Who Deserves the Sun?
#035: The gap between exponential optimism and everyday reality in a world ruled by the tech-elite.
“This is the tragedy of the Abundance ideology as it exists today: It frames abundance as something that trickles down from innovators, not something that arises through the participation of ordinary people. It sells optimism as a product, while treating structural inequality as a rounding error.”
Recent headlines have brought the Abundance movement back to the forefront of my mind — both its promise and its failings.
First, in Australia, the government announced that millions of citizens will begin receiving free electricity credits in 2026, the result of a solar boom so large it’s producing more energy than the grid can store. The sun had given more than enough, and the government decided enough was worth sharing.
Meanwhile in the United States, the Trump administration canceled what would have been the nation’s largest solar project — a Nevada initiative capable of powering hundreds of thousands of homes — while withholding billions in SNAP food aid from starving families.
Australia looked at surplus light and asked, “How do we share it?” America looked at the same sun and asked, “Who deserves it?” Then it turned off the lights, locked the pantry, and sent more untrained ICE agents to terrorize the streets.
It’s tempting to think of these stories — about energy, food, and state power — as separate. But they share a thread: how abundance is managed, and who gets to experience it.
“…the future isn’t a democratic project; it’s an engineering problem awaiting the right optimists with more access to capital than common sense.”
Australia’s decision to redistribute its solar surplus is a design of reciprocity — an acknowledgment that shared light sustains shared life. The Trump administration’s acts of cancellation and withholding are designs of control; of scarcity used as leverage and fear as public policy. Both are expressions of belief: one believes abundance grows when shared while the other believes abundance must be rationed to preserve power and drive profits.
Over a decade ago, Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil turned Abundance into a creed — a techno-spiritual promise that exponential technologies would deliver humanity from scarcity. At Singularity University, they preach that innovation can fix what politics can not. In their telling, the future isn’t a democratic project; it’s an engineering problem awaiting the right optimists with more access to capital than common sense.
Over the years, that vision found eager apostles among Silicon Valley’s most powerful.
Peter Thiel framed technological acceleration as a way to bypass what he sees as the “failures of democracy,” openly arguing that freedom and equality are incompatible. Marc Andreessen, in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, elevated abundance to a civilizational mandate — a moral justification for unrestrained growth and elite stewardship of the future.
In their hands, “abundance” became less a promise for everyone and more a permission structure for the few. They believe that if technology is destiny, then those who control it are destiny’s rightful authors.
That worldview has always aligned comfortably with anti-democratic power. Thiel’s early backing of Trump — and his reemergence as a key donor (including his sponsorship of JD Vance) — fused techno-optimism with authoritarian politics. Andreessen’s venture networks remain deeply intertwined with the administration’s AI ambitions and surveillance-first policies.
Together, they helped turn abundance from a hopeful metaphor into an ideological shield; a way to claim moral high ground while building systems that concentrate power in their own hands.
That ethos is on full display each year at Abundance360, Diamandis’s summit where entrepreneurs and executives pay upwards of $55,000 to hear about asteroid mining, longevity startups, and AI salvation narratives. The aesthetic is one of limitless possibility — as long as you can afford the ticket.
Outside those rooms, the contrast is painful. While attendees imagine uploading consciousness and extending life spans, millions of people are simply trying to extend the groceries in their fridge. While the techno-elite dream about post-scarcity, families in the U.S. wait for food aid deliberately withheld by their own government.
This is the tragedy of the Abundance ideology as it exists today: It frames abundance as something that trickles down from innovators, not something that arises through the participation of ordinary people. It sells optimism as a product, while treating structural inequality as a rounding error.
Abundance, in this worldview, is something the powerful dispense rather than something human beings deserve.
Italian design theorist Ezio Manzini offers a different lens. In Design, When Everybody Designs, he describes design as a shared social act; the everyday ways people organize to improve collective life. For Manzini, abundance doesn’t emerge from technological acceleration, but from human cooperation. It’s not the result of innovation alone, but of participation. He calls this social innovation: design as the distributed intelligence of communities — citizens, neighbors, workers — shaping systems around mutual care rather than control.
In Australia, the Solar Sharer Offer isn’t fully co-designed in the formal policy sense — but the abundance it redistributes was co-designed in practice. The country’s solar boom exists because millions of households installed rooftop panels over the past two decades, creating the world’s most decentralized renewable grid. Ordinary citizens collectively built the surplus the government is now preparing to share. In that sense, the program is less a top-down gift and more a recognition of a participatory design process already underway: a distributed public effort, accumulated over years, that turned individual choices into national abundance.
The Trump administration and its techno-authoritarian support network, by contrast, represents the death of co-design — a collapse of participatory capacity. Its withholding of food aid and sabotage of renewable energy are deliberate choices that strip people of authorship over their own conditions. It’s a design of domination.
Manzini warns that societies dominated by centralized systems lose their social imagination. When people stop believing they can influence the systems around them, design stops happening and fear replaces creativity.
Under those conditions, “Abundance” becomes impossible — not because resources are lacking, but because agency is. A society without co-design cannot sustain abundance, it can only consume what someone else controls.
Thanks for reading issue 35 of Systems & Signals. If you want more essays on design, power, and the systems shaping our world — plus occasional tools, templates, and bonus issues — you can subscribe here: