Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Futurists who speak of "post-scarcity" suggest economies based on advances in automated manufacturing technologies, often including the idea of self-replicating machines, the adoption of division of labor which in theory could produce nearly all goods in abundance, given adequate raw materials and energy. In the more near-term future, the increasing automation of physical labor using robots is often discussed as means of creating a post-scarcity economy.

Excerpt from T Fleischmann’s 2019 autobiographical essay Time is the thing a body moves through

“Benjy and I have placed a mirror as wide and tall as my arm span on a card table in the flat bit of his front yard. The mirror shows sky, and beside it we set a ladder and his photography equipment. We dump all our prescription drugs onto the reflective surface, bottle after bottle. The pills are tan, light yellow, two shades of blue, one of red, a pale pink, and a paler pink with a purple hue. When they are all mixed together they look like pills, generically, unlike when they are in the bottles and seem direct references to our survival. The mirror’s reflection of sky is both stark and creamy. If I place my hand upon this sky it does not ripple, but there is a fingerprint.

We are here to shape the pills into letters, which takes time, and so we chat all morning about them. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medication, they are the most expensive material we have used to make an image. Another in a long series of changes to Benjy’s HIV treatment plan and insurance access in the deeply conservative state means that most of these are not pills he is taking but rather pills he has taken. They are pills that worked, pills he can’t access anymore, cocktails of pills that might or might not act on the body with greater efficacy to suppress his viral load than the cocktail of pills he took this morning. I contribute only three varieties to the mirror, synthetic estrogen and two kinds of testosterone blockers. These pills, too, have been rendered different with the sudden announcement that there’s a shortage of injectable estrogen in the United States, a combination of FDA policies and disinterested manufacturers conspiring to end the production of the oil. I’ve never gone for a shot, and sometimes I mail people pills, just as sometimes friends sent pills to me when I ran out. On the mirror, smooth like the oil is slick, the pills roll with the slightest wind, or when my hip grazes the table edge. My feet, too hard on the ground, make all the blue and white and yellow and tan quake at once. It is 2015, the beginning of the estrogen shortage, Benjy and I joke.

Benjy and I make pictures because it’s fun and we want to, so we work at a very slow pace, punctuated by beer and cigarettes. These digressions, we decide early on, are the most important part of our process. Today, we read from our list of phrases, academic and technical terms we plan to misuse, ideas like “object orientation” that we will interpret for our personal meanings rather than the meanings everyone else finds in them. I have no skills when it comes to making art, no training and no eye. This is one of my favorite parts of our collaboration, the idea that someone can just make something anyway, away from institutions. 58 T Fleischmann We're investigating the language of the present from the perspective of the utopic, which is an exploration of difference, and the only way we can find to this language takes us through each other. If the utopic is a post-queer moment, I think that the friendship I share with Benjy can be a part of that. If we have a shared identity it is that we identify with how lovely it is this morning, and the way we talk about our politics is by trying to make something for our friends to enjoy.

I count backward to figure out when I started taking hormones— Seattle, Brooklyn, moving away from the South, Berlin with Simon, falling in love with Otelia . . . I land in some summer, I don’t know when. I distrust linearity, but bodies can seem like one of the only linear things—age, getting bigger and then smaller, death. Another reason to appreciate the transitioning body, which ages backward, every person seeming to become younger, with or without taking hormones. It’s a good reminder that the body was never linear in the first place. And anyway, when wasn’t my desire pubescent? I didn’t know what I wanted until I had it, which was just to feel different. And when I swung a hammer, my inner forearm landing against a new, warm shape, I tired more quickly, and was happier for it.

Benjy and I use maybe one hundred pills. Post-Scarcity, they spell out. The word is multihued and large. I hold the ladder while Benjy positions the camera above, and as the clouds pass in their own game of arrangement, he snaps a picture, waits, snaps a picture. The images show only pills and sky, and it appears as though the word is floating above us. Post-Scarcity, it says, composed of more than one body like all bodies are. I use the crook of my elbow to sweep the pills into a bag and we return to the house, sorting them from one another again, putting them back into bottles. Categorization isn’t how we acknowledge difference, but rather its enforcement, difference leveraged to keep things apart that could well be together.”