7/28/24
Ephemeralization
This is number seventy-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
MY NEW STORY IDEA takes place in the distant future. (A hundred years? A thousand?) Long enough for evolution to have an effect on who we are, understanding that we are already 600-800,000 years into that cycle. But many of the questions remain the same as those we face today. This, then, is part of the world building.
It is possible for us to meet the physical needs of every living being on our planet. Ephemeralization is real. For millennia we have been doing more with less and less. If you return to the early twentieth century, you will find the antecedents of the current computer technology—massive things that filled a room. Since that time, we have constantly created more and more powerful computing devices that are smaller and smaller. The personal computer. The laptop computer. The cell phone and smartphone. Smart watches. Implantable devices.
A pacemaker the size of a pea can be inserted in the heart to keep it beating at a consistent rate even long after a person dies. This can be replaced by a microchip in the brain that regulates the signals for a beating heart.
Now, what do I mean by meeting the physical needs? For a person, I would say shelter from the elements, food for nourishment, physical health. And sex, I suppose. That is a physical need that all creatures function better with. I listed that instead of clothing. I call clothing a psychological need. It is not the same for everyone.
We find the use of deliberate clothing that wasn’t needed to provide shelter or warmth, was a development of Homo sapiens only about 200,000 years ago. It came after the development of tools, pottery, and fire.
Can we provide for every creature’s psychological needs? As long as the psychological need is within the realm of the physical, yes. There is plenty to go around. But here is where need and desire often get confused. Psychologically, we may need clothing, love, companionship, art, security, self-determination, and knowledge.
However, desires often conflict with providing these fundamental needs. Those desires include wealth, power, greed, lust, envy, and pride. Hmm. Remarkably close to the seven deadly sins, but these are the desires that may openly conflict with the needs of others. Because some desire wealth, others are left poor. Because some desire power, others are left insecure and dominated. Because some desire elaborate and expensive clothing, others are left in rags or naked.
I noticed the conflict you did. I listed sex as a physical need, but lust as a psychological desire. Lust is a one-way path. It is the desire of one person placed over the self-determination of another. It may apply to sex, money, possessions, station in life, or relationships.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the species of earth lived in an economy of scarcity. If the crop was poor, we died. If there was a drought or a fire, we died. If the hunt came back empty, we died. And as a result of this mindset of scarcity, we determined that we were not entitled to our basic needs if we did not work for or earn them. The value of each creature was based on what they could produce.
But we no longer live in a time of scarcity. We have an economy of abundance. And once the individual’s basic needs are all met, we no longer equate personal worth to the accumulation of wealth. Those who directly impact the society by improving conditions for all, are directly rewarded. They need not shy away from contributing because the fruits of their labor are collected by a magnate to increase his or her power and wealth.
“So, why…” you ask, “…do people not simply stop working and live a life of sloth?”
Some do. In fact, we see evidence that a devolved species is emerging that has no desire beyond the basic physical needs—living the lives of the lower animals. For it is desire that drives the improvement of one’s lot in life, not physical needs. With physical needs met—food, shelter, health, and sex—it is the psychological needs and desires that drive a person forward.
Let me remind you that the psychological needs include clothing, love, companionship, art, security, self-determination, and knowledge. We do well to provide an environment where such things are available and attainable, but we cannot simply assign love from some storeroom in our society and fulfill that psychological need. Certain behaviors, including labor and social contribution, make it possible for an individual to fulfill their own psychological needs. As long as society provides an environment where such things are available and attainable, people will strive to contribute in order to attain them.
In generations past, people had to spend most of their labor and creativity on attaining the basic physical needs of food, shelter, health, and sex. There was no leeway to improve through labor and to fulfill the psychological needs, let alone any other desires a person might have.
Above, I listed desires that conflict with the needs of others, but not all desires conflict with these physical or psychological needs. The simple desire for comfort is not a negative. With the basic physical needs met, one can attain comfort. The only difficulty with this is when comfort becomes uncomfortable. When the accumulation of property requires limitless work or the exploitation of others, then it is a burden instead of a comfort. It changes from comfort to greed.
In 2020-2021 I released two books in Thinking Horndog’s SWARM Cycle universe. In this universe, a visit from aliens to prepare earth for an invasion by a hostile species results in a sudden conversion from a scarcity economy to an economy of abundance through the introduction of alien replicator technology that provides just about anything desired.
I was troubled by this because of all the typical responses to the idea. Why doesn’t everyone just stop working then? Of course, in the SWARM Cycle, there is an impending alien invasion and everyone must prepare to fight for their lives. A selection of people qualify for emigration from earth, provided they will fight the mutual enemy in space. Each of those qualified individuals can take a quota of dependents who are nothing more or less than their slaves.
In Pussy Pirates, I track the creation of a group who refuse to leave earth. They battle the invading Sa’arm, but are not slaves or immigrants. In The Assassin, I track the development of a planet settled in the diaspora and how the supposed slaves came to run the planet through their labor and industry. Many of the same questions raised in this post are also in posed in these two very different books in the SWARM Cycle.
Pussy Pirates and The Assassin are available as eBooks from Bookapy.
With such a huge amount of machine labor available to us, what kind of contribution can one make to society?
First, with their physical needs met, one need not be afraid of machine labor replacing their own ability to contribute. Thus, art expands significantly. I am not referring to the splashing of paint on a canvas and seeking payment for it. Some painters may, indeed, exchange the fruit of their labor for psychological needs and desires. Machine-art, machine-writing, even machine-programming are banned and are the exclusive provinces of biological life.
Consider that bread from the factory producing food for the masses is good food. There is nothing wrong with it. But an artisan baker creating a few dozen delicious alternatives to factory bread will always find a market driven by the psychological needs and desires of others.
The machines that farm the land to provide food for the masses, have not replaced the gardens and small farms of those who love the land and its husbandry. The machines that build housing for the masses do not alter the need for carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers, and other artisans to provide more comfortable or aesthetically pleasing houses. There is always a demand for those crafts and there will always be professionals in those crafts as they, too, have needs and desires to fulfill.
We need not fear when we provide the physical needs for all beings.
I can only set these thoughts in the context of a distant future society. It would be too difficult to imagine them as part of today’s world. Yet… Perhaps we will evolve enough to recognize these as fundamental rights guaranteed to all. Next week, “The Singularity.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
