Episode 11
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody and welcome to Revolution Now. This is Peter Joseph. Episode number 11, November 25th, 2020.
So today, I want to continue the discussion of scarcity, particularly the subject of post-scarcity. So to recap a little, in the prior podcast we discussed how scarcity has been politicized in social and economic discourse. This is why today, for example, in the United States, trillions of dollars can be invented out of thin air to be invested in the military or stimulus recovery and so on, while the prevailing excuse to disallow any true alleviation of suffering of the lower class, poor, the homeless, the impoverished, or perhaps even assist citizenry with universal healthcare, or perhaps even the excuses that we can't have full renewable infrastructure, as it's all deemed unaffordable in this scarcity worldview. It's an excuse.
And it's worth noting that historically there are associations to this world view such as the work of Thomas Malthus or the bastardization of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Thomas Malthus was an economist working for the British East India Company during the British empire in the 18th century. He concluded that population growth would forever exceed our ability to meet the needs of that population. Hence, the idea of perpetual imbalance and the consequential result of inevitable human suffering through poverty rests at the core of historical and contemporary thinking when it comes to socioeconomic inequality. And what's the result of that kind of thinking where there's not enough to go around? Well, I guess people in poverty are inevitable therefore, there's really not much of a point in trying to help them or even being compassionate. Malthus made these points actually quite clear in his very writings, that the poor are inevitable so why do we care?
So you combine that with the erroneous interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution and hence, the notorious phrase "survival of the fittest", which was transformed into an idea of social competition by other theorists, implying that conflict between people was not only a root condition, only the strongest or fittest would prevail. Hence, implying that the biggest, most aggressive, most dominant and most strategically successful in a competitive sense are the ones that will pass on their genes. And obviously that is not what Darwin's notion of fittest means. Collaboration is just as important to human evolution as competition. More can be said on that, of course, but I'm not going to go down that road here.
But I will comment that in my film, InterReflections, I coined a term, Malthusian Mandate. In the storyline, the protagonist comes to understand that the antagonist, the head of the fictional global intelligence agency, has been promoting a program secretively that strategically limits support for the poor demographics and regions of the world, facilitating more rapid demise of these human beings simply by not intervening. The Malthusian mandate says that the market and only the market, without any governmental interference, is what determines life on this planet.
I drew inspiration for this idea from the movie Network where the corporate CEO character says in one scene, "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale." And as absurdist as that whole scene is, it gets to the heart of a very, very important social Darwinistic commentary. As talked about before, free market economics is predicated on the idea of market self-regulation, which of course does not work and is impossible without governmental intervention or management intervention, to be a little more accurate, and hence this idea of the money god or the market god is a good gesture. The market god determines what's going to happen in this world. That is the ethos of a fantastically large number of people out there in the world today still that believe in capitalism as a pure system.
Though I have to admit it's rather spooky since COVID-19, given the fact that it has disproportionally affected people of color and general, lower income demographics, both domestically and internationally. It just, once again, shows the imbalance that's inherent to this system and how the structural violence and the structural racism by default, when it comes to public health, continues to unfold. Systemically, very large numbers of people, low income people, are going to suffer disproportionately. And similarly, if we're to trust this rush out of a vaccine, which will probably be fine, but this is an unprecedented move to produce a complicated item very, very quickly, unprecedented. But if everything does work as planned, you can rest assured that the poor countries and the poorest demographics are going to be the last to get this, further compounding the implication of the Malthusian mandate, the dying off of the lower class.
So we've covered how scarcity has been politicized, now let's think about how it's been weaponized. From the psychological manipulation to make them feel they're missing out and hence, need to run out and buy some product because it's new or it's a limited time offering or a rare edition, invite only, limited quantities while supplies last, the liquidation sale. Airlines and hotels, when you go online, tell you, "There's only a few seats left. There's only a few rooms left." Obviously in the proprietary world, it's all a mess. Certain video games only work with certain platforms. Only certain parts work with certain cars. There's no strategic standardization of anything because if people shared knowledge and developed ideas and goods in concert, interconnectedly using that efficiency, it would deeply reduce the angles of exploitation that are required by a scarcity-based economic system known as capitalism.
So scarcity is the foundation of the market economies' fundamental angle, if you will. Since there is no real relationship to earthly resources scientifically, in the sense of true measures of supply and demand, and since there's no real relationship to the value of labor in the sense of the labor theory of value in classical economics, the whole society operates in a perpetual state of temporal insufficiency. I'm sure I've spoken about planned obsolescence and its partner intrinsic obsolescence in the past, so I'm not going to belabor it here. If you're familiar with the Phoebus light bulb cartel, which is the most notable historical example of planned obsolescence. However, while planned obsolescence could easily be viewed historically as having criminal components- a kind of conspiracy there, that's not the way most people think about it.
