#post-scarcity

[dank-memes-my-ex-gf-sends-me]

[prole-log]

[neoatlantiscodex]

Star Trek Utopia

Star Trek was overly idealistic. And in truth, it wasn't really until Gene Roddenberry's death that we had any idea HOW the politics and economy of The United Federation of Planets works.

If anyone remembers the episode Justice of TNG, the planet of Rubicun III. It's the episode where Wesley nearly had capital punishment on the paradise sex world.

This was meant to be Earth. He was thankfully talked into it.

Later episodes do reveal how the economy of The Federation operates, and it's a liberal democracy. There are strong personal freedoms, and strong property rights. You might ask, how can there be strong property rights in a communist state? It's not communist.

After the first warp test ship was created, and after First Contact, Mankind just... decided to work together. It seems like early rebuilt civilizations had a gift economy. This was probably pretty easy, (relatively), to pull off, with the Vulcans promising technological development to anyone that joined the zeitgeist.

Vulcans, for the record, have a bureaucratic technocracy. Like Equilibrium, this only works because they are emotionless zombies. Vulcans still have marriages arranged by their families. Only emotionally unstable Vulcans seem to have a problem with it.

After the gift economy allowed society to rebuild, society got to the point where much production was entirely automated.

One of the (many) problems with communism is that:

Who has to work in the factories?

Who has to work themselves to death in the mines?

Well, in Star Trek, Earth got to the point it didn't have to worry about it. Instead, it put it's effort on something completely different.

For the record, other than First Contact, Star Trek and Judge Dredd both have identical backstories. The difference is that Star Trek values your need for fulfillment. It understands your need to contribute in a way most optimal with your character and abilities.

It's a worth that takes the first officer of the most blinged out Capital ship, and values his Trombone abilities equally to his duties as Command and XO of the Enterprise.

Sure, by TNG, they can have a replimat, where you can sit and eat, but this is only necessary if you actually feel like going out. It purposefully creates a Third Place. If you want to open a pub, they will help you. If you want to create a sport arena, they will provide you the necessary space and administrative support.

Do you want a 40 storey building dedicated to painting your warcrack? As long as it's built in an area with enough demand.

Of course, this is entirely theoretical until we can reach post-scarcity economy. The only thing we can take from it is unfortunately the French idea of ennui.

Le sigh.

*exhales his cigarette*

That, and the absolute importance of Third Places for community cohesion.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Due to personal issues, Christina couldn't take part in the original interview with Andy Gross about the solarpunk role playing game Fully Automated! that made up S6E2. But she had questions. In this episode, she had a chance to ask them. Before you grab your dice and download the game (for free!) at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/ have a listen!

[orbitingtheson]

9 May 2247

What exactly am I supposed to spend money on?

I live in one of the garden habs in Earth's L2 swarm. My basic income from the city has always covered my real needs and left me with enough to buy drinks and go to the occasional show. The robots do almost all the work anyway, so pretty much all the stuff I could ever want is basically free.

So when I took a job at a new company a few years ago, I agreed to take my pay in shares. I mean why not? Well the boss did something right, or maybe wrong, and our little company got bought. My share's pretty big. Like over a decade's worth of my stipend big.

So what exactly am I supposed to spend it on? My old boss says I should invest it, but that just kicks the problem down the road. I feel like it's this weird lump of money that's either going to swell until it bursts or just start leaking all over the place.

- good problems

Well you could hire an advice columnist to solve your personal problems for you.

I assume you already know the traditional answers to your question, but I'll go over them anyway. Money's mostly for things that are rare or limited. We're living in what used to get called a post scarcity society, but there are always going to some things that are scarce.

So in general, there's: Paying actual people to do things for you. Buying original artwork. Buying a licensed copy of a work still under copyright. Buying tickets to live performances. Booking passage for physical travel somewhere outside of your community's normal commuting range. Buying or renting more living space, or a living space in a premium location. Buying any physical goods that aren't part of your community's normal trade.

And then you can get into things like donating to causes or funding research.

Really there's no upper limit to how much money you can spend once you get in the habit of buying more than your daily bread.

Your boss has the right idea though. Money exists to help you solve problems and pursue opportunities to make your life or someone else's life better. If you can't think of any problems or opportunities, then it's not a bad idea to let someone else pay you to use your money for their own problems and opportunities. Don't just hoard your money, or grow it just to have more, but try not to feel like you need to put it to some grand use right this second either.

[auntbibby]

DogMah is a humanoid dog robot who originated as a human, whose mind was augmented to be more dog-like, and then was uploaded into a robot dog body "ship-of-theseus style" using nanobots that served as a neural bridge between the old analog biological brain and DogMah's digital graphene-chip brain (this bridging process is mainly unnecessary, as a strict copy and paste of the biological neural map would suffice, but it helps humans feel more confident that the "mind-uploading" process didn't kill them). Bark now feels comfortable in woof canine android body and bark is just happy that bark can begin woof long immortal life in post-singularity society. bark had woof DogMah body and dog-like mind augmentations custom-recommended by the direct-democratically-reprogrammable "benevolent dictator" algorithms that run post-singularity earth society, based on the observed preferences, behaviors and longterm thought patterns of woof original human mind. the certificate of citizen consent between human citizen and custodial algorithm-proxybot was measured by the adversarial benevolent dictator algorithm and confirmed to be legitimate.

[roseproductivity]

Abundance is not a technological threshold, but a social relationship.

Aaron Benanav

[communipuppity]

I have met someone who is doing, I think, the best possible thing a kid who had a trust fund placed in their lap could do (or any rich person really).

Not just giving all their money away to poor people...to promptly go right into the pockets of the slumlords whose greedy sucking them dry is the reason they can’t escape poverty in the first place!

But buying land and giving people *housing* and *food* and *water* without charging them!  :’D

This surely is how to really help people!  It’s not money (or rather the lack thereof) that’s really the problem, it’s greed.  (And money is just the arbitrary instrument greed favors in this period in history)

So if we want to fix the system, we don’t need to just give poor people money, we need to stop feeding and supporting the greed that makes them poor in the first place!  And instead starve the greed it so it will wither and compassion can flourish in its place.  :’)

I’m going to go there soon!  :DDD I really hope this works!!! And that I as an engineer can help make everything there be wonderful and safe and abundant 8>