All What Is Delicious to Man

We're ten years away from a world of perfect abundance, and that's where we'll always be.

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I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much."
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"
–Leonard Cohen

The American dream of abundance was born of the American reality of abundance. All that land “vaguely realizing westward” offered the promise of untold riches just waiting to be excavated, literally or figuratively. The nineteenth-century engineer and inventor John Etzler, a German emigrant to Pennsylvania, heralded the arrival of what he termed “superabundance” in his lavishly titled 1833 opus The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men, in Two Parts.

Americans! you are offered things which you could not buy by mountains of gold, and if they were offered as large as your rocky mountains. You are offered to live henceforth in magnificent, beautiful, and brilliant palaces, which the mightiest monarchs on earth were too poor to have; in blissful paradises, where all is splendour, beauty, and delight; where luxuriance of growth affords superabundance of all what is delicious to man; where you may array yourselves in all what is beautiful and brilliant; where you may lead a life of continual feast, free of labour, of want and fear of want, in endless variety of enjoyments and pleasures, in rapidly increasing knowledges for removing and lessening more and more the evils of nature incident to human life, and enjoying invigorated vitality.

Leonard Cohen’s harlot was more concise, but what’s the point of brevity when superabundance is imminent? Etzler promised that his paradise would be achieved “within ten years.”

That didn’t quite pan out. In the 1840s, Etzler hightailed it to Venezuela, joined by a small group of true believers, in hopes of finding fresh ground for his imagined utopia. Most of his followers were soon dead of sundry injuries and ailments, and Etzler himself slipped out of the historical record. But the inventor did succeed in siring an impressive number of intellectual heirs—his reproductive prowess, though posthumous, was Musk-like in its vigor—and in our time most of these second-hand prophets of superabundance have congregated at the continent’s western terminus, in Silicon Valley. Over the last thirty years, we’ve been assured, over and over again, that a new era of boundless abundance is just around the corner. We shall want for nothing.

The character of the promised paradise has changed to fit the contours of our new virtual frontier. What’s in the offing is no longer Etzler’s abundance of delicious stuff—the technological magnification of nature’s bounty. It’s something vaguer, less substantial, more symbolic. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who seems to pump out a new Abundance Manifesto every year or two, bases his conception of abundance on “ephemeralization,” a term coined by Buckminster Fuller in his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon. Technological progress, Fuller suggested, “lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” In a 2021 interview, Andreessen argued that we should abandon attempts to create “a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to”—such an Etzlerian paradise, he declares, will only ever be available to the rich—and instead work to build “online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.” For the masses, the promised virtual paradise will be “immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” Andreessen defines abundance down.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman does something similar in “The Intelligence Age,” the sophomoric broadside he published last month. (Altman wrestles with the English language as if it were a wad of bubblegum stuck in his hair. I now understand why he was so eager to create ChatGPT.) The entrepreneur sketches out a future in which artificial intelligence, fed by vast amounts of “compute” and “data” and “energy,” generates on our behalf a new world of unprecedented plenty. But the form of that abundance remains inchoate in Altman’s mind—a fact he clumsily admits. “In the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now,” he writes. “I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.” The picture Altman sketches is a low-resolution simulation of a world of abundance, the kind of bland summary that large language models are good at producing. It’s a letdown. We were promised “magnificent, beautiful, and brilliant palaces.” We’re getting chatbots and VR goggles.

An expectation of abundance breeds profligacy, a willingness to waste things. An expectation of scarcity breeds frugality, a concern with using things judiciously. That distinction helps explain why Andreessen, Altman, and their mates are so eager to assure us that abundance is imminent. A fear of frugality, of a judicious public that resists the temptation to throw everything away in an unending quest for new stuff to consume, has always been a subtext of their grandiose claims. You should let us be as wasteful as we want, because out of our waste will come a plenitude like no one has seen before. Don’t worry about all the energy we’re sucking into our data centers, because our data centers are going to make energy free. Don’t worry about all the money we’re amassing, because we’re going to make everyone prosperous. Don’t worry about all the time you spend looking into the screens we’ve given you, because through those screens lies paradise.

For businesses, the attraction of establishing abundance as a social and personal goal is that the goal can never be achieved. Human desire cannot be sated. No matter how much we get, it’s not going to be enough. “Hey, why not ask for more?” Maybe we should ignore the harlot and listen to the beggar.