Artificial scarcity in abundance is the only remaining way to generate meaningful social hierarchy once actual material deprivation disappears.

Ellis saw this in the 1980s when it wasn't yet obvious—and the specific mechanism is almost impossibly simple: Bateman can buy the business card, but he cannot buy the reservation at Dorsia.

This is not a metaphor for status anxiety. It is the architecture of status anxiety itself, redefined. When Courtney or McDermott or Van Patten can walk into any store and purchase the same Valentino suit, the suit stops mattering—what matters is the table at the restaurant that says no to most people and yes to a few. The business card is mass-producible. The *respect for the business card* is not. This is why Bateman's monologues about fabric weight and card stock achieve their terrible precision: he's describing the last remaining scarcity in a world of infinite supply.

The restaurant reservation becomes the true commodity because it's the only thing that cannot be manufactured at scale. You cannot democratize access to Dorsia without destroying Dorsia. The novel's genius is mechanical, not thematic—every scene of Bateman failing to secure a table operates like a stock price ticker for a market that has no products, only gatekeeping. His murders—the actual violence—become almost incidental because the real violence is already complete: he lives in a world where the only thing left to compete for is the privilege of being excluded.

We now call this influencer culture. Ellis just called it honesty.