7 A Tempered Optimism about the Digital Age
I have described a way for humans to inhabit the Digital Age in which we benefit from fabulously powerful digital technologies that do not hog our attention, permitting us to focus more directly on the needs of other human beings. This could give rise to a social economy containing socially enhanced versions of many of today’s jobs. The social economy does not get much attention in this time of hysteria about all things digital. As we become more accustomed to digital technologies they may cease to obsess us. Twitter and GPS-equipped smartphones could traverse the path already traveled by electricity. Yesterday’s wonder technology predictably becomes today’s boring enabler. The extreme wealth of today’s champions of digital technology won’t seem quite so right to those who enjoy its services. We will come to view them as we now view the 1900s robber barons of the energy industry and counter their hijacking of the digital economy.1 This chapter offers a tempered optimism about the social-digital economy. Not only is the social-digital economy an attractive vision of our collective digital future, it is achievable.
Part of the task of this chapter is to compare the social-digital economy with competing ideals for the Digital Age. I argue that its combination of attractiveness and practicality places the social-digital economy ahead of other ostensibly appealing visions of the Digital Age. I discuss two alternative visions. The first of these competing ideals is Jeremy Rifkin’s proposal for a Collaborative Commons.2 In Rifkin’s vision of our digital future, people use digital technologies to create and share, disproving the bleak capitalist assumption that we must view new technologies as means of augmenting our own personal stores of wealth. I suggest that Rifkin offers, at best, a partial perspective on our collective digital future. Its principal appeal is to those with sufficient understanding of the digital package to use it creatively. A second seemingly attractive vision of humanity’s digital future includes a universal basic income (UBI). In this view, our hopes for a flourishing humanity in the Digital Age should not reside in the creation of new varieties of work. Rather, we should celebrate our impending jobless future. According to its advocates, a UBI will permit the humans of the Digital Age to free themselves from wage slavery and to live as they choose. I respond to this by offering a defense of the work norm. According to this work norm, work is something most us should expect to do when we grow up. It is an expression of our social natures in which we make our livings by making some positive contribution to our societies. It facilitates the contacts with strangers essential to the flourishing of the complex and diverse societies of the early twenty-first century. We make some positive contribution to our society of strangers and thereby claim a portion of the wealth generated by that society. The work norm need not endorse the tedious and degrading conditions of many of today’s jobs. We should reject the double standard that applies to the work of rich and poor people. The work of poor people seems described by the economists’ term “disutility.” Their work is not fun and it’s not really supposed to be. The less well off turn up to work only because its disutility is compensated for by the positive utility of their pay packets. Many better-paid people speak truly when they say of their well-remunerated work that “it’s not really about the money.” They expect their work to be meaningful and enjoyable. They justify their high wages not by pointing the extreme personal disutility of what they do, but instead by pointing to the magnitude of their contributions to society. Removing this inconsistency would permit us to design social jobs that, although less well paid than the best-paid social work of movie stars, are still enjoyable. The work norm need not and should not support stigmatization of the jobless. There is a difference between work being normal and its being universal.
The Different Logic of Predictions and Ideals
The economist Paul Romer makes a helpful distinction between two types of optimism.3 There is complacent optimism. Romer offers as an example of this kind of optimism “the feeling of a child waiting for presents.” The more proactive conditional optimism “is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.’” Romer suggests that we should be conditional optimists about technological progress. We shouldn’t suppose that we can relax and expect the goods of improved technologies to just arrive. We won’t get these unless we make the right choices.
In what follows I explore another way to probe the difference between proactive and complacent attitudes toward the future. There is a tendency for some advocates of a digital future to present their visions of humanity in the Digital Age as predictions. Consider, for example, Jeremy Rifkin’s view of our collective digital future.4 Rifkin celebrates the power of the Internet to connect people. The Internet brings individuals together to confront tyranny. Witness the role of Twitter and Facebook in facilitating the Arab Spring. Social networking technologies build on a fundamental human interest in working together to create value. The Internet is enabling the creation of what Rifkin calls a Collaborative Commons built on our need to connect and share. He says “While the capitalist market is based on self-interest and driven by material gain, the social Commons is motivated by collaborative interests and driven by a deep desire to connect with others and share.”5 Rifkin continues. “The result is that ‘exchange value’ in the marketplace is increasingly being replaced by ‘shareable value’ on the Collaborative Commons.” Rifkin continues a line of thinking about the way we use and benefit from new technologies initiated by the futurist writer Alvin Toffler in the early 1980s. Toffler coined the term “prosumer” to describe someone involved in the production of what he or she consumes.6 The Digital Revolution accelerates the prosumer movement. It transforms us from passive consumers viewed by corporations as dumping grounds for their overpriced digital products into empowered prosumers passionately engaged in the process of creating the products we use.
