Abundant Systems

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.

Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

It requires different thinking to take advantage of abundance. Abundant systems teach people to think abundantly.

“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too.” - Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

WORLDBUILDING: Multiplayer collaging the future

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H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

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When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

Austin Kleon • KURT VONNEGUT ON THE NEED FOR BUILDING EXTENDED FAMILIES

Extended Family is important. Why not choose the extended family we bring in?

An abundant system is a system in which any individual in a system acting to achieve their own goals does not negatively impact the other participants’ pursuit of their goals. Another way of saying this is that the system isn’t a zero-sum game.

Introduction to Abundant Systems

Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

Designing Your Own Infinite Game In The Creator Economy - Boundless

Does this have to be true?

Competition is an outdated concept. Instead of trying to ensure you win, try to help everyone win. There's plenty to go around. Refusing to share is just holding you back.

The new economy isn't zero-sum. It's time to realize that and start approaching things differently.

Leo Guinan • The Build In Public Manifesto

abundance at the core

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.

Mario Gabriele • Scarcity as an API

Abundant systems remove the need for this.

Over time, plenitude is a process in which more and more goods and services are provided to more and more people, as technologies advance and costs come down to grant new free ‘indulgences’ every year.

noemamag.com • Will AI Bring Plentitude or Further Imperil the Planet? | NOEMA

I love this idea

Each technology not only unlocks a new state of expanded acceleration (that will be hardcoded into our lives as the new basis for our survival), but will also be used as the basis for new technologies to continue that process. The vast majority of people do not experience this technology as ‘liberating’ them. Rather, they experience it as something... See more

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

Because we don’t think about valuing the work to be done in the future, only the work to be done now, we don’t give people space to explore what the future holds. Instead, we stress people out by giving them vague possibilities of an uncertain future with no time to explore them. By giving people the time, space, and freedom to explore what the future might hold, they will find abundant futures that are bright and exciting. Those are the futures they will work to actively create.