Once a radical idea, Universal Basic Income has entered the mainstream. Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang spoke about it during his campaign, it has become a key policy proposal in sections of the progressive left, and more recently, some of the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley have become its champion. I can understand why: the stated purpose of UBI – to alleviate (or even abolish) poverty – is a noble and worthy cause. In a world where the jobs being lost to automation are more numerous than the new jobs being created (or where well-paid jobs are being replaced by gig work) UBI, it seems, is the only just solution. 
The problem I have with UBI is this: it has become unmoored from altruistic origins. It is no longer about human dignity, but about a coming era where life for most will be relentless indignity. It represents a future where inequality will be so staggering it makes Soylent Green look naïve. UBI will be the last step before we make the descent into a cyberpunk dystopia, where government has largely ceased to exist and mega corporations rule our everyday lives.
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Which all sounds rather overblown, doesn’t it?
Okay, sure. But let me ask you something: in my opening paragraph, when I mentioned that Silicon Valley had come around to UBI, did any alarm bells go off? Well, they fucking should have. If the god-kings of capitalism and their companies – that is, if the very drivers of inequality and surveillance capitalism – have become enthusiastic
about an idea, then maybe we need to think twice about that idea. Conservative neo-liberal economists have also began to embrace UBI. Again, if such as these like the idea, we must ask ourselves cui bono? Who benefits?
Why have the robber barons of the pandemic embraced UBI?
There are two main reasons: first, they believe it will shrink the size of the government. Everything will become a market – education, health, all that – and the welfare system will be replaced with a block payment. Instead of the complex and inefficient bureaucracy of government – so the argument goes – in its place you will have a simple payment to every citizen. Thus the size of government will shrink, as will the taxes the mega-corps currently pay. As Emma Dawson of the Per Capita think tank puts it:
Handing out unconditional cash from taxpayer funds gives great grist to the argument that government should stop delivering essential services and expect people to buy them from private providers.
Second, these corporations have seen the writing on the wall for paid employment. They’ve seen it because they are actively trying to abolish the human. In the sphere of labour, anyway. They’ve seen it and they want to ensure there is still a base of paying customers. They understand that pervasive employment is bad for business, as there is no point in them dominating every market if everyone is too poor to afford anything.
As Douglas Rushkoff (a former advocate for UBI) argues:
Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.
To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system.
Cui bono? Well, it ain’t you and it ain’t me, mate. The biggest corporations own the machines and they will take the profit from those machines. In the long run, they make more from a machine
than from a human, because a human sometimes gets sick, or needs a holiday, or to sleep, or spend time with their family.
The market alone cannot be relied on to provide basic services for all people. That’s why we have fire departments, for example. Decent societies (that are wealthy enough) provide universal basic healthcare, because it is a basic human right, and because the market is not particularly good at valuing human life over profit. Australia ranks 7th in the world for life expectancy globally, for example, while the USA ranks 40th. Yet Australia spends far less in GDP terms (9%) than the States (17%) on health. The US relies more on the market, whereas Australia prefers a universal system (however flawed) geared to serve the public good.
I can see why libertarian types might see shrinking of government as a virtue: they believe it will empower the individual. But even from the libertarian perspective, this will not be the consequence of UBI. Into the vacuum of a retreating government we won’t see the individual, but Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and all the rest. We’ll receive our services from Amazon, our news from Facebook, our scientific research via Google, and our moral compass via the fucking Disney corporation.
(Well, we already do, I hear you say. Yes, well, the trend is certainly in that direction, and this is why I have previously argued we are living already in a cyberpunk present. UBI will make these trends immeasurably worse).
Before automation colonises everything, UBI will help entrench low pay and insecure work. In essence, it subsidies businesses that have poor pay and conditions. It socialises (puts on the taxpayer) the cost of a living wage (note I have a vested interest here: Australia has one of the highest casualization rates in the OECD, and I am currently a casual employee). As Dawson says:
When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.
UBI is, in short, a way to funnel taxpayer’s money into the hands of the already mega-rich.
The Death of Dignity
I’ve noticed something about the type of person who supports UBI: they almost never imagine it for themselves. They can imagine it for the working class, for the blue collar worker whose factory gets shut down, for the office cleaner, for the call centre operator, for the short order cook.
They can imagine it because we’ve been fucking these people over for decades. They can imagine it because it’s not their class, and they cannot possibly imagine the lives of these people, or why they would want to do they work they do. I’ve never met a writer, for example, who readily accepts that AI will one day write a novel better than them, and that they must therefore be content with
UBI as an alternative. We writers imagine we are special – and while it is true that coherent prose is something AI still struggles with – it is only a matter of time.
