You've hit on why people are easily seduced by the concept of post-scarcity.
Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up.
But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter.
An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.
Being too cheap for individuals or society to consider in their transactions and being completely free, are effectively the same to me.
You may feel otherwise, but if the distinction never makes a difference in the practical world then it does not enter my mind. Based on that metric, we already have post scarcity goods like already published books
I’m fairly certain it’s the other way around. I agree that when you get to physical goods there’s no way it’s literally infinite. What I’m saying is that after a certain point it doesn’t matter.
If we had a sun sized amount of sugar available to humanity then it would be post scarcity even though it was actually getting used up by a measurable amount
Bits aren't free, but they are too cheap to meter. If I divide the time it takes to download an ebook by the amount I pay for Internet per month, it comes out to bupkis, even after I try and account for the percentage of my storage it uses up.
But a cup of sugar, and anything else made of atoms, is fundamentally different. There's no obvious route to sugar being too cheap to meter.
An old English idiom for getting something very cheap was "I got it for a song". So this kind of post-scarcity has been with us for a long time: anyone can sing a song, singing was never scarce.