Is this an ideal or a prediction? It is important to note that the logic of an ideal conflicts with that of a prediction. When you present a view of the future as a prediction you present it as something that will happen. When you present a view of the future as an ideal you suggest that it requires effort on the part of your audience. Someone who predicts the sun’s rising tomorrow suggests that it will happen regardless of what we do. No one approaches evening resolved to fight so that the sun may rise the next morning. William Wilberforce presented the abolition of slavery as an ideal that made significant demands of those living in a slave-holding Britain. He didn’t suggest that those listening to him idly sit back, confident in his forecast of a slave-free Britain.
There’s a gap between this advocacy of ideals and Romer’s conditional optimism. You can present something as an ideal at the same time as expressing pessimism about its realization. For the record, I am a climate change pessimist. Climate change pessimism is not climate change denial. It concedes the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, it is compatible with the suggestion that it’s possible for us to work together to reverse some of the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change pessimists doubt that we will. The US election results of 2016 suggest that we will continue to focus more on waging wasteful wars on terror and building border walls than on arresting climate change. A leader who, under duress, utters the words “I believe in the reality of anthropogenic climate change” is unlikely to commit the resources to do much about it. Doing something about climate change requires more than the recognition that it is a real phenomenon with the potential for very bad consequences. The leader must prioritize preventing or mitigating these consequences over other more politically advantageous ends. If I’m asked to place a wager I’m betting that we will suffer the ill effects of climate change with the poorest among us expected to bear the heaviest burden. I hope to lose that wager. For that reason, I advocate the ideal of a truly green economy.
If the Collaborative Commons is a prediction, then it’s something that will happen almost regardless of what we do. We created the Internet which, in turn, enables shareable value. And so, once we’ve traversed a few spasms of rejection by those who seek ownership over the Internet, we arrive at a Collaborative Commons.
There are two reasons to doubt the viability of the Collaborative Commons as a prediction about the Digital Age. First, and more generally, there are good grounds to doubt any prediction about the Digital Age. Technological packages are compatible with a variety of social arrangements. The Industrial package yielded Gilded Age America with its robber barons, the Soviet Union of the 1930s with its purges and deliberate mass starvations, and 1970s social democratic Sweden with its generous welfare safety nets. There are likely to be very many social permutations that can be made to fit the digital package. Rifkin’s Collaborative Commons is one candidate. But there are no grounds to rule out, a priori, the various digital dystopias described in science fiction in which a few control all the machines and the rest of us have minimal access to them and are therefore excluded from the Collaborative Commons.
Rifkin’s somewhat sunny vision of the Digital Age is no more inevitable than are more miserable interpretations of our collective experience of the Digital Age. Consider Marc Andreessen’s separation of the humans of the Digital Age into two groups: “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”7 The much-lamented rise in inequality might mean that we end up with something like this. The 1 percent will turn into the 0.1 percent who own the computers and therefore get to tell them what to do. The 99 percent will turn into the 99.9 percent who will be told by computers what to do. Andrew Keen forecasts a “winner-take-all, upstairs-downstairs kind of society.”8 He describes a world in which a near unbridgeable gap separates the many servants from the digitally enhanced few.
Current trends seem to make a digital dystopia described by Andreessen and Keen more probable than the Collaborative Commons or the social-digital economy. It seems to be the direction in which we are currently headed. In chapter 3, I challenged the idea that the putative desire on the part of information to be free will ensure that access is available to all. The sustainability of bound information depends on the resources that accrue to those who bind it. The fortunes of Google and Facebook buy many lawyers and politicians who will protect bound information even as their founders profess their commitment to the ideals expressed by Rifkin. Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page should be judged more by what they and their companies do than by the sweetness of their words.
