Can we stop talking about the impossible Post-Scarcity future? Pretty please?
I look forward to the day when people stop talking about the impossible absolute elimination of scarcity. It is the same as the impossibility to exceed the speed of light, the faster you go, the more energy you need to accelerate. That is, it is what is in called mathematics, a Limit. Eliminating scarcity is the same. The closer you get to achieving it, the greater the cost, and at a certain point, the cost naturally outweighs the rewards.
This is why Communism and the modern coporatist/fascist government systems and their attached central banks are such a failure.
Absolutes are theory. They can never be real.
Even if we can have enough energy available and technology that feeds everyone, then what? People aren't going to be content to just eat and sit around all day. They will do things. These things will create more new resources, that will again be scarce. And so on it goes, forever, Amen.
Capitalism, of which Steem is a living breathing example of its highest form of expression, almost completely decentralised and user driven, is exactly the means by which humans work towards the reduction of scarcity. You can't make scarcity go away by wishing it away, or denying it exists.
You can only make it reduce, by making the way resources are allocated more efficient, and this is precisely what an Entrepreneur does.
Steem is a tool for entrepreneurs.
This is what makes it so great.
Whether they are writers, artists, videographers, computer programmers, hardware designers, architects, builders, plumbers, accountants, lawyers, taxi drivers, whatever. Everyone is an entrepreneur, when they invest their time, energy and assets into something, in the hope that someone will pay them more than what it cost them to produce. Without profit, there is no incentive, and indeed profit is the metric that tells you that your entrepreneurship is successful. It doesn't matter whether you dig holes for foundations of buildings, or direct the activities of a large corporation.
Ultimately, in the long run, whether you correctly guess that you can be paid more than you spend, determines whether you are helping in the process of eliminating scarcity. Profit is precisely abundance, and is rightfully paid to the one who takes the risk.
Profit is the evidence of successful reduction of scarcity.
Confusing this selfish incentive with the avarice and violence of criminals who want to trick, rob or murder other people to gain other people's resources, is a misunderstanding of the very important difference between Entrepreneurship and Criminality. Sure, there are some who have built their personal wealth on the losses of others, and they should be held to account, and made to pay back what they took. But it is ignorant and ultimately damaging to society to look upon some genuine entrepreneurs as thieves and others, when in fact they are both producing a net benefit by reducing scarcity.
Without post scarcity, how can communists theorize?
You are RIGHT!
First rule of economics is scarcity... but first rule of manipulation politics, is disregard economics rules.
Politics is precisely the opposite of economics. Forcible redistribution based on some arbitrary and non-economic basis of rights that attempts to replace economy with command control. Democracy, for instance, is essentially a marketing scheme to legitimise political activity. Over time, in history, there has been a gradual trend towards the reduction of political power, because the more productive people are, the more a small cabal can gain with less disruptive effects. But as every political system matures, it tends towards seeking totalitarian control. Then people burn it down, and turn around and get sucked into another scam.
True
Essentially it's "post scarcity" vs bullshit jobs.
Communism for the former hot air, and fascism for the latter shit-stirring.
I disagree that everyone wants 3-4 hours a week of work and then, what do they do with their time? Time is a limited resource, and every individual has the responsibility of choosing what they do, and what they do not do, with their time. They sacrifice one thing for another.
Leisure is an example of a utility. Consumption is a utility. You enjoy its use. However, too much utilities, and they flip inside out and become disutilities. This is why after a very long vacation, you come back to work, and are relieved that it's over, as much as you enjoyed it. The sense of emptiness that sex addicts and drug addicts talk about, this is a disutility from over-used utilities.
In general, exerting energy and consuming time towards labor is a disutility. But the sense of accomplishment, the kudos for work well done, the praise for seeing first what should have been obvious, these are utilities. These are the benefits of labor, beyond just the money you get. People work for these things, things that you cannot buy with money.
Love is an example of this. It can be very hard work, and sometimes it may not be worth it in the end. But people work very hard, they dedicate their lives, to win the love of others, or at least, to feel that they deserve it (self love). They will even die for it. Love is a utility that is worth more than anything else in this world. Love is a small part of the utility provided by praise, vindication, and to some extent, even getting paid, has an element of a sense of being loved - that of being valued, and wanted.
That article was quite good for pointing out how the ones who have acquired their wealth through stealth, trickery, and even outright bloodshed and violence, and the inheritors of these dirty legacies, are attempting to maintain their privileged position, by manipulating the economy in ways that intentionally produces discontentment. Then their little puppets up on the podiums, in their press conferences and speeches, can declare to everyone that some particular group of the people caused this discontentment, and then they make rules to punish them, which further increases discontentment, and creates endless opportunities for these people to keep stirring up negative emotions in people, and then telling them they should blame someone else.
Instead of taking responsibility for it.
And it can be very hard to escape from this loop. Because the whole system is designed to manufacture discontent, if you simply want to make a living doing things that people love to have done, the obstacles in your path can be completely soul destroying.
This is why these new distributed network systems are so powerful. They take control of the pool of resources, without any central master plan, and the people themselves then create their solutions. They apply their energy to enhancing the power of these systems. It is my opinion, with the appearance of Steem, we are now into the first phase of the DAO era. Sure, maybe by some people's definitions, Steem is not a DAO, but I beg to differ. I think it's actually better than a DAO, because machines make less of the decisions, and humans make more. The machines are just being built and run, in order to protect the people from criminals.
To me, the automation of these precisely 'bullshit jobs' by distributed network systems, is why they are having such an impact on the world. Blockchain, distributed processing and storage and cryptographic security, allow us to not have to depend on a trusted third party, who, if they can, will seek to become the only provider of 'trust', and then they can hold you to ransom if you do not pay. These new systems eliminate these intermediaries, and allow people to put out really very small amounts of energy to facilitate the automated administrative and security systems, and utterly replace the entire apparatus of banks, governments, insurance companies, and, this is the thing, even Corporations. That is what Steem is. It is a corporation, it is structured as a corporation, but nobody is really in charge. The guys who 'control' steem, really, they only get the benefit of this if they actually succeed in doing what people want them to do, with the system.
You make some great points. Scarcity will always exist because not matter how much things improve we will never have a perfect utopia. There will always be new uses for resources and there will always be inequality.
We can hope to keep improving things but it will never be solved. Also we will never change human nature.
People need the prospect of betterment to motivate them - that essentially means there must be some degree of inequality IMO.
Not only that, as to inequality, is any creature in this world created equal? Yet nature allows every creature to find their own little niche and live out their lives and satisfy their needs, and because it's driven by this subjective, profit driven incentive (even nature is full of entrepreneurs), when the situation changes, sometimes the positions can change around, sometimes even flip upside down.
In fact, underlying everything else, flipping the hierarchy upside down, is precisely what these distributed network systems intends to achieve, if you can attribute intent to mere ideas. Right now the ones with the biggest power, are the most vicious, conniving, violent, and fraudulent of us. It is not the 'common' who should be at the top, but the most honest, reliable, truthful, faithful and peaceful who should have the most power. They are the only ones who use power responsibly.