Image by Pavlov Visuals It's common-enough knowledge that if you ingest a couple tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD, or 'acid' - it will transform your consciousness, provoking a psychedelic 'trip' that may last up to 16 hours. What is not common-enough knowledge is that the economic organization of society is itself a psychedelic arrangement that transforms consciousness, provoking a trip that gets disguised as "ordinary consciousness". The effects may last a lifetime. This, I contend, is very bad. We're subliminally dosed into believing that our holistic experience of what being alive ..read more

A question that sounds like it deserves a really rigorous and vindicating answer, but usually gets little more than a tired shrug: Why, as citizens of the most powerful, technologically equipped, and advanced society in history, are so many of us spending most of our waking lives working jobs we do not particularly like to sustain lives we do not particularly enjoy? If this sounds vague, I have in mind a specific and especially pernicious phenomenon, referred to by popular news platforms and obscure Marxist scholars alike as the "treadmill effect".     The treadmill effect is a sens ..read more

Human life is privy to a panorama of holiness, the sight and experience of which we've grown immaculately skilled at obscuring. As Emerson observed: "Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.” Richard Linklater takes this a step further in his film, Waking Life. A scene documents a conversation between filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and poet David Jewell, in which they discuss the unnoticed ubiquity of 'holy moments'. Not only each day, but each moment is a god: "You know, like this moment, it's ..read more

  Art by Sami Gharbi   Freud believed that civilizational progress depended on the active repression of its citizens. In a deceptively humble footnote, he suggests that civilization - understood as the systematic process of repression for the purposes of progress - began the first time a male encountered fire and suppressed his urge to piss on it, which apparently prehistoric men enjoyed doing, allowing him to use the flame and reap the benefits of his managed repression. Presumably cooked fish, or something. Freud's theory is a departure from the likes of Rousseau or Marx, both of ..read more

Drawing by Paula Ensign Basic income could be like injecting a syringe of vitality into our weary veins, from which a rush of economic possibilities would re-color our perception of the world. These days, the only thing that feels so certain as the need for socioeconomic change is the learned sense that nothing will, in fact, change. The powers that be will prevail. We will lead the lives society arranges for us, like schoolchildren who awaken to find their outfits already hanging on the doorknob.  We may harbor the inchoate idea that the whole of life should perhaps be arranged differen ..read more

 Time inequality is pervasive, corrosive, and largely ignored. Like a noxious gas silently filling the air. A renewed, policy-driven commitment to democratized time ownership could revitalize the suffocated dream of progress. Most scarcities can be stretched. One could read this as the great promise of economics: to systematically stretch our scarcities into such thin films until we can hardly feel them. A scarcity stretched is a constraint loosened. A possibility opened. But this makes those inelastic scarcities that deny our attempts to manufacture their abundance all the more precious ..read more

    Summary   This document proposes a basic income for the U.S. in the form of a negative income tax (NIT). It proposes an income floor for all adults (18+) in the economy of $13,000 per year, indexed to the federal poverty line. This proposal leaves aside the question of how best to include minors, but no basic income is complete without either a reduced rate income floor for minors, or a child allowance passed alongside. Under this proposal, an adult earning $0 annually receives the full $13,000. As their earnings increase, their NIT benefits are phased out with a 33% tax ra ..read more

    The purpose of this document is to facilitate sense-making on what’s become a complex, tribal, and absolutely vital subject of debate: universal basic income (UBI). Think of this as a not-so-brief policy brief. A policy long, if you will. What policy briefs offer in brevity and distillation, they sacrifice in complexity and nuance. UBI’s surging popularity is producing an abundance of briefs, but a scarcity of longs. Briefs present fixed ideas, whereas longs reveal the flux and uncertainties beneath them. Ironically, I only encountered UBI after receiving a degree in economics ..read more

Table of Contents Assessment: Progress & Consciousness 1. Troubles of Progress 2. The Law of Human Progress 3. The Capitalist Production of Consciousness A Response: Universal Basic Income 1. Universal Basic Income 2. Critiquing UBI 3. Next Steps: A Modernized NIT Beyond: Post-capitalism & the Economic Problem 1. Beyond UBI 2. Conclusions: New Trips, New Problems WE cannot much longer ignore the discomforting truth that the economies we’ve inherited from the twentieth century are poorly designed for the production of human beings. As digital technologies weave economic logic deeper int ..read more

This is an essay about Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the same way that arguing with your spouse over leaving dishes in the sink is really about the dishes. Sure, the dishes matter. But there are deeper, subliminal forces at play. Those are what really matter. UBI spearheads a resurgent utopian energy to ground economic policy in radical, pragmatic visions of a better world. UBI matters, but coaxing that renascent energy into bloom really matters. The conviction behind this essay is not that we need a UBI. Rather, we need a fitting policy framework to guide utopian energy back into mainstream ..read more