I do not offer the social-digital economy as a prediction. There are many ways in which we can fail to realize a social-digital economy. When it comes to rosy forecasts of the future we should keep in mind Leo Tolstoy’s dictum in Anna Karenina about happy families: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There may be more than one way for humans to achieve collective happiness in the Digital Age, but in the space of future possibilities, the digital dystopias do seem to outnumber the digital utopias. There are some bleak omens for those who support the idea of a future built around social-digital economies. Among the jobs most threatened by the current fad for economic austerity are those that should be in the greatest demand in a future social economy. When a hospital dismisses workers who deal with patient inquiries, replacing them with automated systems, it seems to introduce an arrangement that is more efficient. We cannot rely on some “logic of the Digital Revolution” to simply reverse this trend. We must view ourselves as empowered to reject the general direction in which our current efficiency fetish is taking us. If we continue to devalue people who make their livings dealing directly with other people, then we risk ending up with some inhuman digital dystopia. But a genuinely social-digital economy is both possible—it is compatible with the digital package—and worth fighting for.
It is important that we resist viewing any attractive depiction of the Digital Age as a prediction. Predictions, both dystopian and utopian, can be demotivating. Consider this example from history. Between December 22, 1941, and January 14, 1942, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Washington, DC, to decide the general goals and terms of cooperation required to beat the Axis powers. This meeting was a great success. But there was something about their attitudes toward the future that helped it to be such. Churchill and Roosevelt avoided two types of demotivating confidence about the future. First, they avoided a demotivating optimism. When some of today’s historians compare the combined productive capacities of the Allied and Axis powers they tend to arrive at the conclusion that so long as the United States, Soviet Union, and British Commonwealth stayed the course then the eventual defeat of Germany, Japan, and Italy was inevitable.9 It would have been tragically demotivating for Churchill and Roosevelt to bring this belief into their Washington meeting. If they view victory as inevitable then why not raid the President’s cellars for bottles of Pol Roger, Churchill’s favorite champagne. They also needed to avoid a demotivating pessimism about the future. The meeting would not have gone so well had Churchill announced “We in Britain have sought to contend against Hitler’s armored legions. There is no force on Earth that can defeat them. And now they are joined by the invincible Japanese. Where’s your Pol Roger?” They viewed the choices that they were making as making the future. They believed that bad decisions would lead to bad outcomes.
Churchill and Roosevelt approached the outcome of World War II with an attitude of empowered uncertainty. They did not place too much credence on predictions about its outcome. But they were certainly not indifferent to these predictions. They understood the magnitude of the challenge that they confronted. We should approach the Digital Age with a Churchillian and Rooseveltian empowered uncertainty. There are many kinds of societies that are compatible with the digital package. Which one we end up with depends on the choices we make and the effort we are prepared to put in. There’s nothing inevitable about the social consequences of the Digital Revolution.
Technological revolutions are times of great uncertainty. The desire to predict the future is understandable, especially at times of great collective anxiety. But there’s another side to this uncertainty. Technological revolutions are also times of great opportunity. Change is forced upon us. But we can influence how we change. As we enter the Digital Age we can think of ourselves as akin to immigrants to a new land. The religious dissenters who boarded the Mayflower left an England intolerant of their forms of religion. Emigration to America brought an opportunity to found new kinds of societies. New arrivals to a Digital Age can fecklessly slide into the arrangement described by Andreessen in which a select few get to give orders to computers that transmit those orders to the rest of us. We could tamely permit our age’s inequalities to infect and be amplified by the fabulous technologies of the Digital Age. Or we could make creative use of the upheavals of a technological revolution to build societies properly tolerant of human needs. My confidence that we will achieve a social-digital economy is of the very general type advanced by Martin Luther King Jr. when he said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King’s statement leaves plenty of scope for significant kinks toward injustice in that arc.
We should be alert to a bias in the way that we think about technological solutions and the way that we think about solutions that may emerge when we consider social solutions, solutions that require people to work together to achieve an important shared goal. If we are convinced of the possibility of a technological solution then we tend not to be discouraged by a setback. We expect that prototypes of moon landers may explode, and that prototypes of driverless cars may fail to distinguish the whiteness of a truck from the whiteness of a spring sky. We feel confident in the arc of technological progress, toward successful moon landings and safe driverless cars. The glitches will be ironed out. We tend not to be so optimistic about fixes for failures of human collaboration. When we fail to achieve a shared goal because some of us were lazy or dishonest we tend to attribute these failures to human nature. We sigh and say that people will always cheat the system when they can. They will take advantage of social welfare programs by claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. Those who have faith in the capacity of humans to sacrifice short-term selfish interests to achieve a shared goal should draw inspiration from cases in which such sacrifices were made. We rightly celebrate the heroic sacrifices made in the war against fascism. There is no reason that such sacrifices could not occur when our shared ends are constructive rather than destructive.
