The Shmoo Diaries, Part I: Are We Ready for Abundance?

Hi everyone, how was your week?

Mine’s been one of those weeks where a single idea keeps tapping you on the shoulder until you finally sit down and listen.

An idea about what happens when something essential becomes so easy and so available that it quietly changes how everything else works.

That idea came from something unexpected: a cartoon character from the 1940s. A stuffed creature I brought back from ComiCon in 1984 and have had in my office ever since.

Most people have never heard of the Shmoo. It appeared in 1948, in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner. You’d need to be well into your eighties now, and were reading the funny pages back when newspapers still shaped daily life. I caught on to it later on.

It usually starts with AI. Someone mentions it casually. Within minutes, the tone shifts.

People talk about lost jobs, fake content, the death of creativity, and the collapse of expertise.

You can feel the defensiveness settle in. The need to protect something. The fear.

What strikes me isn't the technology itself. It's how familiar the reaction feels.

We've been here before.

I know that because a reminder of it has been sitting on my desk for decades.

It's a small, white, pear-shaped stuffed creature. No arms, no legs, just a big smile stretched across its bowling-pin head. I brought it back from Comic-Con in 1984. It's followed me through offices, companies, and careers. Most people who notice it have no idea what it is.

It's a Shmoo.

How a Cartoon Took Over a Country

The Shmoo first appeared in 1948 in Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner. What followed wasn't a novelty moment. It spread across American life using nothing but print newspapers, magazines, and radio. No television. No internet. No social media. By today's standards, that kind of reach shouldn't have been possible.

Within months, the Shmoo was everywhere. It appeared on merchandise. It entered economic debates. The U.S. Treasury issued bonds named after it. During the Berlin Airlift, images of the Shmoo were flown into West Berlin alongside food and supplies, used as symbols of American abundance and hope.

A cartoon character had become shorthand for an idea most societies don't know how to deal with. ABUNDANCE!

For a brief but intense period, the Shmoo dominated public conversation. It became what we would now call viral, long before we had a word for it.

And then it disappeared. Not slowly. Not accidentally. Deliberately.

Al Capp didn't create the Shmoo as a cute mascot. He created it as satire. A thought experiment disguised as something harmless. A way to ask a serious question without asking it directly.

What the Shmoo Actually Was

The Shmoo was small, white, and gentle. It had no arms and no ambition. It existed for one reason: to help humans.

It produced milk, eggs, and meat. Its skin could be used as leather. Its eyes became buttons. Its whiskers worked as toothpicks. Nothing went unused. Nothing ran out.

It reproduced easily. It required no labor, no maintenance, no ownership structure. It asked for nothing in return. It would even willingly die to serve you.

That detail matters. The Shmoo wasn't magic. It was worse. It made abundance effortless.

When the Joke Stops Being Funny

In Capp's strip, the Shmoos appear in a remote valley. At first, people are delighted. Life gets easier. Food, clothing, shelter, all freely available. No work required. No struggle.

Then the implications start creeping in. Workers begin asking uncomfortable questions. If I don't need a job to survive, who am I? Business owners see the problem immediately. If no one needs to buy anything, what is my company worth?

So the Shmoos are hunted down and destroyed. Not because they are dangerous. Not because they failed. But because neither individuals nor institutions know how to function in a world shaped by abundance.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

We've seen this cycle before. The printing press displaced scribes and spread literacy. Photography displaced portrait painters and made memory accessible. Mechanical calculators replaced rooms full of human computers working with nothing more than a pencil and paper. Assembly lines dismantled craft traditions and reshaped communities.

Every time, the focus is on what is lost. Rarely on what becomes possible. Almost never on who benefits from keeping things difficult.

Our Own Shmoo Moment

Artificial intelligence didn't arrive gradually. It arrived already capable. It writes, edits, analyzes, codes, designs, and generates ideas at speeds that collapse months of work into hours. Tools once reserved for specialists are now widely accessible. That's abundance.

And the reaction is familiar. On a personal level, people are unsettled. Writers question their relevance. Designers wonder whether their training still matters. Educators struggle to define which skills are worth teaching.

This is the Shmoo hunt playing out again. Not because abundance is harmful, but because we don't know how to live with it.

The Questions We Avoid

Most of our systems aren't designed to eliminate scarcity. They're designed to manage it. To profit from it. To use it as an organizing principle for value, identity, and power.

When abundance arrives without warning, there's no playbook. So we rebuild scarcity. We add gatekeepers. We redefine legitimacy.

Which leaves us with the questions we keep avoiding: If struggle isn't required, what gives us worth? If scarcity isn't real, what justifies hierarchy? If effort isn't the measure, what is?

A Choice Point

The Shmoo was eliminated because it forced those questions too early. AI is forcing them again. Whether we confront them or repeat the same pattern is still undecided. The story isn't finished.

This is the first entry in The Shmoo Diaries, a series exploring how we keep encountering abundance and struggling to absorb it.

Warmly,

Jan

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