How to create your own basic income right now
Build products of value that have infinite/endless supply
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Would you agree that a basic income would be living better in a worsening world?
What would you do if you had a guaranteed universal basic income (UBI)?
I ask because we are beginning to see the early stages of UBI in a small sector of the population. Young people who are savvy with the digital world are discovering that UBI may be developed out of the inherent abundance of digital products—even the rudimentary products we have available today.
Young people are becoming creators.
That is, they are becoming creators of digital products.
We already know how those products work. You need to invest some time to create them. Then, they go onto a platform like Youtube, Medium, TikTok, or Spotify. Once there, people can purchase them, and because the cost of keeping them is at or near zero, those products can just sit there and sell for a long time into the future. Especially if the content is evergreen and always useful.
In this early stage, a large investment of time is required before people have created enough to have a full basic income. But this could be the model for the future. If you are a writer, a filmmaker, a videographer, a podcast voice, a musician, or a 3D printer designer, you can create digital products that deliver value and for which people will pay. Once created, you can sell an endless number of them because they can reproduce at no cost. If you maintain availability, they will generate a small amount of income over a long time. If you do enough of this, you could establish an ongoing income.
If you have that income and you are a writer, are you going to stop writing? Probably not. Will the photographer stop taking photos? I doubt it. People's creative projects tend to come from the core of their being. It is work that people want to do, rather than being work they must do to make a living. Selling your soul and your time on the planet to a voracious capitalistic system could come to an end. Digitalization offers this new path forward.
If we are to live better in a worsening world, let’s consider the possibility of creating our own system for basic income, right here and right now. Rather than working all our lives paying into a system like social security, then retiring when we are old, how about engaging this investment today. Creators can build up their portfolios and grow their incomes for a few years, and eventually, they have the essence of a basic income.
This engagement with abundance is limited to digital products because they have the inherent abundance that physical products do not yet possess. The products themselves have no marginal cost of reproduction, and most of what is needed to create them can be generated with endless renewable energy. Because there is still a market for them, money can be created from the abundance.
One can argue that this is nibbling around the edges of capitalism, but what if it isn’t? What if it is the leading edge of the postcapitalist world I keep describing? What if it is a ticket to freedom for an entire generation of young people, and what if it could be for middle-aged folks like me too? Digitalization is not going to be reversed, so I see this as a chance to be on the leading edge.
Think about it. And if you are already doing this or willing to test it out, I would love to hear from you. There could be the seeds of something very interesting here.
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Anthony Signorelli