Hi, it's been a while.
My most recent political development has been kind of, well, cringe. Or at least it's been spured on by cringe. It is cringe which has formed it's kindling. That cringe comes in the form of politics debate bro streamer Destiny. I know, I know. You don't have to tell me. Whatever you can say about me getting into Destiny trust me I have already criticised myself for it over and over. You might be starting to worry, what sort of political development could be created using Destiny as kindling, has n0thanky0u become a lib? Don't worry so much. I do not agree with Destiny on lots of things. In fact, I went through a month long period of watching his videos where I thought he was very insightful, then have been going through a multi month long period of wondering what sort of crack I was smoking during that first month long period. Ok, this is not a post about Destiny, who cares about him. What it's about is what watching Destiny forced me to contend with. That is this, it's all well and good having radical politics, but what do you actually want to do in the here and now, forget about "after the revolution", forget about the inner mechanisms of anarchist society or whatever. Watching Destiny honestly embarrass fairly competant leftists left a bad taste in my mouth. It caused me to go away and reflect, because it's all very good to say what you want, but much harder to say how to get there.
This lead me basically to this outcome. I'm a single issue person, in favour of Universal Basic Income. The main base of my though on this issue comes from 3 main sources, firstly nick srnicek and alex williams. When I first read Inventing The Future, I was honestly pretty put off by it. I still don't really know that they needed to spend so much of the book critiquing existing movements, I think it would have been a little less intimidating if I didn't have to read why all my methods for acheiving change will fail because I'm an idiot. I don't agree with everything they say in that first part of the book, but I think their general conclusion is correct, these modern anticapitalist movements have in large part failed because they do not have clear demands. Occupy prided itself on having no demands, and therefor acheived nothing. Same story with BLM in large part. I think we've forgotten that if we actually make clear demands when we protest or strike or whatever, they'll actually listen sometimes. Like certain parts of the BLM protests pushed "defund the police" really hard, and in those places it actually happened. Was it a good idea to defund the police at that time in those places? No, it turned out horribly it was a terrible idea but nonetheless when they made clear demands, shit got done! UBI, and shorter and shorter work weeks/days, these are a great set of demands for a rebooted left to go after, and they're weirdly mainstream enough that they could actually happen in our lifetimes, without waiting for the mythical revolution to deliver us unto salvation!
Secondly, Yanis varoufakis. I think he has a really good outline of how a UBI (or as he calls it a universal basic dividend) should work. It shouldn't be paid for by taxes. Instead, a portion of all stocks should be put into some kind of wealth fund, that's where the money for UBI should come from. Varoufakis makes a really nice argument about how this wealth is created collectively, so a dividend for the collective just makes sense. I mean he talks about more than that but this isn't really a blog post about all the nuances of UBI and why and how it should work. If you're interested, you can maybe watch this talk he gave on the subject. Varoufakis' concept of techno-feudalism and the end of capitalism also rings very true to me, although if you want me to dislike something it becomes hard when you give it a name as cool sounding as "techno-feudalism". I think this explains a lot of the problems I have with the econ 101 research I've been doing, a lot of it just seems to exist in an alternate dimenstion of models where transactiosn occur based on indifference curves and supply and demand and that's how wealth is generated, where as in reality banks hypersitionally generate money out of thin air, stock prices are disconnected from real market forces, and it becomes hard to even draw the line between state and corporation with corporate bailouts, qualitative easing etc. Socialism for the rich, austerity for the rest of us; you get the point.
Look, to be frank with you Im not much of a marxist. When most lefties are looking for an economic foundation to ground their policy ideas they turn to Marx, and Marx is cool don't get me wrong but tere are so many glaring issues I can't overlook with his analysis and it's application in the modern era. When I look for large scale explanitory power in economic models, well it drove me to Bataille. I know, Bataille's a bit out there but I really think his general economy makes more sense than anything Marx ever wrote, it's more revolutionary too! No that the two aren't compatible but you know, they're coming from different places. If you don't know who george Bataille is, he has this conception of flipping economics on its head, from the study of scarcity to the study of excess, an excess which he calls the accursed share. Any single resource you might look at will be scarce, but the earth as a system is actually suffering from a problem of massive overabundance: we recieve so much energy from the sun that we can't possibly waste it all fast enough. When we don't deal with the accursed share ourselves intentionally, it deals with itself unintentionally, we get wars and other terrible things. I unironically believe that to create a practical economic model we need to start by offering sacrifices to the Sun.
I'm not actually a single issue person, I lied. I also still care about muh web0 futurism and general FOSS decentralised technology stuff (speaking of which I started an anime gemlog at gemini://moe-seperatist.flounder.online ), I massively about improving public transportation (I have autism and I like trains ok), and I also care about copyright abolition. There are lots of others of course, I'm not going to list every single issue that I have an opinion on. What I'm saying is there's a lot of schizo shit right, but in the end I have to couch that schizo shit in real shit or the real people won't get it. The schizo shit is secretly more real than the real shit but the real people don't know that they're not real and language takes their side. The american democratic party should step out tomorrow and anounce that they're going to make anime real, and the rise of the far right would be instantly crushed. They won't do that because they hate autistic people. The left's war on autistic people. The thing is, it's a problem trying to talk to normal people when you ultimately agree with Nick Land (before he became a fascist), and focussing on UBI and less work kinda bridges that gap. I'm not saying i do this all to appeal to normies, just to have a more well rounded justification in general. I haven't forgotten about the machine spirit.