We Should Prefer Robust Ideals
When we describe an ideal we are not making a prediction. An ideal presents a possible arrangement as attractive. To be worth fighting for, an ideal must be more than just attractive—it must be realistic. We must see in it an indication of how to go from our current arrangement to the arrangement described by the ideal. This realism is what tempers my optimism about our collective digital future. A tempered optimism directs that we prefer ideals that we can get to from where we are now.
There’s a gap between a lovely sentiment and a practical ideal. Suppose Beatles fans were to offer the famous lyric “All you need is love” as an ideal that could guide resolution of the longstanding disputes between North and South Korea or between Israelis and Palestinians. The lyric seems to describe an attractive way for humans to relate to each other. An imagined arrangement in which all Israelis and Palestinians abruptly came to feel love for each other would lead to a swift solution to many problems. But “All you need is love” is not worth much as advice for those seeking solutions to these longstanding disputes. There’s no indication of how to replace the current intense mutual suspicion with attitudes of unquestioning love. Playing the Beatles across the Korean demilitarized zone or into the Gaza strip is likely to be interpreted as crude Western propaganda.
Some ideals are fragile. They are set up so that partial compliance yields none or very few of the ideal’s promised rewards. Partial compliance may even reverse the moral polarity of the rewards brought by full compliance. In effect, there is no way to get from partial to full compliance. If you could magically arrive at a situation in which both would-be terrorists and potential victims jointly enjoy endorphins generated by group hugs, then you would incontrovertibly have made the world a better place. But what we know about the world and human nature suggests that it is impossible to get there from where we are now. The ideal’s fragility makes pursuit of it very difficult. Partial compliance is likely to produce outcomes that are, in moral terms, the opposite of what was sought. The first ISIS massacre of aspiring group huggers will decisively set back the goals of those who propound the Beatles ideal of universal love. What may be an appealing sentiment offers no waypoints toward its achievement.
Other ideals are robust. They can start small and become more influential. The benefits increase as greater numbers endorse and comply with the ideal, but benefits are still noticeable at low levels of support. The social-digital economy can start small. We can take baby steps toward adequately rewarding people for their generation of social goods and meeting of social needs. Unlike the Beatles ideal, partial compliance generates some of the advertised benefits in ways that can become apparent to those yet to be convinced.
The ideal of the social-digital economy offers waypoints on the voyage to full compliance. As we sustain humans in jobs that might otherwise have been awarded to machines we can realize and enjoy the benefits of dealing with humans. We can draw encouragement from these successes. We can be encouraged to try harder to increase the magnitude of the benefits. Others can witness the benefits received by the early adopters.
It what follows I compare the social-digital economy with two competing optimistic takes on the Digital Age. Which of these visions of our digital future is worth fighting for? The first of these alternatives is Jeremy Rifkin’s suggestion of a Collaborative Commons. We will combine our creativity with powerful digital technologies. We will become prosumer members of the maker economy. The second alternative is the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Many citizens of the Digital Age should take advantage of the expected efficiencies of digital machines to absolve ourselves of work. I argue that the social-digital economy better satisfies the criteria of a tempered optimism about humanity in the Digital Age.
The Social-Digital Economy versus the Collaborative Commons
Rifkin’s ideal of a Collaborative Commons is certainly preferable to the view described by Andreessen in which a select few of us order computers around while most of us accept that we belong to the part of humanity that gets ordered around by computers. Rifkin issues a general invitation to use digital technologies to join the Collaborative Commons. We can accept the invitation to use the new technologies to connect with each other and enjoy the new collaborative varieties of creativity. Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired magazine, has done much to popularize the maker movement.10 In his vision of the future, a new class of creative types use 3D printing and digital design tools to launch a new, individual-centered, industrial revolution.
