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Artificial Scarcity and Entitlement

Imagine for a moment that tomorrow a company perfects the Replicator, as envisioned by Star Trek: a device capable of manufacturing any object, of any complexity — food, drink, clothing or machinery — for negligible energy and material costs. How would contemporary culture adapt to such a device?

In Star Trek (and other science fiction with similar fantastical technology) the existence of such devices leads to cultures where currency has been rendered obsolete, and no person need go hungry or unsheltered. But it’s hard to believe that replicators would ever precipitate the same utopian outcome in the real world.

The dawn of ubiquitous computing and communications has had a disruptive effect on numerous previously-stable business models. Those affected most are usually those which relied upon the scarcity of a resource, be that news, music or television programs.

Each one in turn has found itself confronted with a paradigm shift leading away from scarcity, and typically has failed to adapt to the new order that develops. What began with Napster in the late ‘90s has led to everything from news pay-walls to Digital Rights Management on movies and music. When these measures inevitably fail new legislation is lobbied for to plug the gaps, but by that point it’s too late to change perceptions: the resource is manifestly no longer scarce.

Once this becomes apparent to the general populace, the value of that resource tends to drop rapidly. Music once had an intrinsic value, but clearly it was tied to the scarcity of the medium — you could lend a CD to a friend and until they returned it you didn’t have that CD to play yourself.

Once the physical medium no longer played a part in that transaction and one could make a perfect copy at no cost it was only natural that people would share these copies with one another. Big media like to portray this as theft, but in reality, just as with the Replicators in science fiction, the scarcity has been replaced with abundance and with it the business models that rely upon it have become obsolete.

The solutions to these problems aren’t all readily apparent, and many experiments in how to maintain a profitable business around the distribution of these resources are still underway, most of which try to introduce artificial scarcity. One such example would be Spotify. Ignoring the egregious terms for artists, for some Spotify represents a good value proposition for convenience, while for others it only makes sense to use whilst remains free.

How you feel about this is likely to be tied in with how often you listen to new music, and how often you listen to music you already own in some other form. Nonetheless, with expectations set by a new age of abundance, it’s not unreasonable for some to feel aggrieved at the service introducing increasingly onerous levels of artificial scarcity, with restrictions on how much music you can listen to in a given period, and more frequent (unskippable) advertising.

This sentiment isn’t the same as entitlement: it’s a natural reaction to artificial scarcity, and those that attack this reaction are simply struggling to rationalise what is in effect a significant transitionary point in civilisation. As Clay Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus, “When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity.” There is no law written that states that every business model is entitled to exist in perpetuity.

We’re a long way from the utopian future Gene Roddenberry and others imagined would exist once we lived in a world of abundance, but if we’re to ever get there we need to discard the notion that the intrinsic value of things is determined solely by its scarcity.