Here is a half-formed thought.
I was thinking yesterday about the difference between material economy and cultural economy. This distinction might not be novel, but I feel like I’ve stumbled on it on my own, for the most part. At one level, my thought is a kind of extension of Georgism, out past the bounds of “land” to a broader scope: not just land but “all material things.” And that domain is what we typically think of when we think of “economy”: farms, produce, factories, mines, etc. But more and more, there’s another domain for economy: immaterial things. Cultural objects, such as: financial instruments, software, novels, meme-stocks, spam. Some are good and useful, some are not, but what they all share is that their “value” (their abstract tokenization under the index “money,” within the broader economy) is not linked to any physicality, and is uncorrelated to it. You could have high-bandwidth, low-value cultural objects (spam, AI), or you could have low-bandwidth, high-value cultural objects (well-written books, Ethereum digital coins [but not Bitcoins, which have a much higher computational overhead and therefore material impact]). Here, by “bandwidth,” I mean the material substrate where these objects exist. They rely on the substrate, but aren’t strictly speaking correlated to it, in terms of valuation. Because the value is uncorrelated with the material substrate, their value can grow in unlimited fashion despite a finite material basis. That’s “star trek style” post-scarcity economy, if you want.
