Universal basic income and cognitive capitalism: A post-work dystopia in the making?

Abstract

The rise of the gig economy and the prospect of increased automation has led to renewed calls for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income scheme from a variety of spokespeople on the left, including notable journalists, academics and politicians. Weeks, Mason, Srnicek and Williams and others suggest that such a re-orientation of welfare distribution would not only mitigate the effects of these tectonic changes to the nature of labour, but it might in fact facilitate a break away from neoliberal capitalism and towards a post-work condition. Building upon the work of Universal Basic Income detractors such as Pitts and Dinerstein, this article brings into question the likelihood of these claims. Universal Basic Income’s advocates speak of the freedom to be unlocked by Universal Basic Income: but the freedom to do what and for whom? The article addresses the increasing significance for the process of valorisation today of digital ‘free labour’, and thus explores the idea that Universal Basic Income might have presented itself at this current juncture less to be a vehicle to a utopian future and more to be a handmaid for capitalism as its mode of production evolves. After utilising Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror to depict a dystopian imaginary of what a Universal Basic Income-future might thus really look like, the article concludes by questioning how we might rescue the scheme as a leftist project: attending to Guattari’s insights into how to resist capitalism’s subjectivation, as well as Fuchs’ vision for an ‘alternative Internet’.

Universal basic income revisited: COVID-19, biopolitical trade-offs, and the expropriation of digital academic labour

“…Though higher education is only one piece of a larger picture, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in this sector supply reasons for supporting those on the Left who were actively promoting the case for UBI prior to the pandemic's onset. For example, Mathers (2020) argues in favour of introducing UBI primarily because of the exploitation of digital labour. Since neoliberal governments are unlikely to be receptive to this or any other such argument, proposals for UBI are by their very nature a matter of collective struggle.…”