I meant such topics such as Nicolas Taleb's antifragile - where an organism cannot be fed unlimited calories to become resilient to the times ahead.
Another example is within engineering with scarce inputs. The result is often much more ingenious than when the inventor or engineer has no limitations whatsoever.
Trying to figure out what to read or what to watch when everything in the knoen universe is at your fingertips, is another challenge where scarcity helps. I do like where we have ended up, regarding this though :).
We have enough food production to feed 30 billion people, and throw away massive amounts.
We have plenty of land and housing could be inexpensive or free for all.
Sunlight, wind, and tidal is literally 1kW/1m^2 free energy.
Pirates already can watch anything, listen to petabytes of music, access nearly every book including academic papers.
We really could be living in post-scarcity world. But its the oligarchs and billionaires who want to keep the spoils for themselves. And in the USA alone 8 billionaires own as much resources as the bottom 60% does.
Simply put, material scarcity is a fucked mindset. And we could grow past that - in fact I think we have to.
But we, at least in western society, want much more than just food. Even assuming that zero food waste is realistic.
Land is pretty cheap, except when you want to live in a city, especially big. Which is what most people want.
Sunlight is free, solar panel manufacturing and maintenance is not.
Pirates watch things for free, but the people that pay fund the production.
Most expensive things are expensive because they require labor, which is expensive. And people tend to actually want expensive things, even if they don't strictly require them - either as a status symbol, or just to make their life easier (a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner is not required to live, but most people can't imagine living without one).
Simply put, I think you either greatly oversimplify the problem and handwave the problem by just blaming "billionaires" for everything, or I don't understand your point properly.
I could have definitely used it in my company nowadays, as a paying org. A refresh of available apps would maybe be necessary now. Sandstorm was so awesome.
