Manufactured scarcity
The abundance is real, so a new scarcity gets invented to compete over.
The most common answer among writers who take the problem seriously, and the most revealing. Material scarcity ends; within a generation, something else is scarce instead — reputation, subjective time, standing, access.
This is worth reading as a confession. If you believe abundance solves the problem, you do not need this plot device. Every author who reaches for it is conceding that the bottleneck was never resources. It was ranking: the need to be someone whose effort was necessary, which requires that effort be able to fail.
The invented scarcities are strikingly arbitrary — the right to run a theme park ride, a running clock, an exercise-bike credit balance. That arbitrariness is the point. Any measure will do, provided it can run out.
8 works give this answer
The Diamond Age
The neo-Victorians cultivate hand-craftsmanship precisely because it is economically pointless. A hand-carved chair signals what a compiled one cannot, so an entire class organises its days around deliberately slow work.
Manufactured scarcityAD-027-MAN·BK·2003Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Compete, viciously, over the right to operate rides at Walt Disney World. The currency is Whuffie: accumulated reputation, continuously scored, spendable on nothing but standing.
Manufactured scarcityAD-031-MAN·BK·2005Lady of Mazes
Live inside a chosen manifold whose rules deliberately exclude most available technology, because unlimited capability turned out to make an undifferentiated life unbearable. People restrict themselves in order to have a life with edges.
Manufactured scarcityAD-044-MAN·BK·2010The Quantum Thief
Time is the currency, literally. You spend your allotted clock living; when it runs out you serve a shift as a mechanical Quiet, maintaining the city, before being restored to flesh with a fresh balance.
Manufactured scarcityAD-046-MAN·TV·2011Start hereFifteen Million Merits
Pedal an exercise bike to earn merits. Spend merits on media, on skipping adverts, and eventually on one shot at a talent show. Sleep in a cell whose walls are screens you cannot switch off.
Manufactured scarcityAD-051-MAN·BK·2013Neptune's Brood
Accountancy. Interstellar colonisation is financed by slow money that takes decades to clear, so the indispensable profession is forensic audit, and the protagonist chases a fraud across light years.
Manufactured scarcityAD-056-MAN·BK·2016Infomocracy
Politics became the main industry. Armies of fact-checkers, campaign staff, debate technicians and election observers work continuous cycles, because micro-democracy created more governance work than it removed.
Manufactured scarcityAD-064-MAN·TV·2020Upload
Eternity on a service tier. Premium residents golf and dine; those on the free plan run out of data mid-sentence and freeze until the month resets. The dead take customer-support calls.
Manufactured scarcity