Technicians and boardroom executives consistently strategize about how to get repeat purchases. It's just part of the M.O. Apple had to pay out about a hundred million dollars recently for deliberately slowing down its own technology. In fact, I know people in the tech industry, and the most repeated suggestion when it comes to using your hardware is to not update your software ever because software updates are fundamentally destructive, of course, because they keep designing the updates to make prior hardware configurations obsolete, and they hide behind that. So much of planned obsolescence hides behind the idea of technological progress.
So planned obsolescence is not an obscure corporate conspiracy. It's right out in the open for everyone to see if they pay attention and know the dynamics. And I'm not even going to touch upon other elements related to this subject, such as clothing companies that burn off old clothes worth millions of dollars so they can remove supply to make way for new things. As is the case with the company Burberry, which destroyed over 35 million in products to remove supply.
Now far worse, actually, is the phenomenon of intrinsic obsolescence. This is the obsolescence inherent to final products created that are inevitably less efficient than possible because of the nature of competitive dynamics and the system itself. We all know the phrase that capitalism wants to create "the best possible goods at the lowest possible prices", which of course doesn't produce the best possible anything because prices are not a proper regulatory system for technological or scientific efficiency. If we willfully deny efficiency in our production of things due to the economic system, we hence have systemic or intrinsic obsolescence built in. In other words, it's not even remotely optimized.
I mean, look at the plastics incorporation- look at what it's done to us. There was a time when people lived without the need for rogue plastics everywhere, and the standard of living was not that much different. Unfortunately, it became far more cost-effective to get away from glass and other things that could be utilized and recycled in many different ways, such as the milk man that took the milk bottles back. That's, of course, a very quaint example and not necessarily indicative of the complex society we have today, but the idea is still strong: reusability, circular economy, not developing polymers that end up in the ocean and so on.
And the most frustrating thing about that, ultimately, if you look into this research is the corporations got together and said, "We're going to put the blame on the public. We're going to make them take care of the products they bought from us, as opposed to us dealing with what we've created." If you're an American, you might remember that advertisement with the Indian with the tear, as he looks at all the waste on the side of the street, usually incorporating many pieces of plastic in that image. And it would seem that this kind of commercial is an activist expression put forward by an NGO or a nonprofit. But no, it was a ruse by commercial industry to not only paint themselves as being ecologically aware, but also to try and impose this idea that "It's up to you, who buys our products, to figure out what to do with it after the fact. We have no responsibility." Which is preposterous.
That aside, when it comes to intrinsic obsolescence, you have to look at the whole industrial system and judge it by its efficiency. As stated in the prior podcast, true intelligent design is deeply incorporated. The more interconnected economic processes are holistically, the more efficient the outcome will be. Sadly, we live in a competitive society where everything is fractured and everyone is constantly competing against each other to produce the same kinds of stuff over and over and over again, and the result of course is waste and inefficiency. And guess what? That's good for this kind of economy. The market loves deprivation, waste, and inefficiency because it creates more opportunities. It loves things not working for very long. It loves things breaking. Anything that gets people back to the store to buy something again is a good thing for the market system.
It also loves insecurity. This is another issue that people don't talk about enough. It loves low self-esteem. Anything that gets people out there to buy stuff to make themselves feel better about themselves in this social reality we live in as people try to jockey and keep up with the Joneses and so on. So anyway, all of those tangents aside, the market system is based on deficiency. It is based on artificial restriction. Scarcity and efficiency are the movers of money. The more there is of any resource or item, the less you can charge for it, hence the more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money. That is the nature of a scarcity based economy.
So moving on, what is the difference between this kind of economy and a post-scarcity economy? I've been talking about post-scarcity for a long time now, and I've run into so much unfocused thinking and exaggerated claims and I can sympathize, in fact, with the critics. Critics kind of have a right to be dismissive of these ideas because most proponents of post-scarcity approach it from far too fantastical position. Undue weight is placed upon attributes of post-scarcity, as opposed to the functional theory of post-scarcity and the economic orientation it creates. I apologize if that sounds a little convoluted.
