Dave Green has written a great piece about the economics of the Bitchun Society in the Guardian.
The problem with having everything you need is that it isn’t very dramatic. If you’ve heard that Cory Doctorow’s free-to-download sci-fi novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, depicts a near-future utopia that’s seen “the death of scarcity” (and “the death of death”), you might be wondering what sources of narrative tension might be left. Or is it all: “Tuesday. Got up. Had no shortage of anything I might possibly require. Wrote some music. Surfed the internet. Went to bed”?
Fortunately, it’s a bit more exciting than that. In the book, nanotechnology takes care of everyone’s basic needs, eliminating material scarcity. Handily, the “Bitchun Society” depicted by Doctorow doesn’t share our hangups with intellectual property either, which is all available online. As a result, the population doesn’t have any need for money. Instead, what they aspire to is “Whuffie”, which serves some of the functions of currency, but is much closer to such concepts as “the approval of your peers” or “respect”.
