind. Otherwise why even mention that?

No, you're making assumptions.

You're willing to pay more to solve a problem. Do it. No realy. Do it. The amount you're willing pay, pay that. It's that simple. Don't read more into it. Do it.

Let's say they would be willing to pay an increased tax of 5% on their income to help homeless people.

You're saying - "instead just give 5,000 dollars to a homeless person, done!"

I think the absurdity of the suggestion is apparent but just in case - there's the obvious issues of

1. Assuming OP is a software engineer with no knowledge of "the homeless plight" or the best economic mechanisms to drag someone out of homelessness, there's no way they could give the money away in a way that actually defeats the problem withouts significant research effort.

2. Donating to charity is a possibility, but is not as effective as "everyone paying 5% extra tax," which leads me to...

3. Rather than paying an extra 5% tax, the OP's most effective course of action would be to lobby the government and his/her local population to make efforts to pass legislation that enables the government to levy a tax on everyone, and then use that money to solve the homelessness problem.

So, just like the OP said, economies of scale, effectiveness.

I am mildly upset that everyone is somewhat attacking someone for wanting the right thing to happen but not just making it happen on their own. How absurd!

I think that this is an unfair criticism of someone who said in their very post, "economies of scale."

One person who wishes for governments to do more for the poor can't be held responsible for the entire homeless population in the nation. That's absurd.

> The struggle will be to find out how all the rest gets divided when controlling distribution of the right to live is no longer a bargaining position and discovering if we can still provide for everyone without servitude.

Yes exactly like healthcare in the US...

Maybe except for land. Land will always be scarce. Especially land that is economically valuable and/or developed.

Have you people not heard of Malthusian traps? Either we limit the world population artificially, or we continue having poor people. It really is one or the other.

All copyright prohibitions are "fake." In our current society, all supply shortages of media are artificial.

The interesting question here is, are the shortages necessary to have high quality media? I would love to have an HN-filtered list of reading on the arguments- both sides. I personally only have an ill-informed, therefore worthless, opinion.

Patents and copyrights are, as discussed in much earlier incarnations, a form of barter (bribery?) by the state to ensure a steady supply of novel ideas. I give you something, you give me something.

We (or at least, policy makers) agreed that this was the cost of high quality media/inventions. And it was sure as hell a lot better than the old guild systems where everyone in a given trade colluded to maintain trade secrets, under threat of ostracism or worse.

A lot of the weirdness people attach to either concept looks ridiculous if you can get past all of the emotionally loaded crap and keep telling yourself they are a quid pro quo arrangement, and not to be conflated with property rights.

I get most of my entertainment nowadays from artists (musical, artistic, etc) that I fund on Patreon, via Paypal, or on Kickstarters.

So... no. Not at all.

The reason we are not seeing 150M budget movies coming out of crowdfunding is that right now the market is too small. Its a fledgling industry to directly patronize your entertainers without the profit seeking middleman in between (or at least in the case of Patreon et al that middle man is minimized). As it grows projects like the Blender Open Movie project or all the software being crowdfunded will become more common and more culturally accepted.

On top of that, there is very little organization in crowdfunding right now. Almost exclusively because of the newness of it all - it is untested, and for anyone who is just making a living off patronage now taking a huge risk partnering with other artists to combine efforts to make more complicated media is a huge gamble.

That being said, there are no logistical barriers to it. It is only a matter of time. But for patronage models to take over media production - which they will inevitably do, on the simple premise that the middle men profiteers in between creators and consumers of media only existed when the logistics of distribution required not just money but influence in the industry to even get your product blessed to be sold in limited theaters or stores and are now redundant - will require a substantial cultural shift for consumers. And those kinds of shifts take generations. I think those under 30 are fairly receptive to the idea, but to make it pervasive may require fresh minds open to the idea that need to grow with constant exposure to the concept early on.

Otherwise its just a "neat thing" rather than the cultural revolution it will need to be to finalize the model - abolishing obsoleted IP concepts alongside the cultural expectation to "put money where your mouth is" on the things you want to see made, rather than for the things that already exist and are being artificially restricted by the government.

For the most part, I agree with you.

However, the profiteering middlemen do add value in that they actively curate and package content in ways that are "consumable" and desirable. They are sourcing the steady drip-feed of content that we passively consume.

Shunning passive feeds, and actively seeking out content that fits your preferences, as you do, requires effort. Any product the consumption of which requires effort is inevitably displaced by service providers who deliver said thing frictionlessly....eliminating the effort.

Agreed that there will always be a slice of the market that actively shuns passively-fed products and ascribes a priceable value to goods that don't fit that friction-eliminating model (e.g., craft beers). But, as long as we remain purely, animalistically, and perhaps irrationally susceptible to simple stimuli-- a large slice of the market will be kow-towed to frictionlessly delivered, externally curated products.

Simply put, some people don't want to go express their preferences for certain products. They just want the market to deliver them something stimulating and to a certain degree they don't care what it is.

But let's move towards your world! On balance it is better, richer, and more full of vibrant, distinctly human creativity.

In our current society, all supply shortages of media are artificial

If you take supply shortages of media as being caused by a long term lack of profitable remuneration/funding for media, then there is nothing artificial about it. It's the funding model which is broken.

I wish there was something like Patreon, but which would take some monthly subscription amount and automatically distribute it to the creators I like, in proportion to the enjoyment they've provided.

> something like Patreon, but which would take some monthly subscription amount and automatically distribute it to the creators I like, in proportion to the enjoyment they've provided.

Like Spotify, radio, broadcadt TV and such? They pay artists based on airtime and they allot airtime based on viewership/listenership,

True. Then again, all the protected creations are also artificial constructs.

But currency as a concept isn't useless yet because we aren't post-scarcity yet.

Yes, we are post-informational-scarcity (marginal cost of creating a new copy of existing digital information is zero). But we are not post-material-scarcity.

And that matters because authors need to make money in order to purchase scarce material goods.

I am not defending the various stupidities of the current copyright laws in the US, but the basic concept of "fake" prohibitions on unlimited copying still makes sense.

> because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book

Corolary, why would anyone ever write a book, except to make money, right?

>Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.

It's only fake from a very narrow view of the world. It's not a technical limitation, to be sure, and I personally despise DRM and the copyright law, but those things are not fake. They exist for reasons, and even though people like you and I disagree with those reasons, it doesn't make them any less real.

Interestingly, the Betamax lawsuit came after we got off the gold standard, allowing us to import more than we export.

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