The Age of Abundance

The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.

Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash

Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a discussion took place in a dark corner of reality where the fate of the world was being decided. I know this because I was there. In the early 2000s, I frequented many physical and virtual spaces filled with hackers and tech enthusiasts.

The emergence of a new language and a common protocol had set the internet in motion, bringing with it the possibility of continuous connection and information sharing with the entire world.

Years later, the democratization of blogs and social media made it possible for everyone to have their own space on the web. But in the ’90s, the 2000s, and up until Facebook arrived, only a small number of people were truly connected, at least in the sense we understand it today. Most people used the internet to consult static information—newspapers didn’t even have web versions yet.

Through mailing lists, text-based chat servers, and the first openly accessible websites, a vanguard of theorists, technicians, and activists engaged in an intense debate about the ethics, nature, and future of the internet and knowledge. This conversation unfolded over many years, almost in isolation from the rest of the world.

One of the most significant discussions of that time revolved around intellectual property. There were two opposing sides: on one hand, Microsoft championed "proprietary" software, a type of software whose code is secret and cannot be redistributed or modified by third parties. On the other hand, a swarm of hackers pushed for software to be "free"—meaning it could be used, shared, modified, and redistributed without restrictions.

Public and Private Goods

In economics, goods are divided into private and public. Private goods are competitive, meaning their consumption prevents someone else from consuming them. If I eat a tomato, another person cannot eat that same tomato—we compete for its consumption. Public goods, on the other hand, are those where consumption does not prevent anyone else from consuming them—for example, radio waves. If you listen to the radio, you are not preventing anyone else from listening.

The economy we know is well-equipped to handle private goods because they are easy to count and measure. A kilogram of tomatoes is a kilogram of tomatoes. But how much do song plays "weigh"? How many remixes can be made from a single track? The economy struggles even to comprehend public goods.

Those who argued that software should be proprietary believed that information—and therefore knowledge—was, and should remain, a private good. Those who advocated for free software argued that information (since software is nothing more than information) was, by its very nature, a public good. It could only be considered private if its distribution was artificially restricted by a set of rules and punishments.

These were two radically opposing visions battling over the ethics of the internet.

The free software theorists of those years were giants. One of them, John Perry Barlow, wrote a text in 1994 that so accurately described what we are experiencing today that reading it is almost frightening, like he had traveled from the future to warn us.

It was called Selling Wine Without Bottles, and it discussed how information, up until then, had been inseparable from the physical formats in which it was printed (CDs, DVDs, newspapers, etc.). Since information was trapped in its container, intellectual property laws had been built around these physical formats rather than the information itself. However, with the rise of the internet, information became detached from its physical shell, and intellectual property laws could no longer protect it:

The riddle is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantly distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How will we get paid for the work of our minds? And if we cannot be paid, what will ensure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

Since we lack a solution to what is an entirely new challenge, and since we seem unable to slow the galloping digitization of everything that is not stubbornly physical, we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship.

This ship—the accumulated canon of copyright and patent law—was built to transport forms and methods of expression that are completely different from the ethereal cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking from the inside and the outside.

The legal efforts to keep the old ship afloat take three forms: a frantic rearranging of the deck chairs, stern warnings that if the ship sinks, those responsible will face severe criminal penalties, and a cold, detached attitude that ignores the problem altogether.

And that is precisely what happened. During those years, many things—movies, albums—that had previously been unquestionably physical, indistinguishable from a car or a tomato, suddenly lost their physical form and, as if by magic, took on a new nature on the internet.

In response, during the 1980s and 1990s, children’s movies always began with a threatening warning screen, reminding viewers that copying the video could land them in jail.

Perhaps it was those warnings—and the realization that nothing actually happened, that no one was coming to arrest you for copying a VHS—that immunized us all against the mantras of intellectual property. For those giant content distribution corporations, it was like the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf—they had tried to scare people so many times that eventually, no one believed them anymore.

What is certain, as you may remember, is that in the 2000s, the world was suddenly filled with "pirates" who shared music and movies in unprecedented volumes, through a distributed system where no one was in charge and no one was making money. Everything that could be copied was copied and shared freely.

Suddenly, instead of having to go to the video store for every movie, you could have a hard drive filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of titles. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of information helped create the appetite for entertainment that today fuels the massive global audiovisual content market.

