Just noticed your reply, AC. These are great questions!
One the first, sci-fi shows several different models, but yes, cultural transitions can be awkward. I think Jams P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is a good depiction of how long people in power can resists the obvious and attempt to create artificial scarcity to prop up their social position (until there may be overwhelming pushback from lots of people in a Ghandi-esque way). Marshall Brain's Manna also explore that idea, but in that case there is a clear divide of those who own a share of a corporation that meets all their needs and many of their wants on a sort-of basic income basis (with the equivalent of replicator ration units / credits like in Star Trek Voyager). There can be a place for a "Kanban"-like system to signal need (even just emails or other messages). And universal basic income and varying prices (like in Marshall Brain's Manna) is a way to ration some things. Lawrence Lessig in Code 2.0 talks about how human behavior can be shaped by norms, rules, prices, and architecture, and I might expect all four of those would be adapted to support a post-scarcity worldview (including limits as needed, just like when people first got running water in cities they would leave the tap open like fountains and streams they were used to, but eventually it became a norm to turn the water on when you wanted it and off when you didn't.
On your second point, indeed it is true that abundances can create complementary scarcities. I wrote an essay on that in 2013:
https://pdfernhout.net/how-abu...
"It has been pointed out that abundances of some things can create complementary scarcities. For example, too many emails means too little attention for each one. Too many snowmobiles may mean too little quiet woods. Too many fusion power systems may mean too much heat pollution everywhere. An abundance of nanobots or biotechnology may mean no one can walk unprotected ever outside of air tight dwellings, making for a scarcity of convenience and nature. And abundance of cheap digital cameras and voice recorders makes for a scarcity of privacy, as does an abundance of computers to analyze and organize all that digital information. And so on. ...
As for social inequality specifically from abundance, yes, it is true that some people may use the powers of abundance within any socio-political-economic system to consolidate power. Marshall Brain suggests that has been happening with automation, and it will only continue unless various structural changes are made (like a redistributive basic income, such as Social Security for all instead of just those over 65). ...
There may be other ways that abundance creates problems too, no doubt, because it can connect to very specialized divisions of labor including bureaucracies, which, as systems, to put it charitably are "amoral". Organizations can behave in amoral ways regardless of the morality of the people who are the components who make up the system, since any "failing" component that does not perform to standards will just be replaced (Langdon Winner at RPI wrote about this in "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought"). Yes, people can drag their feet (examples abound like in WWII Germany), but the system will still trundle along based on its own emergent organizational dynamics to the bitter end unless it meets some other system that stops it or it hits some sort of natural limit as it burns like a fire through that which sustains it (including the people that compose it). So, we have to be careful what values our systems embody, because the systems will serve as amplifiers of those values. ...
Another way that abundances can create scarcities of self-control is "The Pleasure Trap", "Supernormal Stimuli", "The Acceleration of Addiction", and "The Tyranny of Choice" all resulting in "Ego Depletion". ...
Hopefully we can use what computing power we have individually and collectively to think up and implement ways of dealing with all these challenges, like I suggest here:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." ..."
So, not a great answer to a great question, but remember that a lot of people will have a lot of free time to help deal with such issues. And also eventually at least the commercial motive to create problems for personal profit will recede. They might even have time to clean up the scientific literature from profit-oriented deceptions like ones I cite here related to peer review in general and also medical science in particular:
https://pdfernhout.net/to-jame...
The world wide web has billions of web pages and we now have search engines (and RSS feed readers) to help navigate those, as do directories of various sorts including Wikipedia. Granted, all search engines and directories may have their biases. But as computing capacity goes way beyond what is needed to index and store billions of web pages locally, people can easily get their basic informational needs met locally.
It is maybe increasingly hard to remember what the information world was like in the 1970s when I was a teenager -- where a dialup phone call to my high school's timeshare computer network cost me US$10 per hour (more like US$30 now) and there was little there to do besides playing a few text-based computer games, chatting with a handful of other users online, or writing a program file or maybe reading a very little online documentation or other text files. It was really hard to get information about any specific topic you might have an interest without physically traveling to a public library, and time there was limited, and so was the selection of books and resources to maybe a few tens of thousands of items (in a larger town library). Especially for any teenager before college, was difficult to get any information beyond what you were provided by someone else for their purposes (such as in school textbooks).
Now I could in theory store the equivalent of a town library of 10,000 books on a flash drive with a full text index. On a 20TB hard drive available for US$350, one can in theory store millions of books: https://forums.tomshardware.co...
Or essentially all of Wikipedia (without media):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Still not quite a personal copy of the Library of Congress though:
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2009...
But still an enormous change from the 1970s. And more than enough to be able to learn the basics of almost any academic or technical subject at very little cost -- assuming that the information is reasonably complete and unbiased (which is may not be, to your point). And indexing all that information by at least keyword is now very easy with tools like Lucene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, yes, spam is a problem. It greatly damaged email and contributed to the rise of walled garden social networks (which eventually had their own spam problems including from outrage-stoking algorithmic feeds provides by the social media companies). But, email still works. There are various groups of people who help deal with email spam including by creating new standards and encouraging people to use them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the book "Midas World" there is a story of people who help individuals who create huge problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Man Who Ate the World" (originally published in Galaxy in 1956). Anderson Trumie had a scarring experience in his childhood, before Morey Fry changed the world. All Anderson wanted was a teddy bear, but his parents' lifestyle of frantic consumption did not allow him to have one. As an adult, he is a compulsive consumer. He has taken over North Guardian Island and is putting a burden on the local infrastructure. A psychist, Roger Garrick, with the help of Kathryn Pender, finds a way to heal Anderson and end his exorbitant consumption."
For an analogy today, where people may die from for-profit malware distributors -- and eventually there may be social processes (including law enforcement and international cooperation) to reduce that:
"Ransomware Attack Hampers Prescription Drug Sales at 90% of US Pharmacies (msn.com)"
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
So yes, there will be problems. But there will also be enormous capacity to deal with problems. And there will be (hopefully) an enormous cultural shift to preempt problems -- like, say, in the USA not many people would probably want to marry a human trafficker today compared to the early 1800s when slaveholding was a normal and accepted and profitable part of US culture and has since been greatly reduced in its most extreme forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Human trafficking is condemned as a violation of human rights by international conventions, but legal protection varies globally. The practice has millions of victims around the world. ... According to scholar Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People (2004), estimates that as many as 27 million people are in "modern-day slavery" across the globe."
tl;dr: I can't disagree with your core point that there are challenges and lots of messiness in social change -- but thankfully there are billions of people who could provide solutions, since, as Julian Simon pointed out, the human imagination is the ultimate resource.
https://www.pop.org/overpopula...
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...