I'll start by saying that to define post-scarcity is not to talk about any specific technology. To define post-scarcity is not to imply there's going to be a universal abundance of everything, as if one can snap their fingers and everyone just has access to anything imaginable like the Star Trek replicator. The difference between a scarcity based society and a post-scarcity based society is that unlike a scarcity based one, the intention of industry in a post-scarcity focused world is to make their industry obsolete through efficiency. It is to produce such an optimized level of extraction, design, production, and distribution efficiency that over time, the amount of resources needed to accomplish a product or service becomes marginal.
An entirely new economic vocabulary is needed in a post-scarcity orientation, strategic durability, compatibility, interchangeability, optimized standardization, and other features and factors that connect things in design on the system level. In other words, efficiency is not just in the context of an individual good. It's not the singular item itself in its own singular design. The design has to be incorporated. It's about the entire industry sector and beyond. This holds up the design principle of integration. And to create true efficiency, you need true integration. The more integrative the whole of industry becomes, the more efficient it will become. Standardization is the easiest example of this top level design initiative.
So an automobile has parts. While they can be proprietary to the car with no consideration of other design models in industry, or you standardize as much as possible. So when someone brings their car to be repaired, nothing has to be ordered. There is such great standardization of the parts within that model, things that have been decided upon as being optimized in efficiency, mind you, and you remove a great deal of strife and waste.
By the way, if you're engineer-minded, this is an excellent technical exercise, how do you optimize entire industries to be as efficient and streamlined as possible reducing waste?
Now people of course will say, "Oh, but what about competition? We got to have multiple cell phone companies and car companies making new types of innovations to lure people in." And what you realize is all of that is also wasted. It's utterly inefficient to have a competition based society when you could simply share the information with the public, mind you, and you can start to get actual feedback systems that aren't based on effectively arbitrary suggestion. And this brings the conversation to an area that I do not want to deal with today, and it has to do with the fact that we are creating sick wants and needs in society because of this innovative competitive process in concert with marketing and advertising, because that's how the system of manipulation socially works. So I'll leave that alone for now.
So back on point, everything in this discussion of efficiency, whether we have it working at this time or not in terms of optimization, we have certainly seen a good deal of benefit from the efficiency we have created. And this leads me to the notion of zero marginal cost, which is commonly used by Jeremy Rifkin, a known author and great thinker. And as I've talked about before, zero marginal cost is another way of describing what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization. However, ephemeralization is about the actual process of efficiency through time as science and technology evolves. Ephemeralization means we're able to do more and more with less and less, which is the definition of true economic efficiency. In fact, I would go so far to say it is the definition of what economic wealth actually is. Wealth being a process, not an outcome.
So in contrast, the phrase zero marginal cost puts ephemeralization into the market system context, the connection being the more efficiency, the lower the price. So a cell phone becomes super cheap versus many, many years ago because the technology is improved, there's been mass production, et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, this idea that improved economic efficiency can be defined by cost relationships continues to pollute discourse.
Some may know Peter Diamandis' book called Abundance, which does a good job discussing the more with less phenomenon and how things have become more democratized and even de-monetized in certain contexts, with the lower class having access to things they once didn't and so on, showing improvement. His argument, unfortunately, is that we should just let entrepreneurs keep doing what they're doing, battling out in the wasteful competitive manner. And if we keep doing that, we will eventually reach a zero marginal cost society where pretty much everything is so cheap, it's marginal. And somehow capitalism will adapt to this, somehow maintaining the market system and so on while this kind of pseudo utopia eventually emerges. And while this pattern can be seen in pockets, the fundamental logic is, of course, wrong because this efficiency move approaching zero marginal costs has not been in the direct interest to generate an abundance or to provide more people with access they didn't once have. The whole thing is a side effect, not an intent. Profit seeking and establishment preservation tendencies of corporations still remain, and none of them are seeking to make themselves obsolete, you can rest assured.
What we see in the zero marginal cost environment today is basically an illusion. They provide something for free, access is given, it seems abundant, it seems as if it's all for the sake of an altruistic interest, but it's not. It simply becomes a gimmick. Yeah, you can get a free email from Google and it seems like everything's great, you can communicate for free. How great is that? Well, of course it comes at a cost because Google mines your emails and uses you as a product, also promoting advertising to you, et cetera, et cetera. The bank doesn't give away a toaster back in the day because the toaster is great and they want toasters to be abundant and everyone should have great toast. They do it because they statistically figured out the more toasters they give away, they're going to have more people sign up for bank accounts and they're going to make more money. That is the gimmickry of the more with less phenomenon. And when people say that we're going to approach zero marginal cost in, say, energy systems anytime soon, it's just so fantastically delusional because no industry is going to make themselves obsolete.
