More Sustainable than Sustainable

Prominent software executives have vocally proclaimed that tech such as AI and space exploration will resolve earthlings’ sustainability crisis. Common to these proposals is a paradigm of ever-increasing human demands met by ever-increasing technological scope, capacity and surveillant efficiency. Advocates (Diamantis 2016, Andreessen 2023) label this paradigm abundance. Software practitioners, who collaborate to create the functionality on which these advocates’ platforms are built, also employ a notion of abundance — often in their public commentary, and especially consistently in their conventional practices — but of a very different sort. This paper uses content analysis of more than two hundred public statements (microblogs, blog posts and publications) by software practitioners and executives, plus 17 published assessments of AI assistant software's impact on development work, alongside praxiographic analysis (Mol 2002) of conventional cross-disciplinary software team practices (such as debugging, user-centered design and sprint retrospectives), to discern an ecosystemic understanding of abundance enacted in software team practice. It then contrasts the two versions of abundance and suggests the potential benefit of the one hidden at the heart of collaborative software practice to the project of civil and environmental sustainability on earth.