Interestingly, all the layoffs happening now in the tech sector has gotten people talking about UBI again - @AndrewYang and the #YangGang (like myself) were largely responsible for making it part of mainstream conversation a few years ago - we might have been too ahead of our time, but we at least made our dent, there. UBI tends to be thought of as a "tech thing" because people in that sector are the ones that popularized it...but if you look into the history of it, it's actually an idea that's been around for a very long time.
Today's the political landscape looks very different - the distrust of the government sowed during the COVID lockdown (and the coverup of Biden's mental state by the DNC) basically got Trump elected - thinking that he would be the lesser of evils...
They were wrong, but we've always seen Trump as a "symptom" of deeper causes in the economy and a general indicator of people just struggling to get by. You can call the MAGA folks idiots all you want, but the reality is that we gutted our education system wholesale over the last few decades so the dumbness was a seed we sowed too, in a way.
As a reaction to this swing to the right, there is a swing to the left currently happening, as progressives and left-leaning candidates start to win and take seats at the local levels and beating incumbents/centrists at their own game. (Katie Wilson in Seattle taking the seat as a "socialist mayor", as well as a slew of local city council races as well...) I'm afraid, however, that the problems the country is facing now has gotten so big that it might not even matter - these wild swings are symptomatic of a country in decline, either way.
So how do we get out of this mess? Well, our solution to this was UBI, where we "guarantee" a layer of safety for all citizens on a basic level - $1000/month, guaranteed, no questions asked.
During the campaign, we were criticized that UBI would lead to hyperinflation because if everyone got the same check every month, businesses would just raise their prices by that much, making no difference. Our counter to that was that the money would lead to new businesses being built by everyday people, leading to more competition - it was a protection against corporate monopolies more than anything, in a way.
Ironically, it's looking like we're getting hyperinflation first - the worst of both worlds - rendering the UBI idea itself useless before it was even tried. If the dollar inflates 1000% a year, a $1000/month won't make any difference - this is why some billionaires are proposing the idea now - because they know it won't work.
But the gang has been doing some speculations on alternative versions of UBI that could be enacted, even in the worst-of-case scenarios: time-banking (offering one's time as a service, as opposed to money), alternative assets (like gold, silver), and crypto (which is what is still keeping the dream of it alive for a lot of believers).
Over the years there's been UBI-esque ideas that have emerged - the main problem really is that the average person out there just doesn't have enough money on hand - and discussions around that have morphed into talking about "affordability". The best way to achieve this is to simply crash the real-estate market to bring down rents and the costs of operations as a whole, but Trump himself said "that wasn't going to happen" under his watch, so the hyperinflation path seems a done deal at this point. We still have a few more years to go, after all.
You know, there's the idea that "AI will kill all the jobs" that Andrew was saying way before it became popular - but at its root, the problem isn't really with AI - because the technology itself isn't sophisticated enough to replace human labor - now, or probably forever, honestly. But when we allow monopolies to eliminate competition by smaller businesses and players - we're essentially forced to lower our expectations of the standards and quality we expect from society as a whole...which is basically the enshittified slop we live in now.
Anyway, lately I've been reconnecting to some of the Yang Gang again and it was nice to see that some folks still haven't given up on the idea of making a difference. There's going to be some crazy stuff unfold (even more than now, yes) over the next few years and we need to be prepared for anything to happen - literally anything. We're one of the few groups out there not surprised by how things turned out so far, after all. Maybe we can also be the ones to figure out how to get out of it, too.