Blemya and the Post-Scarcity Human

How Will We Be in a Post-Scarcity Era?

How can we imagine the human being in a society that doesn’t yet exist?

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This is one of the central difficulties when we talk about post-scarcity. We can speculate about artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, new sources of energy, or production systems capable of drastically reducing the cost of goods and services, but technology is only part of the equation. The harder question is another: what happens to human beings when scarcity ceases to organize an important part of their existence? It is not about imagining a world in which all resources are literally infinite. Scarcity is a relative concept and can change its nature as technology, productivity, and institutions evolve. A society may overcome certain forms of scarcity and simultaneously discover others. Herbert Simon once observed that in an environment rich in information, attention becomes a scarce resource. Abundance does not necessarily eliminate scarcity; it may simply displace it. It is precisely this transition that interests me.

To at least visualize this human, I created the Homo blemyus prospenus. 

Much of the economic and social organization we know was built around a very simple problem: resources are limited and desires are numerous. Prices, markets, property, wages, credit, investment, and competition are, among other things, mechanisms developed to coordinate people under this condition. But technologies capable of reducing the need for human labor and the marginal cost of certain goods may progressively alter these relations. This does not mean that post-scarcity is inevitably arriving, nor that technology automatically eliminates inequality, concentration of power, or incompetence. It simply means that a society in which certain goods and services can be produced in abundance requires new questions. If we produce more and more with less work, what will we do with the freed time? If survival no longer consumes most of human energy, what will give life meaning? If we can possess almost everything, what will remain truly important?

Science fiction has already experimented with this question. Gene Roddenberry understood that a radical technological transformation also required a transformation in our social imagination. Star Trek did not merely present new spacecraft, teleporters, and alien worlds; it presented a society that had undergone a profound economic transformation. The replicator is perhaps the clearest example. When food, clothing, and countless objects can be produced on demand from matter and energy, the relationship between labor, price, and objects changes radically. Technology ceases to be merely a tool for producing more efficiently what we already produce and begins to question the very need for certain economic structures. But the most interesting part is that Roddenberry did not need to write an economic treatise about it. He showed people living inside the hypothesis. Kirk did not explore space in order to become rich. Spock did not pursue knowledge to increase his wealth. Picard did not command the Enterprise to accumulate capital. They worked because there were things to discover, problems to solve, and knowledge to create. Fiction allowed us to observe human behavior inside an economic hypothesis.

This is precisely why I consider Blemya a kind of post-scarcity being. She was created before my current formulation of Prospenomics, but today I can see her as one of its most curious expressions. Blemya Media Group was created by me in 2007 with the idea of creating better living conditions through intelligence, creativity, and technology, and the character eventually became a visual representation of that search. Blemya has no head. Her eyes are located in her chest, and her brain and heart are symbolically brought together in the same place. She does not represent physical strength, power, or the ability to accumulate. She represents another possibility: a being that perceives differently, in whom rationality and sensitivity do not necessarily have to operate as opposing forces. Even her symbolic relationship with air plants such as tillandsias interests me: a creature capable of finding abundance in what appears to be almost nothing, just as these plants can obtain part of the resources necessary for their existence from the atmosphere. It is a metaphor for a change in mentality—from an economy of extraction to an economy of perception.

This is why I began playing with Blemya in the form of toy art. I am not trying to turn the character into a product line. In fact, I do not intend to sell these toys. That would itself be an interesting contradiction with Blemya's anti-consumerist philosophy. The purpose of these objects is different. A toy can function as a cultural artifact, a visual marker, or a small instrument of memory. An abstract idea can become much easier to recognize when it acquires a physical form. An adult may explain a theory for an hour; an object can remain silently on a shelf for years. That is the ability I am exploring. The toys are a way of seriously playing with the question: what would a human being look like if they had not been shaped entirely by the need to accumulate, compete, and turn everything into property?

Toy art offers a particularly appropriate language for this experiment. In the late 1990s, Michael Lau helped transform the toy into a new cultural category by combining the language of action figures with street culture and collecting, particularly through his Gardener figures, presented in Hong Kong in 1999. The toy ceased to be necessarily just an industrial product intended for children and also became an artistic object, character, identity, and cultural expression. This transformation created space for artists to use three-dimensional figures to carry complex ideas. This is how I am using Blemya: not as a character that needs to be commercialized, but as a visual language for testing hypotheses about the future. Each modified toy can place Blemya alongside a different cultural reference and ask, through the image itself, how this post-scarcity being might behave within that universe.

This is also where the relationship with Star Trek becomes more evident. Roddenberry placed different people on the same bridge and, without giving a lecture on economics or sociology, presented a society in which cooperation, science, exploration, and knowledge could occupy the place that survival and accumulation occupy in our own society.