Did the world become immoral in the 2000s? Did it really fill up with pirates? I don't think so. The reason the vast majority of the population did not obey copyright laws was that they did not consider them fair. P2P users, who had grown up with the idea that the world was infinite and that there was no need to compete for goods, realized that information was a public good and not competitive. We were not harming anyone by sharing information, just as we had not harmed anyone when we copied cassette tapes or recorded songs from the radio. Information was a public good. Hackers had won the battle of network ethics in public opinion.

At that moment, a generational divide exploded into view for the first time. For years, campaigns compared copying a song to stealing a car. The older generation, raised in scarcity, either militantly opposed downloads and understood them as theft or continued to behave as if information were a scarce good, meticulously storing everything they downloaded on CDs and DVDs, much to the bewilderment of their children.

The children, on the other hand, understood perfectly well that storing something as abundant as air made no sense, just as it would not have made sense to store radio waves.

For the first time, something emerged that I call the ethics of the children of optimism. A generation that had grown up in the '80s and '90s believing that everything would be abundant and should be shared was writing the rules of the Internet. This was the first major clash between the status quo and this new generation, between the old way of seeing the world and the new one. Between the ethics of scarcity and the ethics of abundance.

April 30, 1993, is a key date in the battle between the ethics of scarcity and the ethics of abundance. In the early '90s, the Internet was a tiny space where decisions with massive implications were being made. At that time, the WWW—the protocol by which we still create and serve web pages today—was being born. Some groups, such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, wanted the web to be a commercial product, requiring a paid license for use. They wanted to control the web and charge for it, much like Microsoft did.

But on April 30, 1993, WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee, working for CERN in Geneva, moved the web’s code into the public domain, making it freely available to anyone without restrictions on use or payment. It was an ethical and political decision, deeply rooted in an abundant way of seeing the world. The web would belong to everyone. And it still does.

Stubbornly Physical

A long time has passed, and the world has changed, but in the nearly 30 years since the publication of Selling Wine Without Bottles, this phenomenon has only accelerated.

What obsessed me for years was Barlow's reference to everything that was not "stubbornly physical"—that it would become digital and, therefore, cease to be governed by property laws that applied to private goods.

"Stubbornly."

It would seem that being "physical" is a binary state: either something is or it isn’t. A tomato is a physical entity, like a car. Radio waves are not. It seems straightforward.

But no. If you stop to think about it, very few things are stubbornly physical; few things are not, in essence, information. Just as happened with music, movies, ideas, and software, many objects we once considered physical products are, in reality, information wrapped in a shell—like a CD or a DVD.

Let's look at some examples:

First, technology: Medicines and vaccines are formulas. Technology (medical, military, communication, or otherwise) is a combination of software and design. The most promising areas of scientific research involve using genetically modified organisms to cure diseases.

Second, processes: We have become so skilled at finding information and making decisions that we no longer need travel agencies, insurance brokers, or financial advisors. We have replaced tedious mechanical processes like tax inspections or border security with algorithms. Many businesses have vanished as we replace physical interactions (like visiting a bank or the local tax office) with digital transactions.

But what about the tomato? Is it still physical? Only partially. Even carbon-based life can be understood as a form of information. Everything that defines us is encoded in our DNA—a chain of information. Some biologists, like Richard Dawkins, propose that our entire life cycle—birth, development, reproduction, and death—is nothing more than our DNA’s strategy to make exact copies of itself from one individual to another.

That’s why, even in this last frontier—where we think things are "stubbornly physical" like tomatoes—a race is underway to translate them into information. Companies are already producing proteins from genetically modified bacteria or using a combination of electricity and CO2 extracted from the atmosphere.

In essence, these companies are doing with proteins what the Internet did with music, or what 3D printing did with manufacturing components: separating the information (DNA) from the medium (the animal) and reproducing it infinitely anywhere. Environmentalist George Monbiot calls this the "most important environmental technology in the world" because it will allow us to produce all the protein and fats we need to live without destroying the planet or causing animal suffering.

But there is another reason why even goods we stubbornly consider material—such as cars or tomatoes—are increasingly becoming intangible. When we assess the value of a product, we can break it down in different ways, for example, based on the investment required to create it.

When Henry Ford built the first cars in the 1920s, he needed a lot of labor (factory workers), machinery (the assembly line), raw materials, knowledge (design), and management (factory organization). Imagine he invested 20% of the car’s total value in each of these factors. Even then, design, management, and the technology to build the machinery were already information.

