After the age of scarcity

http://ignoredbydinosaurs.com/2012/05/after-age-scarcity

by Jgrubb • 14 years ago

61 34 14 years ago

This is absolutely true - for digital content.

For physical content, scarcity still sells. Take Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter - selling huge amounts of specially made CDs, books, personal visits, etc.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palm...

eragnew3• 14 years ago

Absolutely agree. But what if the next big wave is making physical 'content' abundant instead of scarce? 3D printing, the internet of things, etc. That's what I'm starting to think about...

pdelgallego• 14 years ago

There are a couple of interesting books about that topic [1, 2]

The premise of most of them is that innovation its outpacing the hability of the average person to keep him self employable. That will lead to massive unemployment, bigger wealth inequality and social unrest.

[1] Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

[2] The lights in the tunnel. Where will advancing technology, job automation, outsourcing and globalization lead?

figglesonrails2• 14 years ago

Meh. If I can print a spatula or buy one for $1 at Wal-Mart, I could care less. Printing will work for some stuff, but consider a) materials used to print still aren't any more plentiful just because you can shape them and b) expensive, hetereogenous, multipart things can't be printed, e.g. a complete car (engine, chairs, windshield, seatbelts, etc.) 3D printing looks like it makes cheap items cheaper. So, what, we put a few businesses out and free up some of China's workforce?

sellandb• 14 years ago

I understand what you are trying to say. I am curious though what you recommend as a monetization strategy if you take that route? I suppose ad revenue is always the old fall back, but I would imagine that for a lot of the content out there, that is not free to produce, there needs to be some way to pay the bills.

Jgrubb3• 14 years ago

Using the digital content as basically a loss leader for things that can't be distributed digitally, namely live performances and merch that you'd sell at those live performances.

alainbryden• 14 years ago

It's artists also have a little success with digital 'busking' - where you intentionally deliver high quality content for free, along with a message that asks people to toss a few bucks your way if they think you're worth it.

The best written one I've ever seen was Benn Jordan's "Hello Downloader", which is included in all of his self-released torrents: http://www.alphabasic.com/Please_read.html

sp332• 14 years ago

Well if the things you need are not scarce, then it doesn't take as much money to "pay the bills."

corysama• 14 years ago

Let me know when you have a strategy to make housing into a post-scarcity good like software.

mr_luc• 14 years ago

There's always the old standby: custom-made, one-off products.

A concert, for instance; lots of musicians make money through performance.

Depending on how crowd-pleasin' your creation is, or how well you've done at finding a crowd, there's a bit of tension possible; a husband who commissioned a Dali portrait of his wife ended up hanging it in his kennels to underscore what he thought of it.

digitalsushi• 14 years ago

I often daydream about the future of products. I like to imagine what it would be like without fresh fruit, or water so scarce it's illegal to water the lawn. I also imagine the model's counterpart, that some things have become very easy to produce. The article refers to digital content, which can be infinitely reproduced without burden.

But I like to wonder, are there physical goods that are close to this digital model - are there some things we can make so much of, that we'll never have to really worry about their production? More to the point, are we entering a period where the baseline is that a person who refuses to work can literally not starve to death because of abundance? If most jobs eventually turn to digital production that can be so easily shared like the article suggests, could we ever see a planet where there are simply not enough jobs and that working is optional since you could subsist on free products?

pacala• 14 years ago

To paraphrase a somewhat popular song from behind the iron curtain: "today I saw again on the TV some fresh fruit".

There is no free lunch. You need energy and commodities to get products, and these will be scarce for the foreseeable future.

ctdonath• 14 years ago

At least in the USA...

We irrigate our lawns with drinking water.

We pay farmers to not grow (or to dump what they do).

The greatest medical malady of our poor is obesity.

1 in 50 live on government-provided welfare.

The "poverty line" is twenty times world median income.

Not quite the idealized form you have in mind, but getting there.

othello• 14 years ago

"If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers."

Probably the best quote from the post. Soon the only way of making a living from a creative endeavour might be to be funded by patrons, then releasing your content for free. A generalized Louis CK model if you will.

Funny how that would bring us back to pre-18th century days where patronage was the only business model in town for creative types, with all the constraints that came with artists-patrons relationships.

