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Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot g

Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.

api 9y ago
It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building. Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian. I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless. The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: - Radically extending the human life span - Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general. - Colonizing the Moon and Mars - Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient. - Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit. - Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment. Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people. ... and so on. Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work. Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed. "When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ." Edit: I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is turning grayer and grayer.
  - api 9y ago
    I went back and watched some Star Trek TNG a while back. It's shocking. There is no way anything that optimistic could be written today. People literally can't even think it.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Well people can think of something like TNG but the (alt-)right will instantly crapstorm you for being a communist. Just look at how they're opposing healthcare for all, a society like TNG would be the ultimate enemy for them.
      - api 9y ago
        The alt-right is the logical endpoint. It kind of combines all the worst ideas from liberalism over the past 50 years (postmodernism, identity politics) with all the worst ideas from conservatism (nationalism, racism, biological determinism) in the previous century. I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend about "what's the worst ideology you can possibly imagine" and it kind of resembles what I came up with but (mostly) minus the theocracy (I pictured a pomo professor, a Christian Reconstructionist, and a fascist hashing out a synthesis). In some respects it's worse-- its obnoxious meme aesthetic is far trashier than anything I would have ever imagined. No dystopian writer could have come up with a fever dream as hideous as the collision of 4chan and Stormfront. Maybe you have to hit bottom before things can bounce back. I have a tough time imagining anything worse than this, but I'm sure people will try.
        snerbles 9y ago
        The fictional history of Star Trek did have a global nuclear war in the 21st century.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their computers.
- codemac 9y ago
  Or - it's that the work-aholics know that they're never going to get ahead. Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are. Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Perhaps because the first group doesn't have as much time/effort sunk into learning to use the current social safety patchwork, so changes to it are less scary. Also, they don't need to keep up any self-denial that well-paying jobs will magically return for coal-mining or buggy-whip manufacture.
tmaly 9y ago
I just thought of the trailer parks from the Ready Player One book after reading your comment.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Middle America doesn't seem to be keen on much of anything these days, besides torches and pitchforks. I'd rather put my money on the people trying to build solutions rather than more problems. Sure, it seems like the actual silicon valley location is mostly making solutions for problems that it created, these days. But there's plenty of tech outside of California. And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s. You think if the majority of people in this country continue to experience a declining quality of life, there won't be riots in the streets? This method of shifting blame from economic issues to social issues won't work forever. edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?
  - floatrock 9y ago
    A major people's rebellion (started for all practical purposes mostly with pitchforks and torches) against the tyranny and oppression of the wealthy noble-class in far-off lands happened in 1776 or somewhere around then... couldn't help but notice the irony of using the 1700's in the above example.
    - richardknop 9y ago
      Yes, and revolutions we had in US and Europe in 18th/19th century could happen again if the income inequality continues to grow and quality of life of middle class / working class continues to decrease. This is sort of extreme reaction a really stressed society would be capable of.
      - snerbles 9y ago
        When the stresses exceed the salve of McDonalds and Netflix, we'll see the guillotines roll out again. Many of the heads in the basket will be our own.
corndoge 9y ago
the parent did not say anything about basic income, what exactly are you responding to?
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  I was talking to Silicon Valley when I said "your".
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    In other words you posted a reply to austenallred's comment that had nothing to do with it in order to try to game the ordering system here. That's quite rude.
    - nsxwolf 9y ago
      Not really. The comment I posted it under was very pro-Silicon Valley, claiming regular people just love SV and all the wonderful goodies they bestow upon us. My comment was responding to that sentiment.
- shortstuffsushi 9y ago
  They're referencing the article, I believe.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
touchofevil 9y ago
Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  That used to be true, but the nation's very poor live mostly in the suburbs and rural parts of the country now. It shifted about 20 years ago. You can't go anywhere without encountering desperately poor people these days.
  - poulsbohemian 9y ago
    This is true. I live in a 30,000 person town in rural America that is a popular tourist destination for upper middle class types. Despite the cold winters, there is a surprising amount of homelessness - the city finally set up a camp area because they were concerned with the visibility to the tourists. Apart from a handful of white collar jobs (a small college, a hospital, a couple law offices), everything else is just above minimum wage, meaning even if you aren't homeless, there is limited mobility. Thankfully real estate is still very affordable, but as coastal cities push more people out of the market, even that is changing, as people move inland to find something cheaper.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities. I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.
  - ihm 9y ago
    There are no tents, but you definitely see plenty of homeless people on the street or sleeping in trains in NYC. It does feel less dystopian somehow than SF though.
davesque 9y ago
Were you responding to the right comment? The point you're making is not relevant to the OP.
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what a basic income does. A basic income isn't housing projects and government cheese, it's cash money you can decide how to spend for yourself. Different people will choose to spend it on different things. What's your alternative? Let corporations accumulate all the wealth generated by technology and subject everyone else to serfdom? It's not as if people are going to stop inventing things.
- aylmao 9y ago
  A different approach, one in which people can still work to get paid, but wages are reasonable. Fulfillment is not all about the money and what you can buy with it. It's about feeling that your'e serving some purpose, and there's value to what you do.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    That's what a universal basic income does. It lets the person whose labor is only worth $3/hour take a $3/hour job and still not starve to death.
    - floatrock 9y ago
      I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think your statement could be misread as overly harsh. I would emphasize that money solves all problems measured in money, but humans care about things not measured in money. So faced with a janitorial job making minimum wage $13/hr or a volunteer gig that can only afford a $3/hr stipend, it lets the person take the job that pays more in ways not necessarily measured in money -- it some evolved enlightened form of capitalism that frees us from the serfdom of capitalism itself or some such aggrandization nonsense. But we've been dreaming about the cultured and creative paradise that only a life formed solely on the unlocked potential of leisure could afford since the dawn of the industrial age, so shrug Maaaaybe this time is different...
wbl 9y ago
My advice to those people: Git gud. There are lots of services and goods that can be created. If you want to help the homeless, or devote your life to the works of Bach there is plenty of meaning to be found doing that.
Frondo 9y ago
If middle America wants to blame someone for the changes that have hit rural life in the last 50 years, they'd do better than to look at Silicon Valley. Uber isn't the reason Big Ag took over the family farm, and Google isn't the reason their daughter moved to Brooklyn and is now dating a girl. But actually, I think the rural folk will be the first to adopt the "basic income" (scare quotes and all), because in a lot of ways, they're already doing it, just under a different name. SSDI, for example, is huge in rural West Virginia, whether you're disabled or no. Doctors there are in on it, as an act of compassion, because the work simply isn't there and there is no other safety net. So, all middle America needs is appropriate framing. Call it the Real America Dividend instead of "basic income" and they'll line up for it.
- aylmao 9y ago
  SV is a symptom of the same problem; a system that allows wealth to concentrate and companies to become monopolies.
Buttes 9y ago
>It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. If I don't have to work, sign me up.
richardwhiuk 9y ago
It's difficult to imagine a more off-topic comment. If you are choosing basic income as a poster child of Silicon Valley, you need to be much clearer about that.
sctb 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434340.

