How Will We Be in a Post-Scarcity Era?
How can we imagine the human being in a society that doesn’t yet exist?
This question has already been explored by science fiction. Gene Roddenberry realized that a radical technological change also required a change in social imagination. Star Trek did not present only new ships, teleporters, and alien worlds; it presented a society that had undergone a profound economic transformation. The replicator is perhaps the most evident example: when food, clothing, and countless objects can be produced on demand from matter and energy, the relationship between work, price, and object changes radically. Technology ceases to be merely a tool to produce more efficiently what we already produce and begins to question the very necessity of certain economic structures. But the most interesting part is that Roddenberry did not need to write a treatise about it. He showed people living within that hypothesis. Kirk did not explore space to get rich, Spock did not seek knowledge to increase his wealth, and Picard did not command the Enterprise to accumulate capital. They worked because there were things to discover, problems to solve, and knowledge to produce. Fiction allowed us to observe human behavior within an economic hypothesis.
That is exactly why I consider Blemya a kind of post-scarcity being. She was born before the 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 this pursuit. Blemya has no head. Her eyes are on her chest, and brain and heart are symbolically gathered in the same place. She does not represent physical strength, power, or accumulation capacity. She represents another possibility: a being that perceives differently, in which rationality and sensitivity do not need to function as opposing forces. Even her symbolic relationship with tillandsias interests me: a creature capable of finding abundance in what seems almost nothing, just as these plants manage to draw part of their resources from the atmosphere. It is a metaphor for a shift in mentality, from an economy of extraction to an economy of perception.
That is why I began experimenting with Blemya in the form of toy art. I am not trying to turn the character into a product line. On the contrary: I do not intend to put these toys up for sale. That would be, in fact, an interesting contradiction with Blemya’s own 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 be much more easily recognized when it takes shape. An adult can explain a theory for an hour; an object can remain silently on a shelf for years. That is the capacity 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 entirely shaped by the need to accumulate, compete, and turn everything into property?
Toy art offers a particularly suitable 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, especially through his Gardener series, presented in Hong Kong in 1999. The toy ceased to be merely an industrial product for childhood and also became an artistic object, character, identity, and cultural expression. This transformation opened space for artists to use three-dimensional figures to carry complex concepts. That is the sense in which I am using Blemya: not as a character that needs to be commercialized, but as a visual language to test hypotheses about the future. Each modified toy can place Blemya before a different cultural reference and ask, through the image, how this post-scarcity being would behave in that universe.
This is also where the connection with Star Trek becomes clearer. 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 take the place that survival and accumulation occupy in ours. I want to do something similar on a much smaller scale. By placing Blemya in situations inspired by characters, universes, and archetypes from popular culture, I am using a language we already recognize to ask new questions. The image of a small toy can function as a thought experiment: what if Blemya were placed in that universe? What would she do? What would remain the same? What would need to change? And, most importantly, what does this tell us about the human being we are trying to imagine?
We do not know what the post-scarcity human will be like. Perhaps they will remain competitive and accumulative. Perhaps scarcity will simply migrate to other fields, such as attention, trust, recognition, time, or environmental resources. Post-scarcity does not mean the end of problems; it may mean a change in their nature. If technology allows us to produce almost everything, perhaps the difficulty will be deciding what deserves to be produced. If knowledge becomes abundant, perhaps discernment will become more valuable. If machines perform an increasing share of necessary work, perhaps purpose and meaning will become central questions. That is why Prospenomics does not only need to imagine a new economy. It also needs to imagine the individuals capable of living within it.
At this point, Blemya ceases to be just a little monster and becomes an archetype. Perhaps the post-scarcity human will be defined less by what they can accumulate and more by what they can perceive, create, connect, and share. Perhaps intelligence will not only be the ability to solve problems, but the ability to perceive possibilities we did not see before. Perhaps prosperity will not simply be possessing more, but having the freedom to dedicate energy to what truly matters. I do not know if the future will produce humans resembling Blemya—probably not. But that is not the goal. Blemya is a materialized question, a small cultural prototype of something we still cannot describe.
That is why I will continue playing with her. These toys are not the answer to what the future will be; they are tools to imagine it. Blemya can appear as a scientist, explorer, astronaut, artist, or anything else that allows us to test an idea. The important thing is that the play has a function: to shift our imagination outside the rules we consider natural simply because we were educated within them. Perhaps this is the most interesting role of art when we think about prosperity: not to predict the future, but to expand the space of futures we can imagine. The real question of post-scarcity may not be how to produce everything. It may be what we will do with ourselves when we no longer need to spend our entire lives trying to survive. And perhaps that is what a small toy is for: to leave on the shelf a question that is still too big to answer.
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.
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