Silicon Valley talks a good game on ‘basic income’, but its words are empty
The radical idea of handing cash to citizens regardless of whether they work has taken root in Europe. Now America’s tech elite is backing the concept – but why?
Basic income, therefore, is often seen as the Trojan horse that would allow tech companies to position themselves as progressive, even caring – the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop – while eliminating the hurdles that stand in the way of further expansion. Goodbye to all those cumbersome institutions of the welfare state, employment regulations that guarantee workers’ rights or subversive attempts to question the status quo with regards to the ownership of data or the infrastructure that produces it.
