On Heaven and Hell
Physical scarcity, digital abundance and our adaptive failures
Sorry it’s been a while since I last posted. The doldrums of summer seem to have somewhat overtaken me. That said, I’ve kept busy vacationing in Portland, catching up with friends, shuttling my kids to camp and work, and painting my kitchen and pantry.
Beyond heaven’s gate
One of the joys of having teenagers is introducing them to “adult” culture. I love watching late-night movies with my 15-year-old son. There’s a set of genres I enjoy — science fiction, artsy independents, edgy comedies — that my wife won’t watch. Now I have a partner in crime.
Earlier this week, after the girls went to bed, we watched Parasite, which the New York Times just declared the best film of the 21st century and “a ferocious rebuke to the devastations of neoliberalism.” The story depicts a world where the poor live gig-to-gig in subterranean dwellings, glimpsing the walled-off heaven of the rich only through service jobs and cons.
Of course, what makes Parasite great is not just the premise but the payoff — the knife twist of revenge. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about another film, #12 on the Times list: Zone of Interest, where the Hoss family tends their garden while the smoke of Auschwitz drifts just beyond their walls.
Heaven and hell. We imagine them as separate destinations, but more often they exist side by side, walled off yet inextricably intertwined.
Trouble in paradise
More than twenty years ago I first visited Hawaii. Thanks to a ticketing error, I found myself in first class seated next to a friendly, talkative man. He told me he had moved to Hawaii in the seventies to surf, then drifted into organic farming. When developers came knocking, his North Shore farmland turned into a fortune.
Two things I remember from that flight. First, he raved about these new waterproof slippers he could wear anywhere — the first time I’d heard of Crocs. Second, into his third whiskey, he taught me a word I’d never heard before: affluenza. The malaise of the wealthy. He admitted that, in some ineffable way, he was happier as a broke surf bum than as a rich landowner.
That stuck with me. Hawaii seemed like heaven on earth. How can so much good fortune not make us happier? Can we have too much of a good thing?
Scarcity and abundance
These days it feels like much of our suffering in the U.S. is of the affluenza variety. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance makes the case: in the physical world we live with artificial scarcity. Housing is scarce, renewables are scarce, sustainable transportation is scarce. Overregulation, fragmented institutions, and weak government capacity make it slow and costly to build the very things we need most.
Chris Hayes offers a counterpoint in The Siren’s Call: we are drowning in digital abundance. Social media and online platforms are engineered to flood our minds with addictive stimuli, competing for our scarcest resource — attention. Hayes compares it not to drugs, but to junk food: cheap, engineered for overconsumption, leaving us “stuffed but starved.”
Scarcity in the physical world. Glut in the digital. Either way, our institutions struggle to cope.
Hype and consequences
I’m reminded of the last big tech wave that was supposed to change everything: autonomous vehicles. When Google revealed its first driverless car tests a decade ago, In a classic hype cycle, tech leaders promised fully self-driving cars by 2020, maybe 2025 at the latest.
But what did “getting ready” mean for the public sector? Regulators suddenly faced impossible questions: how safe is safe enough for a driverless car? Who’s liable — the driver, or the company that wrote the software? What does automation mean for infrastructure, law enforcement, or truck drivers?
The truth is government never built the capacity to answer. Liability slowed reckless rollouts more than regulators. Elon Musk, of course, pushed boundaries by marketing “Autopilot” as if it were fully autonomous. Only this year did a Florida jury finally hit Tesla with a massive damages verdict. Tesla is appealing, but given its stock valuation, Musk probably thinks the bet paid off.
That crash was likely just the tip of the iceberg. In their article on the lawsuit the New York Times noted, federal officials were aware of at least 211 accidents from 2018 to 2023 involving Teslas with Autopilot engaged.
Back in 2016, Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, warned of two possible futures: AVs could reduce accidents and congestion, or they could flood our roads with empty cars, fueling sprawl and emissions. Heaven or hell, all in the same technology. The deciding factor wasn’t the tech itself but whether governments were willing and able to regulate it.
We can have too much of a good thing.
Social media and AI: today’s surpluses
A decade ago, social media was sold as a tool for connection and empowerment. Today with the enshittification of internet platforms it looks more like an addictive surplus with diminishing value. For teenagers, as the great new FX documentary Social Studies shows, the costs are steep: bullying, eating disorders, abuse, alienation. Teenagers, I’m sure, would be quick to add that it’s not just their generation paying the price. Facebook helped boomers radicalize themselves into voting for Trump — arguably doing more damage to the world than anything on TikTok ever could.
Will we someday look back on today’s pervasive social media use the way we look back on the constant smoking in old movies?
Now comes AI. I’m not a Luddite. I use it often and find it useful. But it also spins persuasive nonsense with alarming confidence. At a time when trust is our scarcest resource, AI — like social media — risks deepening information bubbles and amplifying falsehoods at scale.
Nick Foster, the former head of design for Google X, has a new book out arguing that we adopt four mindsets when we think about the future: Could, Should, Might, Don’t. For decades, Silicon Valley has dominated the conversation with a “Could” mindset — always asking what dazzling new things technology might make possible. But after years of promises of flying cars, the metaverse, and miracle drugs — and the lived reality of spam, surveillance, and social media addiction — more and more people have shifted into a “Don’t” mindset, suspicious of new technologies before they even arrive.
That skepticism may be a healthy corrective. But if all we have are cheerleaders and cynics, we’ll keep stumbling. My hope is that innovators, corporations, and governments can spend more time with the Should and Might mindsets — asking what futures are desirable, what futures are plausible, and how to prepare for both. That’s how we build the adaptive capacity to navigate abundance without letting it turn into harm.
Too much of a good thing
Whatever mindset you have about new technologies, the prevailing pattern is clear. Physical goods we desperately need remain scarce because our institutions are too weak to build them. Digital goods flood our lives because the costs are low and we lack the tools to regulate them. Either way, the problem isn’t abundance or scarcity alone. It’s the absence of adaptive capacity to influence the evolution technologies in ways that benefit society and mitigate harms.
The irony is stark: abundance without governance produces maladaptive surpluses — addiction, dependence, harm. Governance without adaptive capacity produces artificial scarcity — blocking access, affordability, equity. In recent decade, the U.S. has managed to deliver the worst of both worlds, starving its institutions of the very resources needed to steer.
The real question isn’t scarcity versus abundance, but drift versus adaptation. Heaven or hell isn’t written into the technology. It depends on whether we rebuild the capacity to steer.