UBI, if implemented, will become the sustaining force for global capitalism

“Momentum for universal basic income is growing,” the billionaire Richard Branson concluded in a recent podcast ad / blog post. Titled “Experimenting with Universal Basic Income,” Branson’s native advertisement frames itself around his meeting with “The Elders,” a bafflingly real super-team of global leaders whose ranks include Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and the ghost of Nelson Mandela. At The Elders’ remote headquarters in Finland, Branson learns of the nascent UBI programs being implemented in cities across the Western world, as well as the ethical paragons who have already voiced support for basic income programs: “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and senior Vatican members are among those who have raised the idea too.” Add to that list of illustrious names the likes of Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, and failed New Republic steward Chris Hughes, and the support for UBI among Silicon Valley’s billionaire class becomes distressingly widespread. Today’s basic income programs are often pitched by the elite as measures to offset income losses from automation, yet their greatest advocates are the principal drivers and profiteers of the phenomenon. Why, fifty years after economists like Galbraith foresaw the divergence of productivity and wage growth, has this populist concept taken sudden hold of the elite? What has disrupted the disruptors? In 2016, another billionaire proffered a workable model for mobilizing populist forces to his own personal gain, conning millions of economically precarious Americans into supporting policies—tax breaks for corporatists, a hostile disregard for climate science, healthcare revocations positioned as reforms—that would profoundly worsen their quality of life. In his successful election bid, this billionaire proved both the transformative potential of simplistic rhetoric and the masses’ eagerness to accept vacuous assurances rather than confront uncomfortable realities. As defined by the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the word for this deceitful enterprise is bullshit. It’s bullshit in the rhetorical sense, as it persuades without any regard for truth, and it’s bullshit in the ethical sense, as it ruins people’s lives. The 2016 American presidential election was the high-water mark in bullshit artistry, a swindle on a national scale with apocalyptic global implications. Now, with universal basic income, the liberal-leaning billionaires have thrown their hats into the bullshit circus ring, ready to determine precisely how little will pacify the working class. Like Branson’s inane blog post, the liberal elite promotion of UBI is transparent self-interest posing as benevolence, a shadow play by the powerful for the disempowered. To call the billionaires on their bullshit: Universal basic income is a promise to make America great again. There will soon come a time, a bright, new future that doubles as a second dark age, when a majority of the world economy’s jobs will be either fully automated or altogether eliminated. Neither high-skilled nor low-skilled work will be spared from obliteration: Touch-screen stations will completely replace retail cashiers, as multilimbed robotic hydras perform brain surgeries. As the machines occupy an ever greater slice of the economy, the capital that they generate will flow into fewer and fewer pockets; namely, into those of the tech moguls currently advocating for a universal basic income. For them, exploratory UBI programs aren’t practice runs for a protosocialism that could counteract the woes of late capitalism. Rather, they are beta tests for deceptive public policy that could sustain late capitalism forever. The aim is pacification, not liberation. A universal basic income is, in the most cynical sense, a subtle kind of doomsday prep for the tech billionaire, a means to diffuse the revolutionary potential of the working class by supplying them with the absolute bare minimum, just enough to keep them almost happy, fat in the apps. An Alexa or a Home. Three Blue Apron meals a day. A Casper mattress in a tiny house. Why work when you have this basic heaven to gain?