Anderson’s writing conveys some of the excitement that accompanies these new digitally enhanced forms of creation. But it’s not for everyone. One of the great insights of liberal political thought is the plurality of values that characterize the human condition. Successful liberal societies nourish the different visions of the good life centered on poetry, ultra-marathons, and real estate development. From this liberal pluralist perspective, Rifkin’s ideal seems too partial, too specific to digital technologies. Some people just aren’t particularly into the Internet and its associated digital advances. They shouldn’t be required to locate them at the center of what they do. These people will use email and make Google searches but they will view them as many today view electricity. There are fascinating puzzles in how to bring cheap and environmentally friendly electricity to the masses. But many people will rightly view both electricity and the Internet as boring enablers of how they make their livings. There is a difference between ways of life focused on the development of digital technologies and the exploration of their possibilities and ways of life that stand in the same relationship to digital technologies as they do to electricity. A poet may need a word processor and an Internet connection much in the way that she needs electricity to power the light that permits her to continue writing in the evening. Her vision of the good life may, nevertheless, be little different from that of the early 1800s romantic poet John Keats. It differs from that of someone who spends his day coding APIs (application programming interfaces) for Facebook. The steam engine may have made the Industrial Age but the productive efforts of most people were not directly centered on steam power. The farmers and vicars of early nineteenth-century Britain might, if they chose to reflect, acknowledge that steam power was having a transformative effect on their times. But few of them will have spent much time in factories. Many of them wouldn’t make regular journeys by train. The way of the maker is great for some. In a just society, we can all benefit from the presence of makers. But many of us just aren’t makers—or at least we aren’t the kinds of makers that the Digital Revolution has elevated to prominence. Few are capable of the acts of technical creativity of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Try as we might, few have any chance of coming up with the next Facebook.
Another problem is that these maker jobs belong in a realm that is particularly vulnerable to encroachment and absorption by the very advances in the digital technologies that are the focuses of these creative impulses. When digital technologies get good at designing themselves, there will be a reduction of opportunities for Steve Wozniak and his ilk.
The social-digital economy offers a more expansive vision of humans in the Digital Age. The social economy will have its own heroes and heroines. They needn’t be any kind of maker. The social-digital economy would contain its share of well-connected prosumers, but many others would find ways to meet human needs that have little or nothing to do with digital technologies. For some people sharing is not a celebrated new digital economy. It’s something you do when you bake a cake and bring it into the office. The social-digital economy makes place for people to participate in areas of the social economy that have very little at all to do with the digital package. A counsellor whose job is to help people distressed by the changes to their circumstances wrought by the Digital Revolution is not a prosumer or a maker. But he is a key contributor to the social economy.
The Social-Digital Economy versus a Jobless Future with a Universal Basic Income
I now compare the social-digital economy with another ideal. This is the idea of the Universal Basic Income or UBI. Many advocates of the UBI accept that most humans won’t find employment in the Digital Age. They seek to view this as a feature and not a bug of the Digital Revolution. We can resist Andreesen’s and Keen’s digital dystopias if we ensure than some of the wealth generated by the machines is shared out to the jobless. Writing in the Guardian, Jathan Sadowski notes that the UBI has acquired support from the tech community. “UBI becomes a consolation prize for those whose lives are disrupted. Benefits still accrue to the designers and owners of the technologies, but now with less guilt and pushback about the collateral damage.”11
The debate about the UBI is multifaceted.12 My interest here is quite specific: Is the UBI an adequate response to the digital package’s threat to mind work? This is how Martin Ford presents it in his 2015 book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. Ford describes the UBI as “An unconditional basic income is paid to every adult citizen regardless of other income sources.”13 The UBI will feed and clothe people who can’t do anything that the machines of the Digital Age won’t do better and more cheaply. But it also permits unemployed and unemployable humans to play an even more important role in the economy. Machines make stuff, but they don’t buy it. If almost all humans are shunted off to an unemployed penury, then how will they afford to pay for these efficiently produced goods and services?
Ford presents the UBI as a response to an impending problem for the economies of the Digital Age. If the 1 percent who own almost all the machines also have almost all the money, then we should see a sharp dip in aggregate demand. The immense efficiencies of the digital economy won’t count for much if there’s almost no one with the money to pay for the resulting goods and services. There is greater aggregate demand in an economy in which everyone has some money than in an economy in which almost all the wealth is in the 1 percent or 0.1 percent but everyone else barely survives on food stamps. Economists have long known that poor people spend a greater percentage of their income than do rich people. Attempts to use tax cuts to stimulate the economy are likely to be more successful if not directed at the rich. A universal basic income permits those at the bottom of the economic pyramid to buy the things that the machines will churn out. The UBI will permit future citizens to perform roles overlooked by too narrow a focus on human economic contributions.
