“What is wrong with the Universal Basic Income? What should we learn from the Unabomber today? Who are a politics of ‘progress’ serving now?”
“A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the richissime CEO of Facebook, joined the ranks of billionaires proposing the payment of a universal basic income, thereby following other “philanthropists” like Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla who, in light of the imminent revolutionary technological advances of a combination of AI and robotisation, had already called for the policy to be implemented.”
“What happens to the left if the edge of class struggle is taken off by billionaire-controlled universal handouts?”
“And what happens to value-inspired conservatism, if, as is tacitly admitted by a billionaire-advocated implementation of a UBI, human labour simply does not matter anymore?”
“They have distracted from the fact that economies are not merely disintrested administrations that are effectively managing the intricacies of human need, but are in fact rather highly ideological forms of energy distribution organising social hierarchy and material dependency.”
“Workers without factories have not been a novelty for some time, and neither is industrialised agriculture, which is at the very heart of freeing the more sizeable part of the population, formerly locked into hard subsistence labour, from the tedious tasks of survival, opening the gates first to further industrialisation and specialisation and later to the large-scale shift to economies of virtualised sign value. A few years ago, David Graeber famously designated the alienated, repetitive and soul-deadening labour, constituting an important share of modern economies, as “Bullshit Jobs”, thereby pointing out that the multiple tasks of administration are not really constituting basic necessities of human civilisation.”
“The labour liberated by automatisation and industrialisation thus becomes reinvested in the creation of usually entirely stratified and dependent office tasks, allowing for ever more efficient possibilities of social control hypercentralised and -verticalised in the ultraconnected infrastructures of industry and finance.”
“The UBI must seems seductive especially when compared to the neoliberal hamster wheel of precarious and alienated labour that has already done untold damage to the human psyche and contributed to the premature burnout of a generation.”
“Throughout the past centuries both left-wing and right-wing ideologies in different ways have aspired to grant human beings control over their own destiny by giving them ownership of the means of production.”
“Also for both the left and the right, at some point, labour and discipline had their own assigned importance and rank as secular means of salvation guaranteeing the dignity of a class, or more fundamentally, the development of the human personality itself.”
“But of course with the shift of work to the tertiary and the development of complex societies came psychological and social changes, the Protestant Ethic gave way to the 4-Hour Workweek, and the hassle of bullshit jobs something to be avoided by all with any sense of dignity.”
“The UBI appears somewhere in this legacy, ushered in by a population numbed through senseless and alienated tasks.”
“Little does it matter then, that it is offered by billionaires rather than being the blood and sweat-drenched product of organised unionised struggle, or that it is usually offered in the Huxleyan combo-package with the late essential project of the New Left, legalised pot.”
“If then, subverted by a UBI, current left- and right-wing politics are losing their raison d’être, a likely development of politics appears to be moving towards a radical decentering of human beings as the political subjects.”
“Current perspectives of ecology and posthumanism are already in the process of readjusting historiography, philosophy, and the sciences to radically relativise humanity’s position in history and society.”
“The Unabomber Unconscious”
“Mark Zuckerberg may well portray a jolly UBI-future of human beings free to spend their time by becoming more “experimental” in a world where everything is taken care of.”
“Reality, however, might be much bleaker if artificial intelligence is capable of surpassing humans in all activities -including the domain of the “experimental”.”
“It return, it might be rather devastating to the collective psyche, when human beings will tell their children that their actions, aspirations and inspirations really neither matter nor will have any effects. After all, human beings crave meaning and will go to any length to create it.”
“Whoever thinks that this impending human existentialist psychosis is a feature of a dark future is best reminded that its effects have already long been observed: while Generation Y’s intelligentsia lingers in a state of permanent identity crisis, more desperate young men, recruited from the margins of Western abundance perhaps instinctively, prefer to opt out and rather die a martyr’s death against society, instead of accepting their role as its useless and passive (welfare) subjects.”
“All already perceive themselves as increasingly unable to determine even a fraction of their own destiny, let alone change the course of a society that is becoming increasingly elitist in its aspiration to total technocratic management.”
“In the meantime, the multiple symptoms of a moral panic and a return to an archaic violence are likely to exacerbate and radicalise the ideology of progress, despite its intellectual and spiritual morbidity becoming more evident with the victory of technology.”
“In return, dialectics already announces the age old formula in the uprising against the posthumanist future and the revolt against the modern world: homeostasis, secession, hierarchy, taboo.”
“Nicolas Hausdorf is an editor, analyst, and essayist. His essay “Superstructural Berlin”, an experimental sociology of Germany’s capital (with illustrations by Alexander Goller) has been published by Zero Books.”