Thought experiment: universal basic income, but it's by a private corporation for individuals with a status somewhere between employee, party member, fan subscriber, shareholder, cryptocurrency coin hodler, and grant recipient. I'm not necessarily saying this would be done in a nice or good way. Just that the possibility exists to combine 'airdrops' with a corporatist form of worker/member subsidization.
The corporation would turn this into a voting bloc that reverses the idea that subscribers/fans/adherents are donating to them but instead that the corp would pay out a stipend. The default capitalist "workers are scum, everyone else is just an externality" could be subverted with a new idea of enlisting the size of a quasi-employee population into 'adherents'.
This already PASSIVELY exists in the way that employees are dependent on various conditions of their employer but also the wider system which (via a mix of truth and lies) must be preserved / supported in your own best interests. I think this dynamic could be exploited much more directly.
In this thought experiment imagine this being done by a corporation across borders, but perhaps with a certain demographic profile in mind. Global megacorps of course work like this to some extent: the tens of thousands of people working for them form a meta-state... but it's too small and as mentioned too based on the idea of pure exploitation of non-people.
The idea here is that instead of global corporation xyz employing 50,000 people worldwide and indirectly having their employees' and their families' interests align... as well as the mayors of the locations where employment is concentrated.... imagine this purposefully being done to achieve a "reverse patreon base" of 5 million people receiving $5/50/500 a month from this corporation. What influence could be bought on a world stage this way?
With insane current inequality - e.g. 50 individuals in the USA holding more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of the population - this idea could be done by a single billionaire family. It could be done virtuously but I am assuming it would just be a "minions" thing in the open. Imagine the stipend being only payable to active xitter posters or card-carrying members of the NRA. Stuff like that.
TLDR what if the biggest successful launches of UBI are actually going to be "specifically NON UNIVERSAL basic income".
@georgebaily It's not a new idea, and the tremendous real world problems with it aren't new either.
The biggest problem I have with it is the way it doubles down on the negative concept of tying people to their jobs. We really should push for life outside of employment, but this sort of thing only serves to emphasize the centrality of what a person does for a living to their whole life.
There are other practical problems, but for me that's the biggest one.
@volkris I agree. But following this line of thinking, with all the potential for evil and distorting / unjust effects this kind of mechanism would have (perhaps intended consequences)... the I think it is likely it is to come true in the current timeline.