This doesn’t mean that strolling malls and watching TV will be the totality of the activities performed by jobless recipients of the UBI. Members of the super-rich class who have tired of making money generally don’t choose lifestyles of indolence. Some of them commit themselves to worthy causes. They work to raise money for people orphaned by AIDS or to combat discrimination. We should distinguish work from the institution of work.14 The institution of work is a feature of today’s technologically advanced liberal democracies. We work and expect payment in return. But we all do work for which we don’t expect payment. If you spend your weekend fixing a fence on your property you don’t expect to get paid. But it shares many of the valuable features—the sense of purpose and challenge—of many of the activities encompassed by the institution of work. Digital Age societies with a UBI may have a very attenuated institution of work. But the citizens of these societies will work. Those limited to the basic income will lack the resources available to Bill Gates, but they can share his charitable goals. They might spend the mornings strolling the malls to discharge their obligation in respect of the economy to help maintain aggregate demand. They can spend their afternoons mounting campaigns for worthy causes.
Paid work will continue to be an option for some. The basic income need not take away incentives to work and earn greater sums of money. Many may choose to spend their days strolling malls but others will enjoy the extra spending power a job will give them. The basic income will suffice for a Toyota, but you’ll need paid work if you want a Lexus.
The transition from an economy in which the contributions of many different categories of human worker essential to the economy to one in which only a few of these categories of worker remain could be messy. Technological unemployment resulting from the Digital Revolution will affect some industries before others. Driverless trucks may be safely traversing intercity routes while drivers are still required for taxis that navigate the chaos of inner cities. It could be bad news for the economy if drivers of taxis take the escape route from employment that the state seeks to make available for long-distance truck drivers. If Ford is right, then both categories of job are headed for extinction. But there could be an awkward series of transitions from a situation in which the economy requires the contributions of both kinds of worker, through a situation in which many taxi drivers must be motivated to keep turning up to work while long-distance truck drivers should be reallocated to the malls to spend their basic incomes on appropriately priced consumer durables, to an ultimate destination in which neither kind of driver is required. The unemployed existence available to truck drivers cannot be so blissful as to make taxi drivers prematurely extinct.
The UBI as an Inadequate Response to Inequality in the Digital Age
My concern is about the capacity of a UBI to generate massive inequality. We should distinguish the immediate consequences of introducing a UBI from its long-term implications for the Digital Age. Suppose a wealthy, technologically advanced society of the early twenty-first century resolves to offer a UBI to all its citizens. We would witness a quite significant one-off reduction of inequality. But this one-off reduction is likely to be followed by a variety of inequality that we should expect to last longer and to be especially recalcitrant. A UBI is likely to generate a two-tiered society. On top, will be the few who possess marketable skills in an age of powerful digital machines and those who have some significant ownership stake in machines. The members of this group will receive their basic incomes plus wages or rents on the machines that they own. The rest of us will get by on our basic incomes. We should expect significant reductions in social mobility. The kinds of attributes that today suffice to bring wealth to someone born into poverty are significantly less likely to have this effect in an age in which much mind work is done by machines.
First, a general observation about inequality. We oversimplify the current problem of inequality when we think of it as the problem of the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It is better characterized as the gap between the have-lots and the have-littles. Many of today’s poor have possessions that would be envied by the rich of yesteryear. They have color televisions. They enjoy hot showers. They treat their sore throats with antibiotics. Some of the poor are hungry. But in wealthy liberal democracies complaints are more likely to be about the quality of food available to the poor. The poor don’t starve, but they have bad diets. Parents rushing between a variety of badly paid part-time jobs have little option but to feed their children junk food.
Problems arise with respect to the large gaps between the wealth of those at the top and those at the bottom. It’s one thing to be given sufficient money to feed and clothe a family, but we have needs beyond these basic necessities. These needs are significantly influenced by our positions in society relative to others. Arrangements that we judge to be egalitarian need not aspire to reduce the gap between the best off and the worst off to zero. There are better off and worse off people in societies that we judge to be egalitarian. But egalitarian arrangements seek to minimize this gap in ways that are compatible with the basic rights of citizens and the need to generate prosperity.
The UBI is well designed to prevent those at the bottom from starving and keep them supplied with things from the dollar store equivalents of Digital Age malls. But a UBI motivated by the need to maintain demand is likely to widen the gap between the have-lots and have-littles. Social mobility is a valuable feature of a society in which benefits are distributed unequally. We celebrate stories like that of Andrew Carnegie, the son of a sporadically employed immigrant weaver whose talent and determination led to extreme wealth and fame. It is hard to see how a society in the Digital Age that pays a UBI could preserve this path from the socioeconomic bottom to the top. Life should be significantly better for Digital Age recipients of a basic income than it was for William Carnegie—Andrew’s father. But the great proficiency at mind work of Digital Age machines means that very few will get to climb the ladder scaled by Andrew. Very few people born into the class of people who get by on the basic income alone will discover that they have marketable skills in an age of superlative machine learners. Some Digital Age Larry Davids and Oprah Winfreys will discover that they have talents that are truly remarkable and beyond the reach of the AIs. They may thereby ascend to society’s upper rungs. But the path of working hard to acquire capital will be less available to those who hope to rely on hard work. Most of the unemployed class will get by on basic incomes that feed, clothe, and entertain them quite well, but won’t suffice to acquire a significant ownership stake in the digital economy.
