Creating abundance is a matter of reproducing a good over and over again, until more than enough is available for everyone's need or even for everyone's capacity to consume.
In nature, the tendency towards bountiful abundance is obvious, especially where seasonal variations in insolation highlight the contrast between abundance and scarcity. Prehistoric artefacts of fertility goddesses as well as harvest festivals and rituals still practiced today show the extent abundance has been recognized and sought.
Abundance is inherent in the reproductive processes of life. Natural abundance is simply Life reasserting itself through the endless cycle of reproduction by every life form of their own kind. This is the engine of abundance in nature and in agriculture. The process is self-limiting too. As every available ecological niche is filled up, species gradually form a food web and settle into a dynamic balance, with closed material cycles ensuring that the balance is maintained. This enables the processes of abundance to continue indefinitely.
Sharing information does not diminish or deplete but rather multiplies and enriches it. Shared information begets more information. The engine of information abundance is the inherent human desire to communicate, to seek information and knowledge, and to share them, an urge that gets more fully expressed as the cost of sharing goes down. 27The cost of reproducing electronic signals is now approaching zero. With digital technology, books, artworks, music and video can now be stored in the same format as software and databases: as a long string of binary values. From these ones and zeroes, with the right equipment and algorithm, an exact copy of the digital original or a faithful copy of the analog original, can be reconstructed. Once stored digitally and made available in easily searchable form on the Internet, an unlimited number of users may now get any number of exact copies of the work. Who cannot recognize the abundance of human knowledge, experience and creative work made possible by the Internet? As more and more people discover its possibilities for sharing freely, the whole range of human skills, thought and feeling is now being made available through this medium.
From an information perspective, abundance in nature and in agriculture is, in a way, driven by the inherent program within genetic information to reproduce itself. This abundance, however, must eventually express itself in terms of biomass and is therefore constrained by material limits. Information abundance, on the other hand, is of the non-material variety. Thus information goods offer the promise of practically unlimited abundance, constrained mainly by the limits of human creativity, the storage capacity of media, and the availability of electricity to power servers on the Internet twenty-four hours a day.
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