Which Future?

[In] Doctorow’s book [.. r]eputation, like capital, can be accumulated in an unequal and self-perpetuating way, as those who are already popular gain the ability to do things that get them more attention and make them more popular. Such dynamics are readily observable today, as blogs and other social media produce popular gatekeepers who are able to determine who gets attention and who does not, in a way that is not completely a function of who has money to spend [..].

The ideal of a post-scarcity society is that various kinds of esteem are independent, so that the esteem in which one is held as a musician is independent of the regard one achieves as a political activist [.. This] is not a world of no hierarchies but one of many hierarchies, no one of which is superior to all the others.

True

This future is the most likely scenario IMHO, and it should be possible to convert from one kind of “esteem currency” into another. There can be trade, commerce in this world, hence there is no need to bring Marx into the discussion.

There are a few holes in the article - “single hierarchy”, that is, “the hierarchy that rules all others” is not a communist or capitalist concept, it is second wave industrial.

• The embryonic form of class power in a post-scarcity economy can be found in our systems of intellectual property law. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine observe, IP rights go beyond the traditional conception of property. They do not merely ensure “your right to control your copy of your idea”, in the way that they protect my right to control my shoes or my house. Rather, they give rights-holders the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that they ‘own’. As Boldrin and Levine say, “This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.”

Excellent comment

Knowledge likes to spread, it likes to combine with other knowledge. This inherent tendency makes it very different from other forms of “property”, then, the controls needed to fit knowledge based goods into a second wave straight-jacket must be much, much more draconian. The defenders of the old system still do not fully grasp this fact.