-
I'm going to try and respond to this, because ultimately, I think we want a lot of the same things from society, but your writing is a tad stream of consciousness and incoherent.
The concept of a UBI is partway towards one half of the picture; a universal set of entitlements balanced by a complementary set of obligations.
UBI is meaningless without a whole slew of other measures, there are also so many unknowns of what the effect of UBI would be on the economy that the test cases of a few hundred people isn't particularly helpful in answering. Will it cause inflation? Proponents say no, but they also say UBI gives people the financial security to live where they want and therefore not tied to high rental markets, that's a pretty big assumption. What about the effect on specific sectors? What happens, say that now everyone has UBI, no-one wants to work in refuse collection and recycling (slightly cartoonish example I know) ? Do wages for those job increase so much as to eat massive amounts of a local authorities budget, that they cut back on other services? Do you have immigration to plug those holes whilst making the immigrant work force exempt from UBI? I want a fairer distribution of wealth and maybe UBI is part of the solution but the wrong implementation could lead to pretty catastrophic economic consequences so I'm not surprised governments aren't champing at the bit to implement it. This has bugger all to do with getting rid of money though.
That's exactly what the CIA was concerned about when they crushed Allende's visionary government in Chile and substituted bloody Pinochet in history.
What does this have to do with ending money, yes the US has a track record of crushing any forms of socialist governance in Latin America but these societies still used money.
Because the neurotypicals are so easily manipulated by make-believe, in a nutshell.
You might want to rethink this one, you've either misused the term 'neurotypical' or you're using it correctly and are being pretty offensive.
But what if a bunch of nerds got together and said fuck you idiots, we can do way better than that shit.
Pretty sure we've already had that and we've got Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Apple. How's that working out?
we just need to dust off what worked for us for like, a hundred thousand years, and give it a bit of an update to integrate our new tools.
Ah yes, the way we lived in pre agricultural societies of less that a hundred people with 'new tools' is the solution.
You talk in circles about, corporations, cooperatives, humanities untapped potential etc but none of this has anything to do with ending money as a proxy for resource.
You can cynically pooh-pooh if you feel that's the only response open to you
Cynical about what? You haven't put forward anything, you've just said you want some nerds to devise a new societal system for the whole planet that doesn't use money. I'm not cynical about the future, I have two kids (3 and 4), it's precisely because of them that I choose to be optimistic.
You are reading a single comment by @Gewürzt and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Gewürzt
Our nature is nearly as mutable as our culture, but of course one of the most prevalent and influential cognitive biases is where folks assume that the peculiarities of their own little niche in time and space are universal. You're totally right that it's the rules of the game which matter, though. So of course it's possible to replace money with something fundamentally different. The concept of a UBI is partway towards one half of the picture; a universal set of entitlements balanced by a complementary set of obligations. The other half addresses the angle so obsessed over by people who talk about entrepreneurs - the currency to be competed for is kudos. It's a lot harder to game an unquantifiably fuzzy thing like reputation.
I don't want a 'department for a better humanity' as such. I just want a few peeps to agree that it should be possible, particularly given today's technology, to develop a far more effective model of collective endeavour than the current orgy of brutal hypocrisy. That's exactly what the CIA was concerned about when they crushed Allende's visionary government in Chile and substituted bloody Pinochet in history.
Sifn't there's 'some way' to devise a new system. We have a smorgasbord of collaborative tools at our disposal, and buckets of unimplemented knowledge of psychology and sociology, left on the shelf by the ruling class and status quo. All those learned recommendations in expensive reports, commissioned in response to this or that inevitable horrible consequence of stupidly vicious dominion, left to gather dust as a matter of routine.
We know how to do a lot better in a zillion ways, large and small, but of course there's no avenue to implement much of it without bumping into a barrier put there by vested interests. Because the neurotypicals are so easily manipulated by make-believe, in a nutshell.
But what if a bunch of nerds got together and said fuck you idiots, we can do way better than that shit. It's obvious to anyone with a sufficient interest in reality (and the opportunity to have become acquainted with it), that we don't need to invent a new political system; we just need to dust off what worked for us for like, a hundred thousand years, and give it a bit of an update to integrate our new tools.
And of course it doesn't get magically 'imposed'. The reality we find ourselves in dictates that if you want to get anything done you need to be a corporation. If your corporation does really well (say, by striving to maximise the potential of its members by making money as irrelevant as possible to them, among other measures) then over time it's increasingly presented with opportunities to buy out competitors and expand into other fields. If the corporation becomes really huge, actual governments become less relevant to it...
And if the corporation is a co-op in which people are visibly escaping the rat race and enjoying otherwise arbitrarily-denied opportunities to flourish, perhaps there would be no amount of propaganda sufficient to keep everyone else trapped in wage slavery; the demonstration of even a small fraction of the potential of an arrangement designed to spread benefits to the many and maximise the resulting synergy should result in an exponentially increasing wave of secession from capitalism.
Humanity has so many failings, but most of them can be boiled down to a failure of imagination - precluding all kinds of leaps of understanding. And on the other hand, we erect all these make-believe walls we can't see past. There's a type of person that doesn't apply so much to, though. Nerds have been finding each other and realising they're actually the cool people ever since the internet became a thing, and if the future is going to be rescued, it certainly won't be the normies doing it, what with their predilection for toxic bootlicking genocide.
You can cynically pooh-pooh if you feel that's the only response open to you, but you're a damn fool if you think the future doesn't need rescuing. I don't see anything else even approaching a plausible suggestion of a way out of the impending doom, so bugger it, I've taken it upon myself to don the 'End is Nigh' sandwich board and walk around shouting like a crazy person.
Because I'm fucking sick of having no cause for hope, dammit.