Currently, economic logics have co-opted the Basic Income in dual service of both centralized state control and free-market accumulation, but conceptualizing it as a gift safeguards it from capture.

EB: So, I think this concept of gift is specifically a stronger mean against these two strategies, so, how to have—so—this strategy to have massive mass control through digital tools in order to rank, in order to evaluate you as a citizen and so in which money is not so central but the value of what you are is based on a ranking system centralized in a social control by the state—this is China—and on the other side, that, you are—you are—fitted by an income and—and—a liquidity only in order to have access to services that are privatized by the market. These are the two main dystopian—but not so dystopian—but, if the paradigm turn that I think we are facing—and so to reframe a UBI that is not for this is our is our goal and our task. So, gift economy, yeah, gift economy, theoretically, for me is linked to the concept of value—so, in both—in the market and in the social control of top-down—everything is based on a system of evaluation, of measurement, so, you have to be measured, no? And the gift is a concept that states especially—apart from Bataille, but also with Klossowski and also Derrida a lot—that gift states that the Other is not measurable—measurable—that is not measurable—that only the Other can state its value. Nobody else can rank you and evaluate you, but only you can say if this is a gift. Only you can say that this is a gift, only the Other—you, I mean, you—it is the one that receives the gift, no?—but—and this is for example also something that we experimented with in the basic income pilot we did in the Macau community, because—basically just to explain we established, as an organization and our community, to create a common wallet feeded by our income as an organization and then we decided to share this common wallet monthly—we see that the artists community has a basic income! But in the very beginning we started to do schemes in order to understand who could receive this basic income, so for example: the only one that was participants, the only one that was active in the time bank, only the one that was able to demonstrate, to do something, no? And I think we understood that it was a super dangerous bureaucracy mistake and after a while, after one or two years, we decided to base the basic income on a self-evaluation. So, it was the freedom of everyone to state if they were allowed or they wished to take this money or not, and actually, the only gesture that everyone, that our participants in this common pot when they received the basic income, are invited to do is to describe in total freedom why they are belonging to this community. So, someone has the freedom to say “because I simply need it and I am doing nothing because I need also for the community to do nothing” or “because I cleaned the flora for fucking twenty days and the community is not running without me”. But anyway, we are, like, experimenting this freedom to self-define the value you have. B’oh, that's all, I spoke too much.

DV: Thank you, I'm really appreciate that you also think that the gift can be really a challenge and actually what came into my mind that, actually, we might actually express that, actually basic income can come under the pressure of the gift, of all that uncalculatable labor which we as society already contribute and actually, if it cannot as a kind of dole—you know, I found very interesting in this word “dole”, actually very close to the Russian word “dolya”, which means a lot, but at the same time it means also a pitiful, miserable, amount of support which actually the sovereign provides you that you not die, you know? And actually, but that could be—really—that's why my—actually—point is that we should really—so—the idea of returning and reconsidering the concept of the gift, we could radicalize that basic income movement, because right now—I'm very often—for me it's lacking some kind of real radicality, and especially when it's also misused from neoliberals and different types of economists I see that we should do something more, you know? And that, it’d be really a point on which we should insist. So that's my very modest kind of contribution, I'm not sure if I'm right, but at the same time, this what I'm thinking right now.