
Silicon Valley talks a good game on ‘basic income’, but its words are empty - ingenieros
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/28/silicon-valley-basic-income
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rdlecler1
The reason I left academia and didn't pursue a post doc was because the
prospects of making $32k in New York while trying to pay off a student loan,
to maybe get an assistant professor position one day, wasn't appealing. I
invested over 10-years of my life up to that point, but I certainly wasn't
entitled to a job and believe me, a PhD is often a huge Liability when you're
looking for a job. If you're making 20 pounds a day working for Uber then turn
off the meter and go do something else.

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schwarrrtz
other articles by this author:

"Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend the frontiers of capitalism"
[0]

"Why growing old the Silicon Valley way is a prescription for loneliness" [1]

SV certainly has problems, but let's not escalate the debate to hysterical
levels. There's a bit too much blanket generalization and hyperbole here for
my liking.

[0]
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/silicon...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/silicon-
valley-exploits-space-evgeny-morozov)

[1]
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/24/growing...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/24/growing-
old-silicon-valley-prescription-for-misery)

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ccvannorman
a trite and inaccurate article that equates all of silicon valley to data
exploiters and tax evaders.

~~~
rdlecler1
To be fair, there could be more done on the tax issue but the article was a
hit job. And "United Square Ventures"? Seriously? Hard to have street cred
writing when your butchering the name of one of the most well known VC forms.

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nitwit005
It mentions Y Combinator and Albert Wenger as Silicon Valley supporters of
basic income. I suspect that means... 2 or 3 people? The article lists more
radical Italian economists.

It's completely valid to create a simplified model to understand certain
social effects, but when you're looking at such a tiny number of people,
grouping them into some sort of blob seems more likely to be an attempt to
distort than to understand.

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objectivistbrit
There's a community of people online who like squashing logical fallacies.
Thing is, articles like this represent a more subtle and high-level form of
disinformation than the simply fallacies such people are trained to spot.

One aspect of this disinformation is treating "Silicon Valley" throughout as
one big blob, an organisation or organised movement, rather than a group of
diverse individuals and companies, each with independent opinions and
objectives.

"YC is funding research on basic income - but Uber mines your data so how can
these Silicon Valley elites be trusted?!!11"

Why do this? Because he wants to paint Silicon Valley as a _power bloc_.
Remember that this is the writing of a public intellectual, and a well-
connected member of the liberal establishment, in a major liberal newspaper,
basically declaring that tech is a) too wealthy and powerful and needs to be
cut down to size and b) their advocacy of basic income (libertarian socialism)
is unsatisfactory, and only full-blown socialism will be deemed sufficient.

"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."

In other words, "don't trust techies who claim to be good capitalists, there
are no good capitalists".

Note that when an industry expands (which Morozov implies is _bad_ ) they sell
more useful products and services to more people. When the welfare state
expands and "flourishes" (which Morozov says is good), it forces more people
to pay more money to other people.

\---

Near the end there's some illuminating new economic theory, which makes his
thought process clearer:

"First, it is a way to compensate workers for the work they do while not
technically working [...] Think of Uber drivers who are generating useful
data, which helps Uber in making resource allocation decisions."

The data generated by one driver is of little value - probably no more than
cents per trip.

"Second, because much of our labour today is collective – do you know by how
much your individual search improves Google’s search index? Or how much a line
of code you contribute to a free software project enhances the overall
product? – it is often impossible to determine the share of individual
contribution in the final product."

The essential point stands for any complicated enterprise - how much does one
line of code contribute to a _commercial_ project? As it's impossible to
measure, there's only one way to settle the issue - worker and employer
mutually agree on the value of worker's labour.

Evgeny's solution, remember, is to hand out more money to everyone. This would
only be a fair system if the value of everyone's work was equal.

Note again the assumption that because many companies constantly mine data
from everyone, and this data has some value, this means that everyone is
creating value, all the time. The only value Uber and Google get from your
data is the ability to better target services to you, so Evgeny's point is
that companies should pay you for the ability to sell you stuff.

(I should point out that I think data mining is a shitty activity, and
companies probably overvalue its benefit - on an unspoken "it's dubious so it
must be useful" premise).

"First, that the welfare state, in a somewhat reformed form, must survive and
flourish – it is a key social institution that, with its generous investments
in health and education, gives us the freedom to be creative."

More freedom for those who get money, less freedom for those forced to pay for
it.