The advance of digital technologies threatens to negate the salutary function of education in a liberal society of promoting social mobility. As machine learners colonize the domains of activity in which the children of the poor might have displayed their talents, the paths of escape should predictably narrow. We will accept that position is inherited. What matters here is not the inheritance of genes with putative links to worthy traits. People will be less interested in claiming to work hard and to have exceptional business acumen once it’s clear that these attributes make less of a difference than the ownership stakes in the economy you inherit. We could return to a rentier society in which what you inherit matters much more than anything you do. In Marxian analysis, the rentier class is defined by significant holdings in property that generates profit. The members of this class have no need to make social contributions. They can maintain an indifference toward the activities of the ventures in which they have holdings. They care only about the monthly check generated by these ventures.
Participation in the labor force offers a further means of improving conditions that will become less available in a workless Digital Age. Workers who feel ill treated can threaten to withdraw their labor. If wealthy New Yorkers want to continue drinking soy mocchaccinos, they must adequately remunerate those who make them. They want the people who fill these roles to be sufficiently well paid to motivate them to keep on turning up for work. If those who make soy mocchaccinos judge pay and conditions to be inadequate they can threaten the withdrawal of their labor. The future jobless of a society in which those jobs are done by uncomplaining digital technologies won’t have this historically important means of complaint. The have-lots are unlikely to take time out from sipping their machine-made mocchaccinos to read editorials in The Big Issue complaining about the conditions of those who get by on the basic income alone.
What about the important economic role described by Ford—that of consumption? In Ford’s conception of the Digital Age, the economies of the Digital Age face ruin if the jobless stop buying. The jobless of Ford’s Digital Age can exercise considerable influence by their choices of which basic items to purchase. Manufacturers of breakfast cereals should invest considerable sums of money to make their brands attractive to the jobless. But it’s hard to see how those who get by on the basic income alone could use their choices over what to consume to register a more fundamental complaint about the status quo. A threat to withdraw the economic service of consumption is effectively a threat to starve. It is, for that reason, not particularly credible. We remember people who took the option of self-immolation to register protests about war in Vietnam. But that avenue of protest takes a degree of commitment shared by few. In the Digital Age, it would seem to be a necessarily self-limiting way to signal disapproval of your permanent relegation to the consumer class.
Those at society’s bottom tiers may have legitimate complaints. Consider, for example, the proposal of the Belgian philosopher Phillipe van Parijs. He argues that the basic income should be set at maximum level sustainable by a society. Van Parijs justifies this level in terms of a commitment to produce the most “real freedom” in a society.15 According to van Parijs, your level of real freedom is set by the actions that you can perform. Put simply, if A can do more things than B then A has more real freedom than B. Real freedom can be limited by laws prohibiting certain acts but also by a lack of resources to perform those actions. You may be happy to not live in a society in which it is illegal for you to drive a Lexus, but poverty can make you just as unfree to purchase one as a legal ban. Van Parijs argues that we should seek to maximize the real freedom of members of society that possess the lowest levels of it.
This is an excellent philosophical proposal. But there are practical obstacles blocking its realization in a society in which machines do much of the work. Currently, the worst off can supplement their philosophical arguments for better treatment with the threat of withdrawing their labor. Consider the comparison with the abolition of slavery. The threat of violent revolt by enslaved people may not be required by any premise of a sound philosophical argument for the immorality of slavery. But the threat of revolt gives forceful expression to those arguments. In a Digital Age in which the worst off don’t work they must hope that sufficiently many of their socioeconomic betters take the time to encounter and be convinced by van Parijs’s arguments. They may be as likely to be convinced as slave holders whose human chattels write powerful editorials rejecting the condition of slavery, but promptly comply with every command issued by their masters. They may need the arc of the moral universe to be very long before polite philosophical argument has the desired effect on slave owners.
An Expanded Basic Income?
Perhaps we make a mistake if we conceive of basic incomes as limited to a fairly basic collection of goods. If an interest in maintaining consumption can keep the dollar store well stocked, then why shouldn’t the same reasoning apply also to the thousand-dollar store?
