Abundant Systems
a scarce system is one in which there are limited resources and one person in the system getting those resources means that everyone else can’t have those same resources. A zero-sum game.
Introduction to Abundant Systems
That means there are three main components to identify when looking at a system: the people, the interaction (i.e. the sharing of information), and the shared context (i.e. what that group of people have in common).
Introduction to Abundant Systems
Breaking down a system - look at the 3 components
Algorithms are simply subsystems of the companies that create them, so when we want to examine the systems we use and are a part of, it is an extremely helpful lens to use.
Introduction to Abundant Systems
Algorithms can be analyzed through the lens of systems
If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.
Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community
And more than anything, it feels particularly, uncomfortably, acutely uncertain.
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
The biggest thing we can do is give people a sense of a secure present from which to explore potential abundant futures.
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.
Andy Weissman • On art and business and context and mirrors
This isn’t actually true by default. Networks of scarce systems end up creating winner take all situations from abundance.
Cooperation is the winning strategy in the Great Online Game.
Packy McCormick • The Cooperation Economy 🤝
This is the key to abundant systems - it’s the optimal strategy.
"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."
Ben Thompson • Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators
We’ve created abundant scarce systems that result in winner take all behavior.
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.