The Next Wave of Basic Income Activism: Distributed Safety Nets
Johan Nygren, inventor of the Bitnation DApp Basicincome.co
“No army can stop an idea whose time has come. “
The idea of a basic income has gone pretty much viral in the past two years. This ongoing revolution has been a big part of my twenties, I paused my med.school studies 5 years ago for three reasons, and they all tie into my work with the basic income revolution.
Reason 1: automation and technological evolution will come to upgrade our healthcare systems to the point where they exist in the cloud. Just like GPS made us all expert navigators and Google search made us all self-educators, the iDoctor makes us all — to an extent — doctors. There´s an entire philosophy about this called transhumanism, that talk about the co-evolution of humans and technology, but that is not what I want to talk about now.
Reason 2: the political and economic system made people sick. I could not honor my knowledge in medicine whilst succumbing to a society that made its citizens sick. I couldn’t live a lie.
Reason 3: instead of protesting, the medical community did the opposite — they adjusted and manipulated their science to abide the politicians. ADHD and other myths were not something I wanted to be part of.
So, I took a pause. Perhaps indefinite, seeing as IBMs Watson already makes 4x better diagnoses than I could possibly learn to do. Watson has surpassed my brains biological limitations, and did that about two years ago, actually.
What happens when you mix basic income activism with ingenuity ?
I became a basic income activist in july 2012, and created my own channel called bipedaljoe, through which I broadcasted my thoughts on basic income and human-technology co-evolution. It all moved pretty fast, Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI.net wanted to publish one of my texts on how ‘the future of education was autonomous exploration’, then the BIG movement discovered my channel and cited it, and they began sketching out the http://basicincome2013.eu movement and invited me to join, and I joined their google-group but never really returned to it because I got busy with another idea, a new idea — I called it project resilience.
Project resilience was a distributed safety net, a decentralized version of the standard basic income model — a safety net that achieved everything the standard basic income model achieved, and that was peer-to-peer and distributed at the same time. You’re probably familiar with the concept of distributed networks, they’ve pretty much entered the pop-vocabulary through tools like BitTorrent and BitCoin, and the internet.
Think about it. Why shouldn’t it be possible to create a fully distributed basic income ? It’s been done for so many services, TCP/IP and the internet, BitTorrent — why shouldn’t it be possible for basic income ?
I think it’s possible, and I think I’ve designed a fully functional service, and I invite the basic income community to work with me.
Johan Nygren, resilience.world
(my Basicincome.co is MUCH better than ucoin.io and the other basic income apps !)
BitNation — Decentralized, Borderless Governance to Provide Universal Basic Income,
coinssource.com/bitnation-decentralized-borderless-government-universal-basic-income/
Basicincome.co(op) — Universal Basic Income on a Co-Op Dividend Scheme,
https://medium.com/@resilience_me/basicincome-co-op-82855663f042
