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title = "Abundance"
glassblowers = ["olgagoriunova.md"]
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There are many bad, or at least non-productive ways, to think about abundance. One is the digital abundance understood as the mere volume of things that can be made available as the material cost of the carrier (a file versus a book, tape or canvas) is reduced. This was the 1990s copyleft argument focusing on the elimination of degradation in quality associated with copying, and ease of distribution and storage. 

Now, digital abundance is a menace. There is too much stuff and the digital overload is intolerable. There is also too much stuff in general – in the Western world – and its quality is mostly poor. We usually hear this argument in relation to fast fashion, fast food and social media content. Such abundance relies on permanent consumption and ends up polluting people's brains, bodies, communities, beaches and forests, with whole countries designated as the rich world's rubbish dumps. From this point of view, a call for scarcity makes sense. Slow food, fewer material items, appraisal of relations in lieu of commodification reposition abundance and its relationship to scarcity. Here, the ecological cost of abundance is the planet.

Amongst projects attempting to address climate collapse then ![](bib:fa8bd539-edaf-40ed-99cd-3fa86e7a6e25) conjures an aesthetic of material scarcity as an urgent necessity. Classically, from Marx, scarcity is a “natural” condition, and now we must return to it, to combat commodification of people and relations and the destruction of the world. Abundance then is to be found in de-objectification, dealienation, conviviality, non-work and leisure, care, etc. These are older ideas, connected to the promise that when people are freed from the necessity of hard work (function of scarcity), they will be free to create (art), which is what brings meaning (God's replacement) and pleasure (engaging desire). However, generally speaking, the proposition of scarcity fails to intervene in the orchestrations of desire. It is hard to desire scarcity. Instead, what is needed is a reconceptualisation of abundance (alongside the narratives of any “natural condition” for humanity). This is also necessary to address existing practices of abundance that counter our current extractivist nightmares. 

So, how to think of it otherwise?

Borrowing and re-purposing ![](bib:5aa403d5-c826-4b6c-b084-3961bbddee23), we could say:
1. Scarcity is not primarily a “natural” condition. It is, first of all, a sense of insecurity;
2. Insecurity is produced socially and culturally (not only or not at all economically);
3. Such production is a function of exploitation;
4. Denial, renunciation and guilt is the subjective accompaniment of the condition of scarcity, which is always present as insecurity even at times/places of material abundance.

It follows then that abundance actually exists but it is scarcity that is produced and enforced. Examples are plentiful: there is an abundance of books and films but the intellectual property regimes create cultural scarcity. Variety in clothes does not need to come from the numerousness of individual items. 4 skirts and 4 tops (8 items in total) would give one 16 outfits; same as 1 skirt and 15 tops (16 items in total). Same with vegan food, usually presented as a restriction on abundance of non-vegan diets: soya will give you tofu, tempeh, natto, miso, edamame, yoghurt, oil, etc (Wikipedia lists 35 foods). Fermentation extends and multiplies the nutritional variety of the same food substances. Variety, therefore, does not mean large numbers of things. A smaller number of things can give one more variety. 

 What follows then is that these procedures involve selection, refinement, curation, preservation - and specific power relations produced, expressed and maintained in infrastructures, practices, institutions for doing so. Abundance can be produced when it is planned for and practiced. Digital abundance is no exception here. We must plan, design, care, develop and practice different digital abundance. 

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Quotes from ![](bib:5aa403d5-c826-4b6c-b084-3961bbddee23):

"To view the word 'post-scarcity' simply as meaning as large quantity of socially available goods would be as absurd as to regard a living organism simply as a lager quantity of chemicals … scarcity is more than a condition of scarce resources: the word, if it is to mean anything in human terms, must encompass social relations and cultural apparatus that foster insecurity in the psyche … this insecurity is a function of repressive limits established by an exploitative class structure". Pp.12-13

"[T]he word 'post-scarcity' means fundamentally more than a mere abundance of the means of life: it decidedly includes the *kind* of life this means support ... today, scarcity has to be enforced", p.59