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Has the Time Come for Universal Basic Income?

Across the political spectrum, the idea of a no-questions-asked payout for everyone is gaining momentum. I’ve written about how Silicon Valley is getting behind the concept as an antidote for what automation is doing to the job market. Libertarians want it as a replacement for means-tested welfare programs, while socialists see it as a step toward abolishing the wage system. It seems like a crazy, impossible idea, but it may not be for long.

On May 26 at Civic Hall in New York City, I’m going to be part of a discussion about the prospects of universal basic income with progressive entrepreneur and activist Peter Barnes. Barnes’ proposal for a “citizen’s dividend” based on carbon emissions is an ingenious way of both mitigating climate change and strengthening the economy. We’ll be joined by scholar and basic-income advocate Michael Lewis, as well as Institute for the Future fellow Natalie Foster. RSVP on Facebook and Eventbrite here.

To learn more about universal basic income, listen to recent podcasts on the subject from my friends at Belabored and Disorderly Conduct.

Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why?

This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey with the Wisdom Hackers—a group of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and activists exploring elemental questions together. I traveled to Paris, Berlin, southern Italy, to Ecuador, and Silicon Valley, and wound up at a hacker congress in New York. This week, my chapter appears as part of our serial digital book. For just a few bucks, you can read my essay in your browser or in a dedicated app, along with Anna Stothard in defense of hoarding objects, Brett Scott on the creepy ecology of smart cities, Tom Kenning on festival temporality, Lee-Sean Huang on the thinking body, Alnoor Ladha on mystic anarchism, and our instigator Alexa Clay on being the Amish Futurist. And more.

Read a short teaser of my 7,000-word chapter, just published in Vice—”Our Generation of Hackers.” But don’t let that keep you long from subscribing to the book today. Spread the word about it if you can, too.

I’ll also be discussing my chapter on Twitter this Thursday morning at 8:30 am EST / 13:30 GMT (the Europeans set the time!). Join us on the hashtag #wisdomhackers.

Other odds and ends

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, I profiled Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian of struggles for shorter working hours and the dream of leisure. His latest book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, is a must-read (and would make a lovely holiday gift).

As part of ongoing reporting on efforts to build a more cooperative, just economy, I wrote in Al Jazeera America about a historic conference on the commons, and published columns in the Catholic weekly America on the commons and cooperatives—oh, and a guide to the recent election with Simone Weil.

My books on God and Occupy are also no less available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Krista interviewed me this summer at the Chautauqua Institution about my books, God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy, as well as my recent reporting on the politics of technology. During our conversation, under the canopy of a Greek-temple-ish structure with more than a thousand listeners, I felt I was in the presence of a mentor and a kindred spirit—someone who shares my love of exalted topics, as well as someone who had taken the time and energy to engage deeply with my work. Choose a way to listen to the show here.

Both books are still available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

On to the hacking

Sometimes exalted topics need to get hacked. That’s why I’m taking part in an experiment called Wisdom Hackers, a kind of philosophy incubator. After spending our summers exploring burning questions, this band of artists, explorers, and instigators are sharing the results in a collaborative book, thanks to a new serial-based publishing venture called The Pigeonhole (which my new bride Claire explains here).

My contribution, which formed during a search for new social contracts around the world, ended up becoming a reflection on our culture’s fascination with hacking itself—the allure and the trouble. It will become available on November 10, but in the meantime, subscribe to the book here (yes, you can subscribe to books now) and read the work of my fellow hackers.

And more

This fall I’m honored to begin a new column at America magazine, a leading Catholic weekly. Follow my columns and blog posts at my author page.

In August The Nation published my dispatch from a hacker monastery in Matera, Italy.

The first in a series of articles on working hours appeared in Vice magazine in August as well: “Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?” It kind of blew up.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

One is an introduction to a new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings on Anarchism, straightforwardly titled On Anarchism, which comes out this month from the New Press.

The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip.

“I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted.

Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”

Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing.

If you’re in the Boston area on November 18, come hear me introduce Chomsky (and you can stay to hear him speak if you want…) at MIT at 5:30.

The other bit is a retrospective review in Commonweal (the online version is behind a paywall) of Paul Goodman’s 1960 sort-of classic Growing Up Absurd:

Goodman’s prose sets out to dazzle us with its iconoclastic attitude and the striking phrases that clothe the author’s not-always-consistent arguments. He quotes from his previous books at length. Throughout he attempts to reconcile his claim to be an anarchist with his conservative instincts, a tension borne out in his life as well as on the page; he was a married family man who was promiscuously bisexual, a Jew who opposed World War II.

Among the other “mansplainers” of Goodman’s time—to borrow a neologism from the feminist blogosphere—one could be forgiven for preferring Ivan Illich, who presented his similarly adventuresome anarcho-conservative proposals with considerably more rigor and coherence; or James Baldwin, who as a black man in exile came by his prophetic tone more honestly. “Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out to Stokely Carmichael how we were niggers,” Goodman recalled in a memoir-ish essay, referring to a 1967 BBC broadcast, “but he blandly put us down by saying that we could always conceal our disposition and pass.” Carmichael was right.

For more: stop by a fine newsstand or bookstore near you.

There’s a prophecy in the Book of Joel, paraphrased later in the New Testament: “Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.” Maybe something of that is being fulfilled in the simultaneously tightening and loosening effect of Craig’s presence. One on one, the younger students err on the side of acting holier-than-thou, while the older ones let a mild curse word or two slip. For both, this philosophy is changing their lives.

Read the whole article at The Chronicle.

Also, check out my addendum at Killing the Buddha: “7 Habits of a Highly Effective Philosopher.”

