...we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind of information that can be compactly represented in digital media. We can replicate it worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs, affordable by individuals. We are working hard on technologies that will permit other sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily, including arbitrary physical objects ("nanotechnology"; see www.foresight.org). The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future.
Glimmers of hope can be found in dreams that precede the changes and often reflect antecedent changes and incomplete, unfulfilled dreams from the past. Dreams of "utopia" came long before any temporal possibility of achieving the dream. Langston Hughes asked, "What happens to a dream deferred?"
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
Yes, it does explode, but it also lies in wait, gathers its strength for the next round of even more advanced struggle, when the dream can be more completely realized.
"What is working class literature?" by Lew Rosenbaum
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