Silicon Valley is not known for its socialist heart, but many of the region’s Libertarians, Singularitarians and such have embraced Universal Basic Income. Why? As Nathan Schneider explains in a Vice piece, decoupling work and income in this manner appeals to the tech set because it’s a neat, bureaucracy-dismantling way of treating a number of societal problems. It’s “VC for the people,” as one subject in the article explains. Of course, that doesn’t mean most of them necessarily support higher taxes on capital to foot the bill.

In addition to the puzzle-solving ardor of the community, I think another factor driving the UBI talk is technologists believing in their own world-changing prowess, expecting their wonderful AI inventions to de-employ us in short order, a scenario that’s possible though not guaranteed. The Digital Age Prometheans worry not only about the fire they deliver but also they ashes that result. 

I do believe, however, there are some noble people in the industry troubled by the income inequality they’ve likely exacerbated and truly want to mitigate the situation, which they feel may grow exponentially worse if robots rapidly get better. And there also those who just want to obviate the so-called welfare state.

From Schneider:

As if Silicon Valley hasn’t given us enough already, it may have to start giving us all money. The first indication I got of this came one evening last summer, when I sat in on a meet-up of virtual-currency enthusiasts at a hackerspace a few miles from the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. After one speaker enumerated the security problems of a promising successor to Bitcoin, the economics blogger Steve Randy Waldman got up to speak about “engineering economic security.” Somewhere in his prefatory remarks he noted that he is an advocate of universal basic income—the idea that everyone should get a regular and substantial paycheck, no matter what. The currency hackers arrayed before him glanced up from their laptops at the thought of it, and afterward they didn’t look back down. Though Waldman’s talk was on an entirely different subject, basic income kept coming up during a Q&A period—the difficulties of implementing it and whether anyone would work ever again.

Around that time I had been hearing calls for basic income from more predictable sources on the East Coast—followers of the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and the editors of the socialist magazine Jacobin, among others. The idea certainly has a leftist ring to it: an expansion of the social-welfare system to cover everyone. A hard-cash thank-you just for being alive. A way to quit the job you despise and—to take the haters’ favorite example—surf.

Basic income, it turns out, is in the peculiar class of political notions that can warm Leninist and libertarian hearts alike. Though it’s an essentially low-tech proposal, it appeals to Silicon Valley’s longing for simple, elegant algorithms to solve everything. Supporters list the possible results: It can end poverty and inequality with hardly any bureaucracy. With more money and less work to do, we might even spew less climate-disrupting carbon.•