api 9y ago

It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building. Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian. I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless. The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: - Radically extending the human life span - Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general. - Colonizing the Moon and Mars - Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient. - Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit. - Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment. Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people. ... and so on. Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work. Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed. "When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ." Edit: I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.

nsxwolf 9y ago
Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is turning grayer and grayer.
- api 9y ago
  I went back and watched some Star Trek TNG a while back. It's shocking. There is no way anything that optimistic could be written today. People literally can't even think it.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Well people can think of something like TNG but the (alt-)right will instantly crapstorm you for being a communist. Just look at how they're opposing healthcare for all, a society like TNG would be the ultimate enemy for them.
    - api 9y ago
      The alt-right is the logical endpoint. It kind of combines all the worst ideas from liberalism over the past 50 years (postmodernism, identity politics) with all the worst ideas from conservatism (nationalism, racism, biological determinism) in the previous century. I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend about "what's the worst ideology you can possibly imagine" and it kind of resembles what I came up with but (mostly) minus the theocracy (I pictured a pomo professor, a Christian Reconstructionist, and a fascist hashing out a synthesis). In some respects it's worse-- its obnoxious meme aesthetic is far trashier than anything I would have ever imagined. No dystopian writer could have come up with a fever dream as hideous as the collision of 4chan and Stormfront. Maybe you have to hit bottom before things can bounce back. I have a tough time imagining anything worse than this, but I'm sure people will try.
      - snerbles 9y ago
        The fictional history of Star Trek did have a global nuclear war in the 21st century.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their computers.

codemac 9y ago
Or - it's that the work-aholics know that they're never going to get ahead. Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are. Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.
Terr_ 9y ago
Perhaps because the first group doesn't have as much time/effort sunk into learning to use the current social safety patchwork, so changes to it are less scary. Also, they don't need to keep up any self-denial that well-paying jobs will magically return for coal-mining or buggy-whip manufacture.

