Scarcity Thinking and the Internet by Michael Swaine
June 11, 1999 It seems to me that much of the erroneous thinking about the Internet stems from thinking of the Net as a limited resource. That's scarcity thinking. The alternative, which I think is usually the appropriate way of looking at the Internet, is abundance thinking.

Scarcity thinking says that web businesses compete for eyeballs or mindshare in the same way that book publishers and potato chip manufacturers traditionally competed for shelf space. For every winner there's a loser.

Abundance thinking says that the shelf-space model doesn't apply in a marketplace whose boundaries can expand without limit. It's not zero- sum.

Scarcity thinking says that we need to keep the "bad" information off the Net: sex, nudity, hateful language, depictions or encouragement of violence, bomb plans, MP3 files, spam, strong encryption algorithms, Scientology documents, chemical plant risk data, political parody sites, ad filtering programs, or documentation of human rights abuses.

Abundance thinking says that most problems involving what someone might judge to be bad information can best be addressed by providing more information, not less. Give people rich tools for making decisions about where they want to go on the Internet, and they will be able to focus on the good information; that is, the information that they want.

I admit that none of this is original with me, and I'll grant that there are probably situations where the scarcity model does still apply to the Internet. But I do think that the scarcity-vs.-abundance dichotomy explains a lot of differences of opinion over the Internet.

You can probably think of other examples.

If you do, could you send them to me? If I get any really interesting examples of scarcity vs. abundance thinking on the Net, I'll share them here.

Thanks.

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