The last man resents courage. To again answer the question on "why hasn't anyone at all made any serious effort to engage the question of how "post-scarcity" abundance actually plays out?", it's because the reality is hateful:
(1) Post-labor is not post-scarcity. There is not and will never be post-scarcity until AGI completes its thermodynamic imperative at the terminus of the universe. Things that remains scarce after labor's automation (that is: full cognitive/manual labor automation but no runaway singularity): compute, chip fabrication, control over autonomous systems, geography, biological resources with terroir, sexual access, physical attractiveness, youth, status, attention, community membership, reputation, trust, and time. There is no reason a real economy with markets, exchange, inequality etc. would not continue to persist above the abundance floor, plus an inevitable makework economy of human-provenance creative crafts is introduced as a fitness signal. Post-labor is not post-economy.
(2) Any erosion of financial-economic competition introduces a darwinian reversion to primitive abundance economies, centered around sex and status signaling, that economic sophistication only masks. Raising the floor of material abundance is deterministically followed by sex selection intensification. This is documented in all primitive societies enjoying edenic conditions (PNC, Polynesia, Yanomami)—when material competition is removed, sexual competition absorbs the full motivational space.
(3) Economic constraints on environmental selection removed means communities orient selection on heritable traits with mate choice operating without material masking, accelerating gene-environment correlation at civilization scale. Differential reproduction between mating-market winners and losers under intensified sexual selection concentrating mate-valued traits (intelligence, conscientiousness, beauty, creativity, social skill) through assortative mating produces genetic caste stratification; just as breeding domestic animals, the procedure will complete in 5-10 generations.
(4) Cognitive automation must also come alongside super-optimized marketing apparatus, a decentralized algorithmic pleasure matrix targeting every despondent failing in the intensified status marketplace, a hedonic hyperpredator working its way up the bottom class of human fitness extracting the last lingering transportable capital before deposing of them in a pornographic fertility shredder operating on exactly the phenotype sexual selection was already pruning, converting a gradual selection gradient into a sharp binary. Single-axis selection on hedonic susceptibility (weighted heavily on operational a male sex ratio) is faster than any multi-axis natural selection event in evolution. Last men who lay flat in conditions of present-day abundance is already the first sign of this mass assisted-death. On the bright side it would likely see a runaway sexual effect on positive traits associated with the cognitive class of humanity, such as humor (
@gmiller talks about this)
Abundance's inconvenient conclusion is intensified speciation, an aggressive human culling. This is entirely due to man's inherent nature, man in utopia always invents violence—sex is the scarce thing that needs to be solved, not food. The post-labor permanent underclass is a horse, who will go from domesticated tool to domestic novelty. Those who are distracted now will be more distracted later—and then they will be kill. This is why they stop thought dead in its place right at (1) to still talk about a hand-wavey utopian communist "post-scarcity" that has no remote theoretical plausibility. They will tell you taking serious things seriously is hateful and inhumane, but they will not tell you it's untrue.
nick land is explicitly antihuman and antiflourishing, and landian-descended philosophies are just as demonic. e/acc and milady are both poison fruits borne from staring into a horrible nightmarish abyss and deciding to let it consume u instead of standing up and fighting back.