Emancipatory predictions about the end of capitalism recreates the process of US imperialism and get appropriated by technoliberalism

Universal basic income is particularly interesting in thinking about how and why socialist ideals are redefined and appropriated as part of technoliberal reimaginings of the common social good. Hughes and others are aware that the increasing wealth disparity and the disproportionate number of young tech billionaires whose wealth accumulation has been unprecedented are unsustainable and unjust. Yet, in articulating a need for ubi, they also assert that technology is a kind of public good tied to US citizenship. In a 2017 article in Wired magazine, two examples are used to explain why ubi can work. The first is a survey of Alaskans who receive $2,000 per person per year from the state’s oil revenues conducted by the Economic Security Project. In this example, the profit from oil, a public good, is distributed among residents of the state (thus membership in the state determines equal distribution). The second example is that of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, who split 97 percent of casino profits. The model is slightly different from that of Alaska: “In 2016, every tribal member received roughly $12,000. . . . All children in the community, have been accruing payments since the day they were born. The tribe sets the money aside and invests it, so the children cash out a substantial nest egg when they are 18.”27 At the moment, this payout is around $105,000. The article, rather than dwelling on the politics of land, dispossession, settler colonialism, and the politics of tribal casinos in the US, instead asserts that citizenship, rather than need, should be the basis for distributing ubi:

The idea is not exactly new—Thomas Paine proposed a form of basic income back in 1797—but in this country, aside from Social Secu- rity and Medicare, most government payouts are based on individual need rather than simply citizenship. Lately, however, tech leaders, including Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have begun pushing the concept as a potential solution to the economic anxiety brought on by automation and globalization—anxiety the tech industry has played its own role in creating.28

In the technoliberal imaginary of a just distribution of some of the tech wealth, then, settler citizenship both appropriates and erases the settler colonial violence upon which wealth accumulation is based in the US. Notions of distribution (and of tech as a US national resource) thus also further the project of US imperialism.

Colonizing the Commons

In spite of claims that we are entering a new social and economic moment that, enabled by technology, can finally fully free the human from drudgery of service work and repetitive tasks that can now be done by machines, the reliance on surrogates who perform devalued tasks to enable the freedom and autonomy of the liberal subject is one that dates back to imperial mo- dernity and the very premises of capitalist developmentalism. The ways in which the socioeconomic scaffolding of empire enabled imaginaries of surplus or obsolete humanity to begin with is crucial for understanding the dystopic fears surrounding the surplusing of modern man himself.29 We might think of this as the longer historical context for Stephen Hawking’s publicly expressed fear that ai will be the end of the human species.30 At the same time, techno-utopic predictions about the end of capitalism, the focus of this section, as well as less optimistic assessments of the second machine age that fear a rising tide of unemployment as discussed above, displace humanity from the scene of degraded, racialized, and gendered work (enabled through technological development) in order to posit a moment of emancipation or species evolution.