Blog: May 2005

What would happen if scarcity were eliminated? Is that even possible? Many works of science fiction envision such a future — Star Trek, for example, has no "money" and people supposedly seek only personal enlightenment rather than material goods. But they still have Ferengi and gold-pressed latinum and space freighters when plot lines demand it. My co-worker Saskia recently posed the question of why the Harry Potter universe has class distinctions based on wealth (the Weasleys are poor while the Malfoys are rich) when they have magical spells to do all the housework, and so nobody should have to wear ragged clothes, for example. But Rowling isn't an economist and good fantasy & science fiction literature is really about telling stories about our society through the mirror of another world, so she uses the same social and economic structures from the world she knows.

In truth, we have no idea what a society without material scarcity would look like. Since human beings by nature compete with each other, we might expect the method of "keeping score" to revolve around something other than material possessions. Would individuals compete on intelligence? Charisma? Ownership of real estate? Our would our desire for material goods, or our population size, simply expand so greatly that no matter how much energy we could gather from the sun and no matter how technology advances in order to use that energy to create material goods, the demand would grow to keep pace with the supply?

Matt Stoller, filtering Stirling Newberry, says that an economy revolves around its bottlenecks. Our bottleneck today is oil. In the past it has been other things, like labor. If we remove one bottleneck we go through a period of great economic prosperity where everyone benefits until we inevitably run into the next one. So absent the development of interstellar space flight, if we somehow develop magic spells or replicators, I'd put my bet on real estate becoming the bottleneck. The population will grow, and now having a single-family home with a lawn and a picket fence isn't so cheap anymore, giving us a future more like Asimov's super-cities in "Caves of Steel".

But then, who's to say magic spells or replicators are any more likely than warp drive? We can't predict scientific breakthroughs, so until there is one, energy is where it's at.

This is an idea I've wanted to add to the Cosmopolity calendar for a while. You can already RSVP for events on there, so we could create a page that outputs the next few events in a compact form which people could then include on their sites using an IFRAME. But since you can't add your own events to Cosmopolity, it's not as useful.

I built this using Trumba, a new personal calendar service. It's pretty neat; my brother created a calendar too which I can now see, and we created a shared family calendar to track who is on the Vineyard which weekend. Trumba would be well advised to make it easy for people to embed their personal calendars on sites, but they don't yet have an easy way to do this, so I had to write a script to download the RSS, parse it, and generate HTML.

Wednesday, a rally with the Alliance for Quality Education with Laughing Liberally comedian Katie Halper, State Senator Eric Schneiderman, and actress Cynthia Nixon, who is a very sweet person, put on the Drinking Liberally button I presented her, and then stayed around to talk to people after the event.

Thursday, Drinking Liberally featuring special appearances by Congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who stopped by and made a few brief remarks, and City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Gifford Miller, who went one better by staying around for almost an hour, drinking, eating Rudy's free hot dogs, and impressing many attendees.

And on Friday the Thirteenth, the final 42nd Street performance of ImproVision, and Brian Rosenthal's 27th birthday.

I need nearly a whole day off just to edit the photos!

Both John Aravosis and Steven Hart came up with the same joke: if he runs again, we can say, "I voted for John Kerry before I voted against him." (I actually could have said that last year, since I voted for him in 1996 for Senate before I voted against him in the 2004 New York primary.)