Post-scarcity thoughts

[packbat]

This isn't super thought out - we're still trying to find our point while we write, here.

Also, we don't live in a post-scarcity society. There's scarcity up to our eyeballs. Fuck capitalism.

But there's some contexts where we're unconstrained.

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We just watched Red Means Recording's "How to (Not) Buy a Synthesizer", and a while ago we watched Benn Jordan's "I Tried To Make Music The Exact Same Way I Did 20 Years Ago", and both of them talk about the value of getting a piece of gear and investing the time to learn it. Of not trying to buy your way to making the music you want to make, but of learning your way forward. Neither video is about that - RMR's is about the process of vetting a purchase before you make it, Benn Jordan's is about revisiting tools and thinking back on the past - but it sticks with us, because it highlights a thing about post-scarcity situations: time and energy are still scarce.

Like, if we wanted to, we could go download 508 MB of electric bass SFZ right now, or 4.9 GB of piano SFZ, or 2.7 GB of probably-not-free soundfonts that say they're free, or anything off Musical Artifacts or Pianobook or ... who knows, wherever. There's a ton of material out there, and it's probably useful - I bet that electric bass SFZ is dope as fuck. But what would I do with it?

Owning things doesn't ... we don't need to. We are not a struggling farmer, trying to harvest enough music samples from our plot to carry us through the winter. If we need a realistic electric bass sound, we can go download it, but right now we are a once-and-hopefully-future pianist trying to make sounds that we want to have made, and we are not lacking in sounds to make. Heck, we just had a piece where we wanted an electric bass, but a sample pack would not have done - we wanted to hit a high note and slide down to a low one, and LMMS doesn't know how to do that with Sforzando. So it was get a real bass and a real bassist and play it ... or just use something else. And we used something else. And it was good enough.

And we have over two hundred games in our Steam library, supposedly. We aren't gonna play all of these. We don't know what they are. They are not a resource to enrich our life, they are clutter that makes it difficult to find anything. Epic offered us dozens of free games, and we never signed up, because we don't want more games - we want ...

...I mean, meaning, I guess. We want to play Dear Esther and be overwhelmed by understanding of our past depression. We want to play "A Good Gardener" and think about complicity in atrocity and racism. We want to play some improvised whatever on a harpsichord SFZ and wonder what genre our fingers were drawn to. We want a hoard of treasures that we treasure, not cool stuff we will never think about - and time is scarce, and energy is scarce.

We aren't complete in our determination thusly - we have, what, ninety TTRPGs in a collection on itch.io? They're just sitting there, we're not reading them or analyzing them or, y'know, playing them. We donate to a new cause via a megabundle, we poke around looking at the list of items in it, we mark some as interesting, we wander off. But ... like, the meaning comes in with the specific, here. Having more items just makes it more overwhelming, not richer.