Simplified Consumption in Free Market Ecology
Originally published on Botsfordism Substack on May 14, 2025.
The article addresses a fundamental challenge in Free Market Ecology (FME): how consumers manage multiple resource types simultaneously without overwhelming complexity.
The Core Problem
In an FME system, wealth becomes “a vector instead of a scalar value.” Rather than a single currency, individuals hold portfolios of different resource rights. This creates decision paralysis—consumers might exhaust their budget in one critical resource while lacking another, or accumulate surpluses of unwanted resources.
Foundational Principles
Principle #1: The Resource Exchange
A deep, liquid market using fixed-supply cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin) as intermediary would enable rapid conversion between resource types. The author emphasizes this prevents hoarding through “mechanisms that discourage hoarding rights and commodities, especially above ground.”
Principle #2: Labor in an AI World
With AI handling most labor, human worth shifts from work to equity ownership and creative innovation. Traditional wage labor becomes nearly worthless, with wealth flowing primarily from equity dividends, UBI, and resale of goods.
Three Solutions
Solution #1: Real-time Price Conversion
Apps could convert all resource holdings into a single “money” value, simplifying consumer math through constant market-price updates.
Solution #2: AI-Assisted Consumption
Personal AI agents learn preferences and optimize entire consumption cycles, handling recycling and asset management automatically.
Solution #3: All-Inclusive Resorts
Developers create standardized accommodations where residents delegate consumption decisions to professional optimization systems.
Conclusion
The author argues FME requires AI and computerization to function. Without such systems, centralized bureaucracies would solve resource scarcity through “devaluation of human life and mass extermination.” Only decentralized market mechanisms can align individual incentives with ecological sustainability.