Eliminating the working class

What is the universal basic income really about?

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Roads are shorter for those who travel light. Although I'm not the two-t-shirts, two-socks, two-underwear kind of guy, I try to carry as little as I can when I travel. Not this time. The circumstances were different, and I had to take more than usual. It was a long trip in different climates, and I was packing a lot of gifts and requests from family members. For once, I was one of those passengers trying to smuggle more cabin luggage than I should.

That's how I found myself passing my shoes, belt, wallet, phone, laptop, tablet, carry-on, personal item, and myself through X-rays. Airport security is an interesting paradox—an expression of how advanced and backwards modern society is. Life-saving technology we use to keep ourselves from killing each other. Human beings are clever that way.

Because to be early is to be prepared, I also got to the airport well before my flight. So there I was, schlepping my bags past one gate after the other, killing time amongst what looked like too many travelers for this world to have a chance of survival. It's revealing that so many of us are into flying so we can spend our salaries on plastic souvenirs and overpriced frozen paellas.

I had a long trip ahead, I needed rest from carrying my baggage, and I wanted to eat something to build up some reserves. I saw what looked like a kiosk from behind, where I could get some food, and it had a long queue. Common knowledge says that if there's a line, it's probably good… or at least it went viral. I thought I'd stop by to see if I could grab a bite and find some quiet corner where I could wait for my flight.

As I circled around the back of the shop, I saw the large fast-food-type touch screens where customers could place their orders. That alone disappointed me. Eating with my hands, after placing an order by tapping away on a screen that has more bodily waste than I’m willing to imagine, isn’t my type of culinary experience. Call me old-fashioned, but I wasn't going to be eating here. Still, I wanted to know what all the fuss was, so I kept turning the corner to get a better look at what this place was about.

Once the whole storefront was in sight, the crowd was larger than I’d expected. Dozens of people were waiting to place their orders on one of the four screens: basic ham and cheese; tuna, lettuce, and tomato; and chicken avocado sandwiches. All pretty normal, until I looked toward the pickup counter.

What I saw was marvelous, in a dystopian way. It was a massive storefront, enclosed in what looked like bulletproof glass. Behind the glass stood a wall that was at least four meters high and 10 meters wide, stacked with prepackaged sandwiches and drinks. My jaw dropped when I saw what was behind the glass. An enormous robotic arm—like the ones you see in a production line at a car factory—was picking sandwiches and drinks that came from the orders placed at the screens, putting them on trays, and pushing them through a slot in the glass for waiting customers to take away.

Photo by Simon Kadula on Unsplash

You could see the glow in people's eyes as they waited patiently to pick up their orders. They were fascinated by the pristine, high-end snack delivery technology that was about to hand them their overpriced, stale sandwiches. They were so engulfed by the experience they didn't see that, to the right, there was an empty “traditional” café, with a human server who was willing and ready to deliver cheaper, freshly made sandwiches.

To the left, there was a classic box-type vending machine collecting dust that sold the same prepackaged sandwiches without having to wait in line. Because we're fascinated with new gadgets, everyone preferred the sophisticated automated robotic vending machine with a glossy touchscreen. The robotic arm and the old-school vending machine delivered the same quality sandwiches, but they offered a different product: an experience imbued with all the efficiency and speed mediated by some sort of AI technology.

At first sight. After a closer look, I wondered what this was all about. Is the complicated touchscreen interface coupled with the slow and clumsy robotic arm really about efficiency and speed? Judging by the queues and the waiting time between placing an order and getting a sandwich, the system was a disaster. With the push of a few buttons, a normal vending machine would have delivered the same sandwich within seconds.

If it wasn't about efficiency, I guess it was about costs. But how many sandwiches would you have to sell to recoup the investment in complex technology and robotics, specialized kiosks, touch screens, software development, maintenance, and repair versus having a regular sandwich stall with minimum-wage waiting staff? Is it worth putting that much money up front to sell sandwiches, compared to a carbon-based model? In an increasingly liberalized labor market, where humans are dismissed at low costs, I wouldn't think so.

Rather than seeing this modern, high-end, high-tech sandwich kiosk as an expression of speed, efficiency, or cost reductions, it seemed more like a statement. It's capital telling us that labor is no longer needed. “No matter how convoluted the solutions may be, we can replace you. And we will.”

In that light, it makes sense that the likes of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel have come out in support of a universal basic income. These are individuals who have proven that their desire to accumulate has no limits. Why would they suddenly want to share and distribute wealth? With the power they have, if they’re eager to improve the lives of the working class, they could in a heartbeat—without the need for a state-sponsored minimum income. It's difficult to believe their backing of a UBI is purely altruistic when they've shown anything but altruism in how they've acquired unjustifiable levels of wealth.

Could it be that UBI is a step toward the elimination of the working class? Not in the sense of creating a post-work world, but of creating a world where the non-wealthy no longer exist. If they can replace us with algorithms, AI, and robots, what's the purpose of having us around? A UBI, in their minds, could be an annoying yet relatively elegant transition.

Most of the multibillionaires who see a universal income as a worthwhile proposal come from the tech industry. In their world, all tools become outdated legacy solutions at some point. Their companies don't infinitely support the hardware and software they sell, and they eventually phase out older versions and replace them with new ones. That's how they keep their businesses going. That said, it's not that crazy to see human labor as a legacy solution that requires more maintenance—with their pesky emotions and biological needs—than AI software and robots. A UBI, in this framework, is simply the overhead necessary to maintain the working class during a transition period toward the implementation of the final solution.

If this sounds like a questionable conspiracy theory, it's because it is. I have as much access to the thought processes and motivation of the richest and most powerful people on the planet as you do: none. One of the many reasons I’m not one of them is because I don’t think like one of them. However, I do have a well-founded mistrust of the altruism of powerful groups in society, who throughout history preferred to concentrate wealth and power for their benefit, rather than distributing it for the common good. The purpose of going down this rabbit hole isn’t finding the truth. The values of a society show in the events that take place, and in the imagined events that are plausible—that’s the point of art—and today, a slow-motion and comfortable genocide of the working class isn’t that far-fetched.

In the past, I was all for a UBI. I still would be if it was given to me. However, I have my doubts as to whether it’s the panacea we imagine. Would it change anything if it's not accompanied by cooperative decision-making in how capital is deployed? After all, should we be satisfied with a guaranteed basic level of subsistence? Are those the conditions to flourish as a human being? Or are they the conditions for the elimination of the working class altogether?