i like to imagine how people in the post-material-scarcity future would romanticise the current time period.
having a job gave people a sense of community and purpose lacking in our modern age where nobody is forcing you to get out of bed on threat of starvation. actually the average office worker in the early 21st century was so much wealthier than a UBI-having-modern if you forget to count paying rent and also make some very bad purchasing power conversions. if you look at contemporary records (sitcom where the main characters are only at work when it's plot relevant) it is obvious that employment was never really a major obstacle to having an active social life or pursuing your own passions.
Honestly I have a lot of...concerns about how a post scarcity society would work in relation to the things that I love. But I hope having to give up things like tv and pop culture and toys makes them happier
why would a post-scarcity society have to give up those things? what do you think post-scarcity means?
I mean, cartoons are probably going to end up "reduced" to Glitch Productions type things, like 10 minutes of animation every 6 months. There's just no way to produce 20 minutes of quality animation on a weekly or even a monthly basis in a world where no one has an incentive to work on an idea that isn't theirs.
Why would anyone choose to do inbetweens on someone else's cartoon, when they have no financial or occupational obstacles to just working on their OWN cartoon? Animation takes dozens or hundreds of people to do to current quality and a lot of it is a really shit job to get stuck with.
The same goes for things like toys and collectables. Who is going to CHOOSE to make someone else's dolls all day when anyone with the skill or the talent is 100% fo the kind of person who would just be making their OWN dolls in miniscule batches.
Remove employment from the equation and I just don't see any reason why ANYONE would do large entertainment projects at current scale. And even if they did, most of them would crumble under the fact that the entire workforce can and will just leave at any possible moment, right?
This isn't a dig, or a gotcha, it's just the thought I constantly have when this concept comes up
I mean, I'm a professional artist and part of the reason I became a professional artist is because I....like using my skills to help people who can't draw see their ideas come to life?
In a post-scarcity society I might choose to spend more of my time on my own projects, but it can be really enriching to take a break from solving my own project's problems to go collaborate with someone else and work on their problems. I am not the only artist who really enjoys collaborating on projects with people!
I also think, if you remove the economic pressure to get a Real Job, you might also get more people who like drawing and wanted to be animators, picking up animation, even part time.
Working on someone's else's project, especially if that someone else is experienced in the field, is a great way to pick up skills, and knowledge, and ideas, as well as having an outside force to help motivate you to stay the course through what is a big and complex project. I could see that being a motivating factor for some people to work at least part time on a big animation project.
I do think you're right that the like....production side of things would have to change! In some cases that may look like more small indie projects. But having a big team would allow for larger and more complex works and could speed up the process and I can see people still choosing to do that for the sake of a cool project that sounds fun or meaningful or might give you social prestige for participation. (I mean, look at how many animation kids participate for free in multi-animator projects! Folks like to make things and they know big things are easier if they do them together!) However, since profit margins are no longer a major driving force, project timelines no longer need to involve crunch, so it may take longer for projects to complete, but with more people freed up to do animation work if they want to...perhaps it's not dire. hard to say with no real numbers to work from. But I could see the shift to being slower production times overall, but not necessarily less output overall?
(also post-scarcity society may not be an entirely money-less society of course, in which case the currency-of-the-day may be an incentive for some people to work on other people's projects as well, but if that's just sort of a bonus to having a Nice Life By Default, then people can still walk if the project is badly managed or doesn't work with their life for whatever reason. And if you think no one would take on being a project manager for a bunch of squirrelly creatives for free, I would like to point you at Dungeon Masters, or the people who run fandom cons (which, especially for small cons, can be a volunteer gig!)
When it comes to hobbies that involve manufacturing objects like toys, perhaps a post-scarcity future might be a future in which access to the tools to mass-produce goods, or create high-quality goods on demand, allowing for a better-quality of Print-on-Demand goods is more widely available to all. Access to the tools to design and make stuff could be more accessible to people instead of corporations (again, requiring some shifts in how we view property and who is responsible for maintaining equipment and ensuring safe use of equipment)
Lots of people are currently willing to design and release useful things and fun toys for free! People do this with crochet patterns and 3-d printables and sewing patterns so many more things!
In the post-scarcity world, maybe we all have a lot more time to pursue the skills to make toys, but not everyone will have the skill or desire to design things.
(Also, like, post-scarcity does not mean that there aren't Unpleasant Tasks that still need doing in the future or that there might not be hard work. We might have more robots doing some of the hard or dangerous stuff but there's still a lot of yucky or boring jobs that will need a human to at least supervise. We'll still need sanitation engineers and cleaners and safety workers and people who do in-betweens or clean-up on animation. Or at least people whose job it is to check these things over, which might be even more boring than actually doing the work. Though, I could see finding ways to democratize labor. People like games that like power-washing or sorting things or other "boring tasks." If that paid well or was something you only had to do sometimes, maybe a lot of the Boring Tasks get divvied up as volunteer shifts. Who knows!)
The post-scarcity future is a long way away, tbh. I don't think you'll lose access to big-budget animation or mass-produced toys any time soon. Probably not in your lifetime.
Of course, everything I've said about a post-scarcity society is like pie-in-the-sky, idle dreaming about how we could possibly design a future, based on things I've observed about human nature and our love of little tasks and feelings like we're helping! we're social creatures! we like pitching in!
If we have any moves towards post-scarcity in our lifetimes, they are gonna be awkward and imperfect systems. "Progress" is a wiggly looping tangle through history rather than a straight line, and its definition changes constantly. I hope to see some changes in my lifetime that enable at least a basic UBI or universal healthcare in my country (USA) and better work-life balance in terms of amount of time we have to spend working. If we can get those changes and get them stick, I think that might be the start of a cultural shift towards true post-scarcity.
