Summary

After Scarcity is a sci-fi-essay film that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s-1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy, an attempt that finds traction today as a way of defying financialization. If the problem of socialism was time loss—too much bureaucracy, too much conversation, too many meetings—a socialism-on-speed, counting electricity plus statistics, could move past this limit. The film recounts the history of a moment in time when, against all odds, it seemed feasible to plan for the whole system at once—collective ownership of global resources with the programmed and networked efficiency of Wal-Mart.