The Abundance Fiction
Unlimited allocation, cheap memory, and token leaderboards are three layers of the same mistake: treating resource consumption as if the resource arrived from nowhere.
From the Ether starts with an engineering convenience: ask for memory and let the allocator provide it. The abstraction is useful because most programs should not negotiate with a RAM chip. It becomes dangerous when architecture built around the convenience forgets that allocation is a claim on something finite.
The Residual Buyer follows that claim into fabrication. AI infrastructure becomes the preferred customer for memory capacity, and consumer RAM no longer gets cheaper on the schedule its buyers learned to expect. The resource was not exhausted. It was reassigned to someone willing to pay more for it.
Tokenmaxxing adds the organizational layer. Once token consumption becomes visible, subsidized, and easy to count, using more can be mistaken for doing more. The abstraction no longer hides only a cost. It turns the cost itself into a status signal.
These are not one problem at three scales. Allocation without accounting can be sensible locally. Expensive memory can fund new fabrication. Heavy token use can produce valuable work. The failure arrives when the proxy loses its counterweight: no ownership at the program layer, no primary-customer status at the market layer, no outcome measure at the organization layer.
Abundance is often an interface presented to one participant by moving the scarcity somewhere else. The heap moves it to the allocator. The AI data center moves it to the residual buyer. The leaderboard moves it to the budget holder, who sees activity first and value later, if at all.