Introduction to Abundant Systems

In a world of abundance, scarcity evolves. While pre-internet scarcity was about a physically constrained, or otherwise limited, number of resources, post-internet scarcity is about separating signal from noise.

Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.

We may live in an age of abundance, but with our sense of self tied to the proprietorship of rivalrous assets, scarcity will need to exist. Even if we must code it ourselves.

Yet, one of the superpowers of connected technologies - networks - is that they will remove scarcity if at all possible. Connected networks by definition make things abundant that were once scarce.

The concept of wholeness is integral to a systems thinking approach. A system is more than the sum of its parts—it's defined by the interaction of its parts. To understand how a system works, you have to study not the individual elements but the linkages between them. When you start thinking in systems, you can then spot opportunities for change. B... See more