Agalmics
Charlie Stross's brilliant novelette "Lobsters" (which I'll be putting first on my Hugo ballot in that category) refers to "the agalmic future." I didn't pay much attention to the phrase, but Amy (one of the people I've been discussing Hugo nominees with) asked if it was a real word. I got curious and looked it up, and found that it was coined by Robert Levin, in a brief essay called "Agalmics: The Marginalization of Scarcity."
It's an exciting piece for a quasi-techno-utopian like me; it talks about some stuff that I've seen in action but never quite formalized. Or perhaps I formalized it as philanthropy: helping others. But Levin goes a step further, and talks about the kind of philanthropy in which you help yourself by helping others. The word agalmics comes from the Greek agalma, which Levin says means "pleasing gift."
He mostly focuses on open-source software (and, really, the Internet at large) as an example: a programmer gives away software, and gets various benefits by doing so, and the users get benefits by receiving that software. It's a form of cooperative philanthropy, maybe, in which everyone wins.
It still doesn't apply to a lot of areas in the real world, of course, because there's still scarcity of many things. But if we can imagine a world like Stross's that's moving beyond scarcity, what kind of society might be engendered?
Yes, this is all very idealistic. Some things will always be scarce, such as ancestral homelands. Even a lack of scarcity has its downsides: potential population booms, for one. (Though more affluent societies are by and large less prolific.) Like many solutions to world problems proposed by engineers, it doesn't really take into account the irrational ways that people feel about things.
But it still, against all reason, makes me optimistic about future possibilities, for the first time in a while.
Giving feels good. A couple months ago, some friends on a geek-chat mailing list helped me modify a configuration file for the Web server on my PowerBook, which allowed me to set up the magazine at WisCon despite not being connected to the Web; they offered quite a bit of advice and expertise for no particular reward. The other day, I got a chance to pass that gift along by helping someone else do the same kind of setup, and I have no doubt that he'll do the same for someone else. I may be able to incorporate my new knowledge into documents which will help more people. Sure, all of this helping is about obscure technical trivia—but it will help people use the Web more effectively, and helps the magazine become better-known. And that in turn will, I hope, continue to help bring good new writers into the field, to help expand the field of sf; and that will have effects we can't predict on future readers. And so on. Everything, as Ted Nelson said, is deeply intertwingled. We can't know the effects of our actions down the road, but if our actions are for the greater good, the ripples that spread out from them are often also for the greater good.
(For that matter, still looking no further than the magazine, the fact that an entirely unpaid staff of 25+ volunteers has been putting out such a good magazine week after week for coming up on two years now is remarkable, in my opinion. What do we get out of it? That varies, I'm sure, among the individual staff members, but among other things: the respect of people we respect; appreciation from readers and writers; the satisfaction of a job well done; occasional external validation, such as award nominations and stories being reprinted; and at least in my case, a way to give back to a world that's given me so much of value. Also, the hope of (in whatever small way) making the world a better place, making people happier or more thoughtful or more willing (because of seeing more examples) to give of themselves.)
This is, btw, why in my ideal society teachers would get paid more than anyone else. Teaching in all its forms, passing along data and information and knowledge and wisdom—that's what it's all about. That's one of the best things one can do, in my value system. I'm not good at it in the formalized setting of academia; I have too little patience with people who don't pick things up quickly. But I surely do admire it.
Okay, enough utopian rambling. Back to editing 'n' stuff.