I tried to go on strike for May Day, following the Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike, and it was harder than I thought. My decision was made official—that is, public—by Malcolm Harris’ inclusion of me in his piece, “How Does a Writer Strike?” The trouble is, of course, that I’m self-employed, and my only steady income comes from Waging Nonviolence, which I both co-run and love. My work for the past seven months has almost exclusively been about, and generally regarded as being in support of, the Occupy movement itself. One Occupier even asked me not to strike on Twitter.

The best I could figure was that I’d tell an editor she’d have to wait until the next day for my report, and that I’d keep myself from tweeting. Rather than observing at my usual slight-but-noticeable remove, I would be in;?I would be of.?Correspondence with fellow Occupy writer Natasha Lennard was helpful in thinking this through, and I resonate a lot with what she wrote at Salon:

The May Day general strike is an experiment and one I look forward to taking part in wholeheartedly. I find the distinction between observer and participant a problematic one to uphold. A distinction I prefer, although equally imperfect, is one drawn by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1938 novel “Nausea” — the distinction between “living” and “recounting.” The protagonist notes, “a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.” Just imagine what Sartre would have made of Twitter and Facebook timelines.

But, as with most projects of upbuilding self-denial, I failed, again and again. In Union Square I sat and consulted with Ingrid Burrington, May Day’s one-woman Cartography Department, whom I’d profiled in a little piece on the Harper’s?website the day before, and as we did, we were being filmed as b-roll of me “reporting” for the 99% Film. Before that, I broke ranks with my fellow Occupy Catholics (discussed in a recent polemic for n+1‘s Occupy! Gazette #4?and?Killing the Buddha) in order to run ahead and catch sight of the march taking the street. A reporter’s duty! And, after that, as night fell, an Occupy organizer up and told me a bunch of neat secrets from the tactical end of the planning process, so I got out my notebook to jot some of them down. At that moment two fellow Occupy journos—who had witnessed my agonizing over striking in an email list—noticed me and started shouting, “Scab! Scab!” They had both opted to work that day.

As 10 p.m. approached, the temptation to report got harder and harder to fight. There was just so much. Like a tourist with 10 seconds in front of a world-famous landmark, I couldn’t resist taking a picture.?The scenes were too powerful, and passing too quickly. I later wrote in my subsequent report for YES! Magazine?(and Waging Nonviolence):

As dark came, Occupiers’ plans to hold an after-party in Battery Park were foiled by police blockades. Text-message alerts guided those who wished to stay to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial tucked along the East River waterfront between buildings that house Morgan Stanley and Standard & Poor’s. The memorial includes a space that served as a perfect amphitheater for a thousand-strong “people’s assembly”—so named because OWS’ General Assembly is currently defunct—and it became one of those moments of collective effervescence and speaking-in-one-voice that won so many discursively-inclined hearts to the movement in the fall. People of other inclinations danced to the familiar sound of the drum circle on the far side of the park.

The topic of the assembly was whether to stay, to try and occupy.

So, before the clock tolled midnight, I scribbled. I wrote. May the god of the strike have mercy on my soul.

For the occasion of a recent panel discussion at Columbia Law School on Occupy Wall Street and the First Amendment, I wrote this essay, subsequently published on the website of Harper’s Magazine. It argues that one should not take the movement’s appeals to the Bill of Rights too literally in legal terms, and that its tactics and aims have always been infused with an impulse more revolutionary than the law could ever accommodate. The whole discussion at Columbia, which also included WNV contributor and legal scholar Jeremy Kessler, can now be watched here:

Following that, The Nation?published my essay “Thank You, Anarchists,” which explores some of what anarchist thought has contributed to the movement and why it deserves to be taken more seriously than it often is by those on the outside:

As assemblies enter our own politics through the Occupy movement, we should take care to recognize what they’re not and will never be. Even more important, though, is what they’ve already done. They’ve reminded us that politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for. For this, in large part, we have the anarchists to thank.

Co-opt that.

Occupy Wall Street has had its share of celebrity visits and they haven’t always gone very well either. The example that comes to mind concerns another prominent black leader, Russell Simmons, who was allowed to speak during a General Assembly meeting. He interrupted the discussion at hand and gave his two cents about what, in general, the movement should do, concerning the by-then-tabled question of “demands.” He received applause and thanks. But a few minutes later, after the scheduled discussion continued about how white, male-bodied people on the plaza needed to “check their privilege,” a white, male-bodied young man got up and said something like, “Perhaps celebrities should check their privilege, too.”?That got applause as well. A lot, as I recall.

It’s really unfortunate that this has become a racial issue, especially when the occupiers have problems with outreach to some racial groups already. As one black left-wing journalist suggested in a conversation I took part in recently, it may be better understood as a problem of communication styles among different communities rather than active, albeit subtle, racism.

But I do think this represents a really interesting effort on the part of occupiers to—so to speak—kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society. And celebrity really is a huge Buddha.?Even well-earned celebrity. I’ve witnessed other—including white—notable people getting essentially no attention during visits to the plaza. I think it’s really telling that Lewis chose not to hold a grudge. From his remarks, I don’t get the sense that he understands the movement in a deep way, but he does clearly understand—from experience—that creating a new world can get messy sometimes.

The occupiers’ obsession with process—the General Assembly meeting, in this instance—is one really important case of the role of ritual in what they’re doing. The ritual of process comes before all else because it is the vehicle of the future, and the bulwark against compromises with the past.

Read the rest, including Anthea Butler’s discussion of the Lewis incident,?at?Religion Dispatches.