Post-Scarcity and Other Follies
From the Venus Project to Fully-Automated Luxury Communism, techno-utopianism should inspire innovation but stay grounded in reality. It should not rot the brain.
Sometimes even zany ideas get traction. And a few such ideas make the world go ‘round. Others, however, are so speculative and bereft of analytical rigor we have a duty to call them out. Cleverly navigating reality is what drives innovation—not utopian fantasy. In what follows, we explore some of the zaniest ideas floating around in the memosphere. We should treat them with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
If it weren’t possible before, technological advance will soon allow humanity to "undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things," writes author and space communist Aaron Bastani in The New York Times. He continues:
"To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies."
Here we are to imagine technology so advanced that lab-grown meat, solar panels, AI, and automation provides for everyone on earth at no cost. According to Bastani, there's only one thing standing in the way: global markets. "Ours is an age of crisis. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty."
An age of crisis?
Nicolas Kristof, writing in the same publication, concludes that "Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline "Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday." Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: "The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday."
So much for the age of crisis. It would seem that global markets are doing fine, so much so that the period from 2010-2020 was the most prosperous decade in human history. (The period between 2020-2024 ain’t great, though, thanks to technocratic failures. And we should acknowledge that the monetary base layer has long been corrupted by central banking and the governance base layer has been captured by the welfare-warfare-industrial complex. Yet, the utopians have even bigger technocratic plans.)
The Venus Project
The late structural designer Jacques Fresco gained throngs of admirers in his visual depictions of a resource-based economy, a form of utopian scientism. In a “resource-based economy,” all goods and services are available to anyone without the need to pay for it.
"For this to be achieved all resources must be declared as the common heritage of all Earth's inhabitants. Equipped with the latest scientific and technological marvels mankind could reach extremely high productivity levels and create an abundance of resources."
Fresco painted, quite literally, pictures of massive solar arrays and towers that excite the technocratic imagination. But he leaves the question of means, costs, and tradeoffs for someone else's imagination.
Much of this fanciful thinking comes from the half-baked idea of a "post-scarcity" society. Though ideas such as luxury communism and Venus projects seem to be all the rage, they depend on the idea that technological abundance will eventually suspend economic laws. The origins of this sort of fantasy extend back to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, political theorist Herbert Marcuse, and eventually to Karl Marx himself.
The Fragment
In a text known as the "Fragment," Marx imagines an economy in which machines produce stuff, and people supervise the machines. He appreciated that the primary productive force in such an economy would be information. For example, a steam engine's productive power doesn't depend on the amount of labor it took to produce it but rather on society's state of knowledge at the time. Knowledge and organization, therefore, are more important than making and running machines.
Marx is correct that knowledge and organization are important. He just didn't know why they are important, much less in what configuration that importance is made manifest. We'll come back to this point in a moment. Right now, let's stipulate things will soon be different. Production costs will continuously approach zero, and robots will do a lot of the work for us.
We'll still have the good old economic calculation problem first articulated in 1920.
In his essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," economist Ludwig von Mises explained that one of the biggest challenges facing any economic order is the employment of capital goods—things like manufacturing devices--designed to make things for consumption. How does anyone decide what goods to produce, how much should be produced, and how these goods should get produced?
For example, if the Servant Robot Company wants to introduce a new robot, what kind of microchips should the company use? Both chips are technologically feasible, but only a working price mechanism conveys that, at the margin, one chip is more expensive than the other. Because one processor is dedicated to robot movement, the company should only use the more expensive chip for 'neural' modules. Techno-socialism seeks to collectivize the ownership of those capital goods. But when? By definition, collectivization eliminates the markets in which these goods get exchanged. Rational economic calculation becomes impossible as soon as 'the collective' removes all the relevant market perspectives.
But Max, use your imagination. Think of scenarios in which people can manufacture their own goods with 3-D printers or nano-manufacturing devices that can replicate themselves, requiring only energy and simple slurries as raw inputs. The collective would provide these devices.
Which slurries? What energy? From where and at what cost? And do the first of these future printers and nano-manufacturing devices have no cost or alternative uses? What about services? Will the supercomputer be funnier than Richard Pryor? Weirder than Wes Anderson? And what about services one might want to be carried about by humans? What about a vase with wabi-sabi handmade by a craftsman in Kyoto? What about storytelling in the voice of Morgan Freeman at my kid's birthday party, not a simulacrum, but the Morgan Freeman? Won't artists be allowed to price their time and services? Or should we enslave the artists?
Okay no slaves, Max, except the robots who will be programmed not to feel pain. Services by humans will be an exception. But a supercomputer possessing godlike powers will replace entrepreneurial markets for various goods. And that will be enough for Luxury Communism.
Sounds wonderful. If such a miracle arrived somehow, I guess I'd be for it. But it seems that a “resource-based” economy can only arrive after certain conditions are met, namely when a functioning system of property, prices, and profit/loss is no longer necessary. If Luxury Communism is possible at all, it'll take the market's economic calculation to get us there.
Those imagining a world without market prices are appealing to a future in which there are self-replicating nanomachines and unlimited energy. Let's pass over the speculative horror that these nanomachines could mutate, turning the world into grey goo. Conversations about a world in which people are no longer needed to produce anything seem as distant as a world in which people no longer need each other. Maybe some sophisticated AI overlord will host us as we subsist and dream our realities, as in the Matrix. Life won't be so bad if we can experience steak, sex, and satori on demand. Perhaps nature will grow up around our energy-harvesting cocoons while we dream. Dystopian stories can scare people into Luddism, dirigisme, or both. When it comes to techno-socialism, is turnabout fair play?
The Price is Right
For the foreseeable future, without markets for production goods, there are no prices for those goods. Without prices for production goods, there's no way to determine which lines of business are profitable. Indications of scarcity remain distorted at best. In the absence of accurate information signals, nobody has a clue what goods to produce or how to produce them. Such information problems make it impossible for collectivized economies to generate the fantasyland abundance associated with techno-Marxism. Unless someone figures it out, these ideas remain the stuff of science fiction.