But today, raw material prices are at their lowest in the last 100 years because accessing and transporting them has become easier. Car manufacturing technology has become widespread, and instead of a handful of manufacturers, there are now hundreds. Most workers have been replaced by machines (which, let’s remember, are software and design). The value of a car is no longer in the materials it is made of but increasingly in its design, brand perception, and incorporated technology. On top of that, manufacturers now spend another 10% of their budget on marketing.

The value of physical products is increasingly derived less from raw materials and more from intangible components. While the silicon in a modern car’s chips is a limited resource, the brand, technology, and driving experience it offers are abundant. So, whereas there used to be 8 or 10 car manufacturers worldwide, there are now hundreds, and the number will continue to grow.

Red Bull is the latest major brand to enter the lucrative sugary drinks market. In 2019, it sold 7.5 billion cans for nearly $6 billion worldwide. It is still far from the $37 billion Coca-Cola made that same year, but it is the first major modern company to become a major player in that market. However, Red Bull is not really a beverage manufacturer. In fact, it outsources the production, bottling, and distribution of its drinks in every country where it operates. Red Bull’s activity and product are its brand. 

 That’s why it owns two Formula 1 teams, five soccer teams, a hockey team, dozens of festivals, and in 2021, it became the first company to send a man from space back to Earth in a parachute, with tens of millions of people watching worldwide. When you buy a can of Red Bull, you are acquiring an experience, a sensation they just tell you it’s contained within a few milliliters of liquid.  

Just like with a can of Red Bull, most of the things you consume are much more brand than product. Much more information than raw material.   

A Change of Era

There is a well-worn saying that we are not living in an era of change, but rather a change of era. And it’s true. Before our very eyes, a colossal transformation is taking place, unprecedented in human history. Perhaps the greatest metamorphosis our species has ever undergone, more significant than the introduction of agriculture or commerce.

Almost all forms of value we know are shifting from private goods—scarce and limited—to public goods—abundant and nearly limitless. The things we need to live and be happy are no longer resources we must compete for but rather resources we can all enjoy without competing against one another.

Just as happened with music, more and more things are being "freed" from the material capsule that tied them to a world of scarcity (we cannot produce infinite CDs) and are leaping into a world of abundance, where we no longer have to compete to use them.

And this transformation is not limited to goods.

Going back to John Perry Barlow, there is a fundamental characteristic of information that we have been observing for 30 years, which explains how the world has transformed and in what direction it is heading. As we have seen, information can be reproduced infinitely without increasing cost and without depriving the original owner of its use. In other words, information does not obey the laws of scarcity—it is abundant.

And because information is an abundant good, and more and more of the things that matter to us can be understood (and exchanged) as information, our way of life is also shifting toward that abundance:

It is a cliché to say that money is information. Except for Krugerrands, loose change, and the briefcases full of cash we associate with drug lords, most of the money in the digital world is encrypted in ones and zeros. The global money supply flows through the network with the fluidity of weather patterns. It is also evident that information has become as fundamental to the creation of modern wealth as land ownership and sunlight once were.

What is not so obvious is to what extent information is beginning to have intrinsic value—not just as a means of acquisition but as an object of acquisition itself. I suppose this has always been the case, though less explicitly. In politics and academia, power and information have always had a close relationship.

However, now that information is increasingly bought with money, we see that buying information with other information is simply an economic exchange that does not require conversion into another currency. This presents a challenge for those who like to keep clear accounts because, beyond information theory, exchange rates for information are too elusive to quantify with decimal figures.

Nonetheless, almost everything a middle-class American buys has little to do with survival. We buy beauty, prestige, experiences, education, and all the obscure pleasures of possession. Many of these things can not only be expressed in non-material terms but can also be acquired through non-material means.

And then there are the inexplicable pleasures of information itself—the delight of learning, knowing, and teaching. That strange and pleasant feeling of information flowing in and out of oneself. Playing with ideas is a form of entertainment people must be willing to pay a lot for, given the size of the book and workshop markets. We would probably spend even more money on these pleasures if there weren’t so many opportunities to pay for ideas with other ideas.

This explains much of the "voluntary" collective work that fills the archives, forums, and databases of the Internet. Its contributors are not working for free, as is often believed. They are paid in something other than money. It is an economy based almost entirely on information. This may become the dominant form of human trade, and if we continue insisting on modeling the economy strictly around money, we may be making a serious mistake.