tmaly 9y ago

I just thought of the trailer parks from the Ready Player One book after reading your comment.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Middle America doesn't seem to be keen on much of anything these days, besides torches and pitchforks. I'd rather put my money on the people trying to build solutions rather than more problems. Sure, it seems like the actual silicon valley location is mostly making solutions for problems that it created, these days. But there's plenty of tech outside of California. And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s. You think if the majority of people in this country continue to experience a declining quality of life, there won't be riots in the streets? This method of shifting blame from economic issues to social issues won't work forever. edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?
- floatrock 9y ago
  A major people's rebellion (started for all practical purposes mostly with pitchforks and torches) against the tyranny and oppression of the wealthy noble-class in far-off lands happened in 1776 or somewhere around then... couldn't help but notice the irony of using the 1700's in the above example.
  - richardknop 9y ago
    Yes, and revolutions we had in US and Europe in 18th/19th century could happen again if the income inequality continues to grow and quality of life of middle class / working class continues to decrease. This is sort of extreme reaction a really stressed society would be capable of.
    - snerbles 9y ago
      When the stresses exceed the salve of McDonalds and Netflix, we'll see the guillotines roll out again. Many of the heads in the basket will be our own.

corndoge 9y ago

the parent did not say anything about basic income, what exactly are you responding to?

nsxwolf 9y ago
I was talking to Silicon Valley when I said "your".
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  In other words you posted a reply to austenallred's comment that had nothing to do with it in order to try to game the ordering system here. That's quite rude.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    Not really. The comment I posted it under was very pro-Silicon Valley, claiming regular people just love SV and all the wonderful goodies they bestow upon us. My comment was responding to that sentiment.
shortstuffsushi 9y ago
They're referencing the article, I believe.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

touchofevil 9y ago

Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.

reaperducer 9y ago
That used to be true, but the nation's very poor live mostly in the suburbs and rural parts of the country now. It shifted about 20 years ago. You can't go anywhere without encountering desperately poor people these days.
- poulsbohemian 9y ago
  This is true. I live in a 30,000 person town in rural America that is a popular tourist destination for upper middle class types. Despite the cold winters, there is a surprising amount of homelessness - the city finally set up a camp area because they were concerned with the visibility to the tourists. Apart from a handful of white collar jobs (a small college, a hospital, a couple law offices), everything else is just above minimum wage, meaning even if you aren't homeless, there is limited mobility. Thankfully real estate is still very affordable, but as coastal cities push more people out of the market, even that is changing, as people move inland to find something cheaper.
santaclaus 9y ago
> with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities. I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.
- ihm 9y ago
  There are no tents, but you definitely see plenty of homeless people on the street or sleeping in trains in NYC. It does feel less dystopian somehow than SF though.

davesque 9y ago

Were you responding to the right comment? The point you're making is not relevant to the OP.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what a basic income does. A basic income isn't housing projects and government cheese, it's cash money you can decide how to spend for yourself. Different people will choose to spend it on different things. What's your alternative? Let corporations accumulate all the wealth generated by technology and subject everyone else to serfdom? It's not as if people are going to stop inventing things.

aylmao 9y ago
A different approach, one in which people can still work to get paid, but wages are reasonable. Fulfillment is not all about the money and what you can buy with it. It's about feeling that your'e serving some purpose, and there's value to what you do.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  That's what a universal basic income does. It lets the person whose labor is only worth $3/hour take a $3/hour job and still not starve to death.
  - floatrock 9y ago
    I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think your statement could be misread as overly harsh. I would emphasize that money solves all problems measured in money, but humans care about things not measured in money. So faced with a janitorial job making minimum wage $13/hr or a volunteer gig that can only afford a $3/hr stipend, it lets the person take the job that pays more in ways not necessarily measured in money -- it some evolved enlightened form of capitalism that frees us from the serfdom of capitalism itself or some such aggrandization nonsense. But we've been dreaming about the cultured and creative paradise that only a life formed solely on the unlocked potential of leisure could afford since the dawn of the industrial age, so shrug Maaaaybe this time is different...

wbl 9y ago

My advice to those people: Git gud. There are lots of services and goods that can be created. If you want to help the homeless, or devote your life to the works of Bach there is plenty of meaning to be found doing that.

Frondo 9y ago

If middle America wants to blame someone for the changes that have hit rural life in the last 50 years, they'd do better than to look at Silicon Valley. Uber isn't the reason Big Ag took over the family farm, and Google isn't the reason their daughter moved to Brooklyn and is now dating a girl. But actually, I think the rural folk will be the first to adopt the "basic income" (scare quotes and all), because in a lot of ways, they're already doing it, just under a different name. SSDI, for example, is huge in rural West Virginia, whether you're disabled or no. Doctors there are in on it, as an act of compassion, because the work simply isn't there and there is no other safety net. So, all middle America needs is appropriate framing. Call it the Real America Dividend instead of "basic income" and they'll line up for it.

aylmao 9y ago
SV is a symptom of the same problem; a system that allows wealth to concentrate and companies to become monopolies.

Buttes 9y ago

>It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. If I don't have to work, sign me up.

richardwhiuk 9y ago

It's difficult to imagine a more off-topic comment. If you are choosing basic income as a poster child of Silicon Valley, you need to be much clearer about that.

sctb 9y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434340.