Scarcity = Abundance - Trust (transcript)

Here's what I said in the video described in Scarcity = Abundance - Trust:

Trust is the lever that can turn scarcity into abundance. What's more, trust can also fix many of our problems with economics and capitalism.

I'm a realistic optimist, and I hope you'll be one too by the end of this short talk.

To get there though, let's start with a much more familiar equation: Scarcity equals value. You've heard this before, right?

Now, I went to the Wharton Business School where they taught me this principle, which is central to economics and capitalism. It's an idea that's easy to extrapolate to believe that scarcity is a prerequisite for a desirable business: No scarcity, no business model, no profits.

And from there, it's not too far to think that almost anything goes when you're busy trying to create scarcity. To make the argument for abundance and trust, I'll tell two stories, one recent, one not so recent.

The first is about IBM, which was the 800-pound gorilla in the tech business when I started as a tech industry analyst, and which appeared about to fail in the early 1990s. Among other problems, their lunch was being eaten by the workstation vendors Sun and Apollo, and my peers and I doubted that the mainframe would last very long, and maybe even thought that IBM would go under.

Then some internal mavericks convinced IBM's programmers to take a look at Apache, the open source web server software. They liked it and installed it across IBM's range of computers. They also installed TCP/IP, the communications protocol, and then they did the same for Linux, the operating system. Suddenly, all their machines could talk to each other and you could run software on multiple platforms.

By using all these pieces of code IBM did not own — IBM was famous for being very proprietary about its intellectual property — they saved the company. They proceeded to sell multiple billions of dollars in services across those refurbished platforms.

Open source software is a great example of abundance born from trust. Open source software is, for all practical purposes, infinite: Anyone can download and use it. But its health depends on many people collaborating to make it better over time. None of them own it, but they all play together because they get to use it, and that takes mechanisms of trust.

My second story is about indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia before the Europeans got to those places.

It turns out that the indigenous people, after much trial and error, had figured out how to manage their landscapes and turn much of their land masses into forest orchards and controlled grazing zones. For example, here's a weir, or fish trap, built long ago, possibly 20,000 years ago, by aborigines. Because they tracked every year when the fish were going to run, multiple tribes would show up at that time, close the traps, and feast on their catch, drying and saving the rest.

Of course, the first Europeans to see this thought this was lazy.

Australia's recent horrible wildfires have renewed interest in aboriginal fire stick farming, which they used to sculpt the landscape. Yes, indigenous groups had many conflicts and famines, but their lives weren't as difficult as we often think they were.

Ancient notions of stewardship and sharing are sometimes barely comprehensible to us modern folk, but they created abundance across their land. For more background, I recommend the books 1491 by Charles Mann and Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe.

The invading Europeans didn't recognize this human-generated abundance. They systematically destroyed it then, replacing it with industrial systems based on mass production, mass consumption, and ownership of everything. These systems were based on mistrust of the average person.

So, skipping past a lot of history, most of the institutions we take for granted today are actually designed from mistrust. I mean here the compulsory education system; our electoral system, which is mostly a consumer mass marketing exercise; culture, which was once sacred and now is now just art we buy and sell; and everything about our identity, nutrition, and happiness.

Do you feel like you have enough? Are enough? That's not likely, because consumerism would grind to a halt if you did, so it makes sure you always have unmet needs.

My own amateur theory of history is that long ago before the colonial era, many tribes understood deeply how to live in community on the commons. Those two words were immensely important to them and still are to surviving cultures.

This way of life wasn't easy or automatic. It was hard-earned wisdom that they passed down through generations. But their lives weren't nasty, brutish, and short, and the people weren't ignorant.

After trampling and replacing lots of this hard-earned wisdom, we proceeded to lose faith in humans, partly through the senseless, wasteful brutality of World War I, partly through the consumerization of every aspect of our lives, which dumbed us down.

In the process, we broke trust.

Today, broken trust looks like the stalker economy and surveillance capitalism, among many other things we consider normal. Worse, trust has been weaponized, with some parties intentionally undermining our trust in science, journalism, government, and one another.

Now, I promised an optimistic path, right?

Happily, we are rediscovering trust, community, meaning, purpose, and abundance. I've discovered hundreds of movements around the world already doing this, including the open-source example I just gave. But the systems that we're accustomed to and deeply embedded within still reinforce scarcity and profits over abundance and well-being. It's not that we need to abandon profits, but rather we should profit as we build community and improve our commons. So, we have a ways to go.

Exponential technologies can cut either way. They might help us automate and replicate our way to the much-promised world free of disease and want, or they might surveil and enslave us to the point that we're living lives we no longer want. Which way this goes depends on what we do these days. Our lives in lockdown because of the coronavirus really highlight the role of trust and open whole new huge opportunities.

If you'd like to start thinking this way now, adopt this saying from the open-source community, "Assume good intent." Remember, scarcity equals abundance minus trust. We can fix economics and capitalism and live amid abundance, but it will take swapping out some well-grooved beliefs and taking some leaps of trust.

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