The “volunteers” Barlow referred to were a small army of technologists, hackers, editors, programmers, and engineers who populated the web in 1994, organizing themselves into distributed communities where prestige and trust were the currencies of exchange.

Many of the applications we use today without a second thought were created by volunteer programmers. The most important of them all, Linux, is a free operating system developed and maintained for decades by thousands of “volunteer” programmers, and today, it is the cornerstone of the internet.

All 500 of the world’s supercomputers run on this operating system. Linux is also the standard for managing the servers that deliver the websites and apps we use daily. It is the foundation of the Android operating system and is behind countless everyday devices, from smart TVs to ATMs and even NASA rockets.

The Linux kernel (the core part of the software) has 28 million lines of code—something akin to the entire works of Shakespeare—carefully created and refined bit by bit by an immense hive mind where leadership is earned through prestige and technical competence rather than through salaries.

But what a handful of “volunteers” did in 1994—moderating mailing lists—has now become common practice for all of society and likely for 100% of those born after 1975.

We all participate in the economy of abundance: sharing on social media, learning, creating content, reshaping the content of others, and engaging in conversations daily. The most prominent individuals in our society continuously contribute valuable elements to this ecosystem. When we enter the job market, seek a promotion, or try to sell a service as freelancers, our intangible value outweighs our résumé. The same applies when we seek a romantic partner—or friends.

The great transformation of the era of abundance is not merely about replacing a physical product—a DVD—with a digital one—a download. It is about fundamentally changing the way we satisfy needs through entirely different mechanisms. In 20th-century society, prestige came from buying a car with money. In the society of abundance, we acquire prestige through social networks or social relationships, and we pay for it by offering relevant information to our audience. We pay with information.

And we all do it. From the teenager dancing on TikTok to the professor of military strategy explaining the intricacies of the war in Ukraine on Twitter, to the grandmother posting pictures of her grandchildren on Facebook for distant relatives to see. The difference is that some do it better than others.

Our lives—the lives of a vast portion of people on this planet—are becoming increasingly intangible, more collaborative, and more abundant.

But Aren’t We on the Brink of the End of the World?

I know it’s hard to reconcile this idea with the constant messages we receive about a collapsing, finite world. The prevailing narrative of our time tells us that the world is becoming increasingly scarce and that we will have to fight harder and harder for resources.

But this is a profoundly outdated vision, rooted in a 20th-century mindset in which the only path forward as a society is to keep meeting our needs by acquiring more and more material objects—thus putting ever greater strain on the planet’s resources.

Meanwhile, within all the things that have become abundant over the past 30 years lies nothing less than the possibility of a new promise of progress for all of humanity. Much of the abundance we currently generate remains trapped behind a web of regulations and social conventions. But what if we tore down those barriers? What if we made it our mission to ensure that everything that can be abundant reaches everyone?

What if access to the internet were free and widespread, with no individual contracts, but instead provided by cities—just like street lighting? What if we gave people of all ages the opportunity to continue learning for pleasure, free of charge, in universities, supported by digital resources and public networks? What if we ensured that news, music, books, and movies were accessible to all, without barriers?

What if we made it mandatory for all scientific discoveries, vaccines, patents, and innovations—funded in whole or in part by public universities—to belong to the public domain? What if we committed ourselves to breaking every barrier that ties us to scarcity and excessive material consumption?

Because all these things that still seem scarce to us today are, in reality, not scarce at all. They are like CDs in the 1990s—information encapsulated in a physical medium we can do without.

And even more—what if we extended this ethic of abundance to every aspect of life? What if we recognized that in a knowledge-based society, exploration is the new labor? What if we started valuing people for what they learn rather than for how many hours they spend in an office, repeating the same task day after day?

What if we acknowledged that love is the very first thing that is inherently abundant, and we created more models for family, relationships, and friendship—more social contracts that allow people to live their love in whatever way suits them best?

What if we recognized that each person is, in themselves, an abundant and complex being—containing multitudes—and we allowed ourselves to experience identity as a fluid, evolving process rather than as a rigid imposition that forces us to choose and live in scarcity?

The ethic of abundance could be a new promise for the 21st century. And in many ways, it is already arriving. Just as an ethic of digital downloads once emerged, today millions of people are building a culture on social networks that turns its back on the myths of 20th-century scarcity.

It’s time to embrace that ethic. Welcome to the age of abundance.