openbook

Anonymous

3 days ago

My critique of the UBI...

Distributing money is like handing out heroine, giving drunks a bunch of money and telling them to "spend it wisely", the UBI is going to be a nightmare for a lot of people. Maybe your heroine is OnlyFans, or DoorDash, or videogames, but it's all the same. Some crap to pass the time, to placate ourselves, to distract ourselves from our suffering, because we feel alone in the world. Surrounded by all these people, we still feel alone, because although we're connected more than ever before, we're not actually *feeling* connected or feeling a *part of anything* together. We're not "in it together", we're "in it for ourselves", and that's an existential lonliness that we can't ever solve with money because depending on money is whats causing the problem in the first place.

And this is why I'm worried about AI replacing all the jobs. It's the foretold inevitable end of the market economy, the end of wage labor, the end of capitalism, but then instead of ending capitalism we just give everyone a UBI? It'll just immerse us more permanently into the Matrix of consumerism. The heroine and the OnlyFans will only get better as AI optimizes everything, still focusing on profit and the quality of the product instead of the quality of human life.

The real problem we need to solve is that the human family is not spending enough time with each other, we're not having the conversations we need to have, we're not working on the things we need to work on, because we're all busy working for money and then throwing money at the problem. But money can never solve our problem, because it's not so much a material lack as it is a spiritual malady we're suffering from. You'd be surprised how many resources I can find wandering around homeless, you'd be surprised how hard it is to starve in America, but you'd also be surprised how much that is not what homeless people are suffering from. Every year I feel like I've got to carry more weapons with me, it's like Mad Max out here because of the drugs and the police always moving everyone around so there's no stability or sanity on the streets anymore. People are suffering from their families being disappointed in them, people are suffering from being called lazy, people are suffering from complex bureaucratic glitches and having their identity stolen and their kids stop talking to them because they're homeless and shit like that. They're suffering from wanting to work and being unable to, or being unable to find work that isn't somehow unethical. There's no "good work" left in the system. I don't want to work in a chemical plant, producing a chemical I don't think should exist. I don't want to stand there selling crap food to people that they shouldn't even be eating, with a big smile plastered on my face, when I know how nasty the kitchen behind me really is. But I'm supposed to be considered a more valuable member of society if I make money so I'm more valuable if I work at that chemical plant? Sell people sugar and bad food? I'm more valuable to society if I'm selling drugs? More valuable if I'm a good lawyer being paid to get criminals off? Or a court judge getting paid for putting innocent people away? It's a crazy life. Most of the things humans do wrong is for money, but we're considered worthless if we don't have money. Money is the crime we're all caught up in, that we all need to stop doing, and of course people with money will always blame people without money if they're trying to distract everyone from the fact that money is the problem, and that it's actually their own pursuit of profit that's making the world worse. In this system we're caught between being poor, or morally depraved. Neither of these choices are good choices. We try to make out rich people or homeless people as the bad guys but this is just another illusory division that money causes us to fall for. We need to stop hating on each other for how much or how little money we have and just forget about the money, and start circulating resources. There's plenty enough to go around, we just aren't putting in the time or energy to do it because we're all so busy working for money like a bunch of suckers. /rant

If any of this resonates with you get involved with the distribution network where we circulate resources for everyone's sake at r/distributionNetwork :
https://www.reddit.com/r/distributionNetwork/

Also, still working on this website but it's mostly done, it's a more complete explanation of how the distribution network works:
https://lunchz.github.io/distribution/

#distributionNetwork_💬 #distribution_💬 #advice_💬

#fskynet_💬 #capitalism_💬

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