by Daniele Fabbri | Nov 25, 2018 | News
Credit picture to: CC(Paul May)
In an article published on Medium, “Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Vallaey’s latest Scam”, Douglas Rushkoff maintains that “The plan is no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement”.
Rushkoff was once a supporter of universal basic income (UBI), he says, but during a talk at Uber’s headquarters, with Uber management itself bringing up the possbility of UBI, an epiphany occurred to him and he changed his mind.
“The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top”, he says, and digital companies act by enacting a revised, perfected version of primitive accumulation. At this excels Amazon, by being an “automated wealth extraction platform”, through the control of the retail market and partially on the production of goods. But it becomes a problem when all the value is extracted from the market, consumers become too poor to pay for services or can’t buy enough goods, and even their data loses value.
In Rushkoff’s view, financing UBI through money creation or through corporate taxation would be a mean to keep consumers spending, a shortcut for ensuring that capital continues to accumulate at the very top. His words are harsh: “UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers.”
Silicon Valley’s support of UBI would, in Rushkoff’s view, be motived by a will to keep people from considering more enabling possibilities, which could challange the status quo: rather than asking for an allowance, we should ask for an ownership stake, as inequality rests on uneven distribution of assets. Assets that have been successfully appropriated by big corporations, which, unable to put money back in the economy, now ask for government intervention.
Rushkoff’s solution is, rather than UBI, a form of universal ownership: Universal Basic Assets. To support his view, he mentions the case of Denmark, where people have access to a share of the nation’s resources and consequently the social elevator works properly. This lends itself closer to the Commons concept, an ancient form of organizing societies but which has almost completely disappeared from today’s globalized and digitized society.
“A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality – much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.”
More information at:
Douglas Rushkoff, “Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam”, Medium, October 10th 2018
Article reviewed by Dawn Howard.
by Claire Bott | Aug 25, 2017 | News
Successful entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of online photo-sharing application Flickr and creator of the popular business communications system Slack, has spoken out on Twitter in favour of universal basic income.
On 4 August 2017, Butterfield stated that “giving people even a very small safety net would unlock a huge amount of entrepreneurialism”. He was responding to Austen Allred, the founder of crowdsourced news website Grasswire, who had tweeted “If you look at giant tech cos [companies], almost all had founders that were financially supported by parents while they started,” and “That’s the universal basic income argument that’s compelling to me. How many more billion dollar cos would be started w tiny bit of help.”
Butterfield’s tweet was reported by a number of news sources, including CNBC, right-wing site Breitbart, and Business Insider.
Butterfield has received a significant number of awards and accolades for his business skills, including being named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2006. Slack, which he set up in 2013, became the fastest-growing start-up in history, reaching a valuation of two billion dollars early in 2015. His comments come shortly after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also publicly supported the concept of UBI, stating in his Harvard commencement address in late May:- “We should explore ideas like universal basic income, to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
by Kate McFarland | Nov 6, 2016 | News
In an interview with CNBC on Friday, November 4, famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk — founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity — stated that a universal basic income will likely become necessary due to automation.
Musk says, “There’s a pretty good chance we’ll end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation. I’m not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”
In recent years, UBI has received a surge of attention from Silicon Valley’s tech industries, where it is often viewed favorably as a way to soften the blow of technological unemployment and to facilitate entrepreneurship. Most famously, perhaps, Y Combinator–the start-up incubator headed by UBI-proponent Sam Altman–is preparing a pilot study in Oakland that will lay the groundwork for a larger scale trial of a basic income. O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly and (particularly notable in this context) Tesla Motors software engineer Gerald Huff are among the other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite who have written in support of UBI.
However, Musk has remained silent about the issue prior to Friday’s interview with CNBC.
Musk has been an outspoken champion of other political causes, particularly the introduction of a carbon tax to combat climate change (a policy that itself enjoys popularity among many UBI supporters who see the tax as a way to fund a social dividend).
Reference
Catherine Clifford (November 4, 2016) “Elon Musk: Robots will take your jobs, government will have to pay your wage” CNBC.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation
by Kate McFarland | Oct 20, 2016 | News
NPR (National Public Radio), a popular and influential news radio network in the US, has broadcasted a short segment about automation and basic income on September 24.
The segment focuses on the interest in UBI among the Silicon Valley tech sector. Guests include basic income supporters Natalie Foster (of Institute of the Future), tech entrepreneur Misha Chellam, and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes.
Listen and read the transcript here:
Queena Kim, “As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We’ll Need A Guaranteed Basic Income” (September 24, 2016).
Photograph: The fully automated restaurant Eatsa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Yelp Inc), available as part of Yelp’s Eatsa album Qurazy for Quinoa.
by Kate McFarland | May 26, 2016 | News
In recent months, Basic Income News has covered multiple articles that explore basic income as a solution to the unemployment expected to result due to further automation of labor. (See, for example, here, here, and here.)
Meanwhile, events of just the past few days prove that worries about automation are not going away any time soon: Foxconn (a supplier for Apple and Samsung) reported that it replaced 60,000 of its 110,000 factory workers with robots, Pizza Hut announced plans to “hire” the robot Pepper (pictured above) as a server in its restaurants in Asia, and a former McDonald’s CEO warned that minimum wage hikes would spur automation in the fast food industry.
In an article published last month in Tech Insider, reporter Chris Weller weighs in on the issue of technological unemployment — drawing upon the ideas of American basic income advocates like Jim Pugh, a former analytics chief for President Obama and host of basic income “create-a-thons” in the Bay Area, and Sam Altman and Matt Krisiloff of Y Combinator (the San Francisco start-up incubator that has recently hired a researcher to oversee a basic income experiment).
Citing Pugh, Krisiloff, and skeptic Ross Baird (executive director of Village Capital), Weller concedes that basic income might not be a necessary response to automation — but it is clear that he does not rule out the possibility that basic income might be “the hero that saves American workers.”
Read the article here:
Chris Weller (April 8, 2016) “Giving people free money could be the only solution when robots finally take our jobs,” Tech Insider.
Image Source: Photo Zou