Except in this world everybody would get to play Medicis or Louis XIV. I certainly hope that "crowd-patronage" will mitigate the limitations of artistic freedom that often came with traditional patronage.

bluedanieru2• 14 years ago

I hope Kickstarter eventually does something like this, except with some guarantees on delivery. Like pledges that are only released once the content is delivered.

nextstep• 14 years ago

That doesn't work. Inventors on Kickstarter need that initial money to create their first product. If we say "no money 'til we have the product," then the inventors will have to go somewhere else to get that seed funding. And then we're back to square one.

hammock• 14 years ago

Programming is following the same model, except it's called a talent acquisition.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Isn't 'crowd-patronage' essentially letting the market decide?

It wouldn't require that many fans either -- assuming each fan brought 30 bucks worth of merch and donations, you are looking at a middleclass wage at 2K fans. No matter how obscure your genre is, it ought to be possible to get 2k fans.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

I would say it is forcing the market to decide.

When I have to be a patron, I can't just lean back and honor good products by buying them. I have to look up names, sample their past work, invest money in projects that might suck.

I'd do everything that investors are paid for right now. Except I would feel I'm wasting my life away because I'm doing all this over €10, not €10m.

Jgrubb3• 14 years ago

I actually wrote a couple paragraphs down that road, but it started sounding too Bob Lefsetz, so I scrapped them. I think we're already (back) in the age of the creative/patron model.

As far as the limitations that come with traditional patronage, I'd say the limitations that came with traditional record contracts were probably at least as restrictive since the label was operating under that assumption that this was a business deal at the end of the day, whereas the patron has no expectations for recouping their investment. At least not monetarily.

zdw• 14 years ago

Creative works have always been purchased on a "Do I enjoy this enough to buy it?" basis. We're used to sampling art, and it's always been this way, whether it be via public art, radio, etc., then we go buy it if we like it. The internet is an evolution of this, but without the controls that distributors are used to (payola anyone?).

What RadioLab is trying to do here is using a "free gift" to goose the people who enjoy what they make into giving them some coin.

This is very common in public radio and TV, but usually comes in the form of a free t-shirt or coffee mug. In that case the "gift" has dual purpose - it also functions as advertisement and a physical reminder to go watch/listen to the thing you helped support.

mise• 14 years ago

There's scarcity in spending time with a particular person, for example. Meeting their producers sounds like a good "exclusive" bit of interaction, but I agree about non-exclusivity of content.

Jgrubb3• 14 years ago

Precisely. Great songs that touch people are exceedingly scarce. Recordings of great songs are not. Same goes for great books, great movies, great product design.

etrain• 14 years ago

This goes beyond creative works, but to many other types of digital content.

I remember hearing John McAfee discussing trying to come up with a way to sell software, and say something like "here was this thing, that cost absolutely nothing to reproduce and transmit - and so I decided I could give it away for free, and charge for the updates."

Pretty much the Gillette Razor model for the 21st century.

sethg• 14 years ago

Differential pricing is a retail strategy that predates the Internet. If you want to be one of the first people to read a new book by an author you like, you have to spend to get it in hardcover; if you don’t like the hardcover price, wait a year and then buy it in paperback. You can watch a new movie in the theaters, or wait to pick it up on DVD. Pay sticker price for whatever groceries you want, or make the effort to collect coupons and buy the things that are on sale. Etc., etc. It’s all artificial scarcity, in the sense that nothing prevented a publisher from putting out a book only in paperback from day one.

“Exclusive content” is the same idea: the only difference is that the discounted price is zero.

figglesonrails2• 14 years ago

Yep, and time and time again has shown people pay for sooner. I really think people who assume "scarcity" is the only factor in economic models aren't seeing the whole picture. Exclusivity of group membership (I have a t-shirt, jacket, etc. with this awesome logo I can advertise my social status/beliefs), being "first" in a social group, and just plain impatience or apathy contribute greatly. If everyone was purely rational, I'm pretty sure we'll all use refillable water bottles, personal water filters, and buy food in bulk. Assuming the motivations behind every actor in the economy are purely rational is utterly naive.

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

Convenience is still scarce. Digital content doesn't seem quite as abundant to less technically inclined people than HN readers.

T_S_• 14 years ago

In this post-material economy, attention is what is scarce. Quality interactions are scarce. Of course we will are not quite there yet, and the material economy is becoming more influenced by externalities like carbon output. Both trends are making it difficult to use the price system as an efficient means of allocating resources.

After the age of scarcity

Related Stories