I want to do something similar on a much smaller scale: use Blemya as a visual experiment to imagine not only a technological future, but a human future.

The question becomes increasingly urgent because we are entering an era in which tools capable of extending human intelligence are becoming available to almost everyone. Artificial intelligence can write, draw, calculate, research, and create images in seconds. But an unexpected question emerges: if we increasingly delegate intellectual tasks to machines, are we expanding our capabilities—or reducing the exercise of the abilities that made us human?

Some researchers have already discussed the effects of what is known as “cognitive offloading”: when we transfer part of our memory and reasoning to external tools, we gain efficiency, but we may also lose some of the mental training that came precisely from the effort of solving problems on our own. The calculator did not destroy mathematics, just as the encyclopedia did not destroy knowledge. But every new tool forces us to reconsider which human abilities will remain essential. Perhaps the great challenge of the future will not simply be to create more intelligent machines, but to create humans capable of using them without losing curiosity, creativity, and the ability to think.

Throughout history, human beings have always attempted to overcome their own limitations. At first, we did so through external tools: fire, agriculture, machines, computers. Then we began imagining internal tools: how could we transform our own bodies and our own biology?

The idea of modifying human beings has always existed both in science fiction and in real science. In the past, movements such as eugenics attempted to apply a simplistic vision of “human improvement” based on biological selection, often with grave and dehumanizing ethical consequences. Eugenics was built around the assumption that humanity could be deliberately improved by deciding which traits should be encouraged and which people should reproduce. What makes this particularly dangerous is that it transforms a technological or biological possibility into a hierarchy of human worth. The problem was not simply the desire to improve the human condition, but the belief that someone could legitimately decide what a “better human” should be. The future of this discussion will probably follow a very different path: not an attempt to create “superior” human beings, but the responsible development of technologies capable of extending human capabilities, preventing disease, adapting our species to new environments, and allowing individuals to choose how they might expand their own possibilities. Instead of asking which humans deserve to exist, the question could become much more interesting: what kinds of humans might we choose to become?

Science fiction has explored these possibilities through its characters. The Star Wars toys represent an ancient human narrative: the confrontation between opposing forces, training, conquest, and the struggle between light and darkness. Luke Skywalker represents the development of an inner capability; Darth Vader represents the danger of technology and power without emotional balance. The Force itself introduces another possibility: perhaps the most important form of human evolution is not physical at all, but the development of perception, discipline, consciousness, and control over one's own impulses. In this sense, Star Wars is less about creating a biologically superior human and more about the possibility of transforming the individual from within.

The Marvel universe takes this question in another direction, turning human transformation into a collection of different experiments. Namor can be interpreted as a fantasy of adaptation to the aquatic environment. If roughly three quarters of Earth's surface is covered by water, perhaps one of humanity's greatest frontiers would not be another planet, but the planet we already inhabit. Namor represents a human adapted to the oceans, capable of thriving in an environment in which ordinary humans are severely limited. Hulk represents a different strategy: rather than adapting humanity to another environment, why not amplify the human body that already exists? His extraordinary strength becomes an exaggerated metaphor for overcoming biological limitations from within. Iron Man proposes yet another path. Tony Stark does not fundamentally alter his biology; instead, he surrounds himself with an exoskeleton that extends his physical capabilities. His armor can therefore be seen as an early fictional image of human-machine symbiosis, in which technology becomes an additional layer of the human body. Taken together, Namor, Hulk, and Iron Man suggest three possible directions for human transformation: adapting to new environments, strengthening the biological body, and augmenting the existing body through technology.

Perhaps the future human will be a combination of all these possibilities. Luke Skywalker suggests the transformation of consciousness; Namor, adaptation to new environments; Hulk, biological enhancement; and Iron Man, technological augmentation. None of these possibilities necessarily requires the creation of a single “superior” human being. The more interesting possibility is a future in which humanity becomes more diverse in its capabilities, with individuals and societies choosing different ways to expand what it means to be human. The challenge will be to make such transformations voluntary, responsible, and inclusive rather than repeating the central mistake of eugenics: deciding that some forms of human existence are inherently more valuable than others.

Note on images and references  

The images published in this article are independent exercises of conceptual art and toy art created from Blemya’s authorial universe. Some works visually dialogue, in a referential, transformative, or parodic way, with characters, universes, and recognizable elements of popular culture. They are not official works, licensed or produced in association with the respective rights holders, nor do they intend to suggest sponsorship, endorsement, or commercial ties. Characters, names, brands, and other recognizable elements belong to their respective holders. Blemya and its original elements remain independent authorial creations within this artistic and conceptual experiment.