We see the trend in ephemeralization. We see the efficiency trend. We see the potential as all of these other guys I've mentioned before have- Jeremy Rifkin, Raymond Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis. And they just ignorantly think that the system is going to conform to that wonderful efficiency trajectory to make an abundant society and have people have access, but it's not and it doesn't. It's an illusion in the system.
Now, someone could just dismiss me as being cynical and say this is conjecture. We see examples of things that have become demonetized and democratized, and that happens to be true, but you can't sideline the very foundational ethic of the system. Plus empirically, we know the system fights abundance.
As I wrote about extensively in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, there was a period of time where we hit a surplus upon the industrial revolution where it became clear that we were able to produce more supply than there was demand. So much so, the captains of industry and the government had to come together and convince people through a massive publicity and propaganda campaign, all sorts of things about how they had to keep buying and throwing away so they can defeat the communists, keep the American dream alive. This stunning rejection of the idea of trying to find equilibrium with human needs and human wants in industry.
In 1929, Charles F. Kettering, a very famous industrialist, wrote an article called Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied. In this article, he complains about the rise of industrial efficiency and how people are just not consuming as much as they need to. The way he argues it is to say this is about progress in general, not as much about just the need for repeat purchases, even though he highlights that as well.
He states, using the context of car production, "We as manufacturers must offer those improvements after they've been found to be capable improvements. The public buys and disposes of what it has. The law of economy and mass production enters here. We are permitted to turn out cars in volume because there is a market for them. If automobile owners do not dispose of their cars to a lower buying strata, they would have to wear out their cars with a consequent, tremendous cutting in the yearly demand for automobiles, a certain increase in production costs and the natural passing along of these costs to the buyer. If everyone was satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined. The timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us. You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing or accept hard times. You can have your choice."
This quote embraces the fundamental ethic of our society when faced with the ability to create an abundance to meet more human needs with less resources required. Industry instead moves to compensate for that by increasing consumption, by forcing a kind of ethic upon culture to keep as much money moving as possible. And that is the nature of the system and why the techno capitalist apologists, as I call them, really fall flat on this front. You can't have a post-scarcity abundant end or a zero marginal cost end in an economic system that is explicitly based on scarcity as an exploitative function. And to say we're going to just evolve out of it and there'll be a natural transformation of the system, is also deeply and utterly naive.
As I've said before, sustainability, efficiency, and conservation are the enemies of our current economic system. And the strongholds will remain. Yes, we could have had zero marginal cost energy on this planet by now using renewables. The stronghold of the oil industry will not allow it with its tentacles in major governments and beyond. Capitalism will continue to produce a mafia groupistic tendency for domination. And you're not going to override that tendency with the slow emotion efficiency of zero marginal cost, assuming we're just going to eradicate these major institutions and groups because of this tendency. The tendency will continue to be stifled is my point.
In fact, if we were truly on a path in capitalism towards a post-scarcity abundance, zero marginal costs, we would have already seen vast layers of human needs being met through the process. It would have already happened. We would have already seen free transport, at least in the wealthy nations. We'd have already seen completely free food. We'd have already seen zero marginal costs reach telecommunications and other related core utility technologies. We do not see this. We see a little bit of a cost reduction in some contexts and continued price growth in most contexts. Have cell phones, very much tied Moore's law, have they gotten cheaper over the past decade? No, they haven't. What about automobiles in general? Have they gotten cheaper since the mass industrial era? No, they really haven't compared to income, but at least it's being recognized. At least we see the efficiency tendency and it's being discussed, even though it's not discussed in the right context or with the right focus.
Now, as I commented earlier as a sub point here, it's important people learn how to talk about post-scarcity without falling victim to the technological trap. The pursuit of post-scarcity has nothing to do with any particular kind of technology. I see this all the time, people are on podcasts and radio shows and interviews and they write books and they harp on the technology more than they do the process of growing efficiency. The technology is always going to change. There's great information to be found in the integrative logic of 3D printers, and industrial automated systems, industrial automated networks to transport and all of that post-scarcity stuff people have talked about, but it's important to remember the focus isn't on the technology. It's about the transformation. And more importantly, it's about how we design our economic system holistically to embrace the rise of ephemeralization and more with less, not fight it, which we do now.