There are currently trials of the UBI that involve comparatively small payments. In his recent defense of the UBI the Canadian philosopher Mark Walker suggests a specific sum as sufficient to meet the basic needs of Americans—US $10,000 per annum.16 He presents this sum as amply covered by the capacity of the US economy to generate wealth once appropriate cuts are made to comparatively unimportant expenditures such as the military. Walker grants that US $10,000 per annum suffices only for a frugal existence. But if we are interested in the long view of the Digital Age we must take account not only of the form the basic income would take when first introduced, but what it may become. Perhaps the same economic justification for a basic income that covers a frugal existence might be extended and applied to more expensive goods? If free money is a useful spur to the production of cheap Toyotas, then why shouldn’t the same reasoning be applied to luxury Mercedes Benzes? This process could be abetted by technological advancements. The techno-optimist writer Byron Reece enthuses about advances in manufacturing that will permit a Mercedes Benz to be built for $50.17
I suspect that we are unlikely to see the expansion of the basic income beyond a quite circumscribed collection of basic goods. This is because the goods purchased by the rich are valued by them, in part, because of their inaccessibility to those with more modest means. No one wants a $50 Mercedes Benz. The Mercedes is a luxury product and the demand for luxury goods differs from demand for their nonluxury counterparts. An objective assessment of a cheap car such as the Toyota Corolla and a luxury car such as a Mercedes reveals little difference between them. Both can safely, comfortably, and efficiently take passengers from point A to point B. Given the functional similarities of the Toyota and the Mercedes it becomes apparent that much of the additional value of the latter is as an indicator of social status. It serves this purpose by not being available to all. A $50 Mercedes sends none of the signals of enhanced status sent by a $100,000 Mercedes. The Mercedes has some features lacked by a cheaper car, but much of its value to its owner lies in its broadcast of success. If you are considering a $50 Mercedes, then why not pay $25 for the basically as good Toyota? The possession of neither car supports a claim to membership of society’s elite.
It wouldn’t matter so much if the class of goods available only to the rich were restricted to those that confer enhanced social standing. The poor get Toyotas; the rich get Mercedes. The poor get iPhones; the rich get gold-plated iPhones. The members of both groups get to visit the same locations and enjoy the same smartphone features. But the category of goods available only to the rich is likely to extend beyond those that merely confer enhanced social standing. It will include the new medical and educational technologies, technologies that both enhance social standing and make more concrete differences to how well life goes. Those who either own the machines that do mind work, or do work that these machines cannot do, will want to believe that they get more than gold-plated versions of the technologies available to the jobless. They will insist that, beyond signaling success, these technologies make significant differences to how they live their lives. They will want rejuvenation technologies for themselves and enhancement technologies for their children.
The digital future likely to result from Ford’s suggestion will be one in which there is a sharp distinction between those who receive nothing beyond the basic income and those who receive the basic income plus payment for the exercise of some skill that retains value in a largely automated future and those who have a significant ownership stake in the machines. I predict that the have-lots will be especially interested in ways to distinguish themselves from the have-littles. Those who receive nothing beyond the basic income will be expected to stroll the malls. But their purchasing activities are likely to be restricted to items on the lower shelves. The have-lots will not be at all interested in these items. If they do turn up to the same malls they are likely to insist on being taken to the private viewing rooms where the most exclusive items are available. These exclusive items should make the lives of the have-lots very different from the lives of the have-littles.
Concluding Comments
In this chapter I discuss what is involved in offering an ideal for the Digital Age. Ideals are not predictions. Good ideals for the Digital Age are attractive and achievable ways for humans to inhabit it. We must approach their realization with an empowered uncertainty. Whether we achieve them depends on what we do. Treating them as inevitable outcomes of progress in digital technologies will reduce the likelihood that we will enjoy the benefits of the social-digital economy. I compare the social-digital economy with two other attractive Digital Age ideals. Rifkin’s ideal of a collaborative commons in which people use digital technologies to share and create value seems too specific to the operation of digital technologies to be a general ideal for the Digital Age. Some people will enjoy working with others to create beneficial digital novelties. Others will lack those skills and interests. They will seek work in an expanding social economy. The ideal of a universal basic income promises a one-off reduction in inequality. But it threatens to bring a replacement variety of inequality that is especially recalcitrant. We should expect low levels of social mobility in a society whose machines do much of its mind work. Those without work in a Digital Age with a UBI will be denied the great benefits brought by a vocation.