Seminars and scarcities

Catching up on the Crooked Timber archives today, I saw they’ve done several seminars since last I looked, on three books/series I’d love to read: Jo Walton’s The Just City and The Philosopher Kings,Ada Palmer’sTerra Ignotaseries,and Cory Doctorow’s_Walkaway._For those of you unfamiliar with Crooked Timber, it’s a community blog and their ‘seminars’ are when people all post reviews and reflections on the same work within a short period of time.

While as I said I’ve love to read all of those books, with adulthood comes the sorrowful certainty that I will never get to everything on my reading list.  So I ordered myself a copy of the first book in Ada Palmer’s series, set that seminar aside, and got to reading the rest.

There is already a_lot_ of content in the three linked seminars, so I’m not going to add anything of particular weight here, but I did want to highlight two things:

First, Ada Palmer’s contribution to the Jo Walton seminar is spectacular:Plato vs. Metaphysics, or How Very Hard it Is to Un-Learn Freud.  If you’re only going to read one piece from either seminar, read that.

Second, several of the reviews of Doctorow’s_Walkaway_ mention that in it, 3D printing creates a post-scarcity society.  I am very tired of the phrase ‘post-scarcity society’, which seems to frame scarcity as a naturally occurring obstacle that eventually technology will allow us to progress beyond.  To be fair, I don’t know if Doctorow’s book actually uses the term, or the framing.  But from the reviews it seems like he might.

I gave a talk at LibrePlanet back in 2016 on artificial scarcity of physical resources like food and clothing.  The whole reason I gave the talk was to point out that scarcity is more often caused by politics or economics than a lack of technology.  It is a very rough talk, because I’m not at all an expert on any of this, but perhaps it’s worth dusting off my notes and writing up a transcript.