That aside, to clarify the nuts and bolts of the ephemeralization in a contemporary sense, what we're dealing with is the rise and exponential value of information technology. Information technology. As we know, the chip in your cell phone is many, many times more powerful than the biggest, most expensive computer of 50 years ago. However, within that processing power evolution, we also have the ability to compute around other phenomenon with the tool. I apologize that this is a little complicated to explain, but the point being is that if you take the data set that comprises the design or the interest to solve a problem, and you use the exponential state of information technology through computer power, meaning you're letting the computer understand what the problem is as a tool, and this isn't about artificial intelligence, even though that's right around the corner and will further compound and accelerate this process, hopefully for the better, you are able to approach or achieve exponential advancement in that given issue.
So for example, with the ability of exponentially increasing computational power, you can take such a tool and apply it to, say, renewable energy development. And if done correctly, as we have already seen to a degree, this ability to compute, this ability to utilize the advancement of this processing power will naturally increase the speed of renewable energy development. So I hope that's clear.
The ultimate question comes down, to what kind of environment is going to be conducive for this vibrant development, this vibrant advancement of efficiency to allow for a zero marginal cost or, forget the cost part, a general post-scarcity abundance? That again is not a state. It is a trajectory that will be defined by the methods we utilize.
Now, the final thing I want to talk about in this podcast, shifting gears, is just to reflect on the history of this kind of thinking and the figures that have emerged. Most listening are probably familiar with the Venus Project, Jacque Fresco, Buckminster Fuller, and people I've talked about prior, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Jeremy Rifkin, and a host of other contemporaries out there that engage this conversation. But from a scholarly standpoint, where can we find the first origin of this kind of thinking in documented literature?
In my own research, I discovered a book by a man named John Etzler called the Paradise within the Reach of all Men, published in 1833. Now mind you, 1833 is 40, 50 years before Edison even invented the light bulb. These were very primitive technological times compared to today. But the Paradise within the Reach of all Men, while it's a bit eccentric, is probably the very first post-scarcity book ever written almost 200 years ago, which I think is absolutely fascinating.
He talks about the use of machinery as opposed to human labor mechanization. He writes about building a community design system, like a city that's completely sustainable based on these principles. He writes extensively about integrative renewable energy long before potentials were even really realized. He talks about how the world can nourish a thousand times the current population if we simply became more efficient on mechanization. He writes up, "The first element of mechanics teach that there is no motion imaginable that could not be produced by some adaptive mechanism provided we have the requisite power." He continues on the subject of renewable energy, "We have a super abundance of power a million times greater than all men on earth could effect hitherto. The powers are chiefly to be derived from wind, from the tide, and the heat of the sun. Each of these powers require no consumption of materials, only materials for the construction of the machineries."
He touches upon how we can adapt society to mechanization of labor in very similar terms that we hear today, 200 years later. He says, "Once established, there will be no occasion for any work except the superintendents of machinery, which requires one to three persons in all the whole of community. If done by turns, every adult would hardly have one turn for one day's superintendence in the whole year. But it would probably be done voluntary, being about an amusement and no tedious occupation of labor." Sound familiar?
And most importantly, I think, in this writing is the general observation and reasoning to have disdain for an economy based on markets and money. He states, "Today, we drudge and toil in agriculture and in manufactories making many useful and many useless things for human life, for supplying many various demands and necessities, comforts and luxuries. We little care about the real benefit our industry may afford to the buyer, provided we make money by their sale. This is an endless variety of artificial productions of every kind resulting from competition of the producers." He continues, "What virtue can be in passing one's life like a prisoner in the treadmill? The occupations of manner or present state of advancement are yet not much better. They are either a monotonous drudgery or some insipid occupation, which nothing but custom and necessity may render tolerable in some degree, but which are the very means to keep the mind in inactivity in low trivial pursuits." He continues, "What is the mighty object of leading such a life? To get money in order to buy what one wants. Is this the most exalted virtue, the highest destination of man's life that can be thought of in this world? It may be a virtue or a necessary evil in a state of general ignorance and prejudice, but it is no virtue found in nature." Again, does any of this sound familiar? 200 years ago.
So lots of interesting stuff in that book, and I recommend it as a historical treatment. It's a very eccentric book at the same time. Etzler was very eccentric. He actually tried to build some of his exotic machines out of wood and these terribly inefficient mechanistic means, but at least he tried. And of course history has more or less dismissed him as a technological utopianist. So interesting stuff.
Thank you all for joining me today. I didn't get to any Q&As, but I will do that next round. And I do have quite a few that people have already submitted through the sub Reddit, but you can go there as well if you'd like to submit more. I appreciate everybody and be safe out there. Thank you.