This is the litmus test for UBI: would you accept it for yourself? Would you accept your job being abolished in favour of automation, and your income being replaced by 20 grand a year?
The debate around UBI is often patronizing and arrogant, because it is a largely carried out an elite that accepted the destruction of working class jobs and working-class towns as a by-product of the necessary ‘progress’ of globalisation. This type of elite have become wealthier, on average, on the back of outsourcing, erosion of pay and conditions of poorer people, ‘free’ trade, and yes, from automation.
Now this same elite offers us crumbs from the table. Now they give us a band aid for the gunshot wound of neo-liberalism.
Not everyone conceives of UBI this way, of course – as something instead of work. They see it as a supplement to whatever else you are doing. Part-time work, or gig work, with 20 grand on top, for example. It is entirely possible that this is how it might begin.
But let’s look a little further, at the list of professions due for abolition in the next few decades:
Drivers (taxi, truck, bus, postal), cashiers, travel agents, manufacturing workers, fast food chefs and workers, textile workers, lumberjacks, wranglers and herders (drones will do this work), farm worker (fruit pickers etc.), and flight attendants. These are mainly low-skilled or low-paid jobs, and therefore most people won’t give a shit about them. But automation is coming for the white
collar jobs as well. Jewellers, pilots, surveyors, air traffic controllers, translators and interpreters, DJs, librarians, and computer programmers.
And this is just the start. I tend to think people will only start caring about the abolition of so many jobs once the middle class gets really stung. But by then it will be too late.
One of my concerns here is personal: my father was a truck driver (my uncle was a jackaroo – another profession to be abolished). My old man worked two jobs, and through this managed to
change his social class. It was shitty work, but it gave him more economic opportunities. I, in turn, did the same shitty work for several years after I left home. I was paid a decent minimum wage, and I had access to basic services. This helped change my life.
As such I think of a future version of me. I think of a child growing up in a working class family in 2050. Will they go to uni, like I did? Could they become a writer? Well, the likely answer is: fuck no. And UBI, if it comes into existence, will be part of the reason why. UBI greases the wheels of automation, never forget that. Would I have been able to change my social class, if most unskilled and semi-skilled labour been automated? If I’d had nothing but a UBI? Or UBI plus low-paid insecure gig work? Again, no fucking way. UBI is a mechanism to place a large part of the population in a box that they will never get out of, and keep them placated – just enough – so that they don’t burn the whole place down.
There is dignity in work. There is dignity in achieving something with your own two hands: in getting sweat on your brow (in manual labour), or in seeing a novel published, or an animal saved, in playing an amazing set to an engaged audience, or placing a little-known book in the hands of someone who will in turn cherish it.
Most of us need to work because it helps give our life meaning. Most of us want to belong to a tribe were our work and our skills matter. This is a primal human need.
The next argument for UBI is this: well, if these jobs are going to be lost anyway, isn’t this the best out of a range of bad options?
The level of defeatism in this thought is extraordinary. This attributes to the billionaires a celestial power: providence. This assumes that the economic and political desires of a tiny portion of the elite are our destiny, and that the needs of the ‘common people’ must necessarily cede to this divine right.
Well, fuck that: the last time I looked Australia was still a democracy. These is no reason we have to accept the automation of industries (not fully, anyway). There is no reason we have to accept the creeping abolition of the human. There is especially no reason to take the patronizing pocket change of UBI in exchange for the destruction of human society and meaningful work.
Conclusion
People are excited by the idea of Universal Basic Income – ostensibly because it is good for the poor. And yet they overlook older and far superior ideas. Universal healthcare, for example (which will be undermined, perhaps fatally by UBI), is a far better system for those in need. You only need to look at the difference between Australia and the United States in terms of healthcare outcomes. Universal basic services are a far better approach than that of income. A living wage, too, is a far fairer idea that ensures not all profits simply accrue to the one percent.
It is not just that UBI is a slippery slope to a dystopian future, it is the slope. It is the mechanism by which government shrinks and bloated corporations come to fill the space. As a corollary of this, it is also the means through which the democratic franchise is undermined, perhaps fatally. UBI is the handmaiden of artificial intelligence, of automation, of the coming cyberpunk dystopia.
There has to be a better way.
Three years late to this article, nonetheless still a great post!
Thank you Benson (I might re-read it now, remind myself what I wrote).