A Labor-for-Income Revolution — World Summit Gift-Based Income Model (GBI)
Transcending the Universal Basic Income (UBI)
Prominent people around the world are talking about the need for a UBI (Universal Basic Income) because jobs are going away due to automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s open for debate as to whether the UBI is merely a patchwork solution or a necessary transitionary step to a post-capitalism, post-jobs world, but regardless one thing is clear, the labor-for-income model that we accept as normal is about to radically change.
Setting aside for a moment any ideological notions such as the puritan work ethic that have shackled humanity with drudgery and toil for far too long, here are some facts that shed some light on our precarious situation:
We Hate Our Jobs
According to a Gallup poll from 2017 85% of people hate their jobs, and especially their bosses. Globally, only 15% of the world’s one billion full-time workers are engaged at work. It is significantly better in the U.S., at around 30% engaged, but this still means that roughly 70% of American workers aren’t engaged.
What the Whole World Wants is a Good Job — WRONG
This is what the conclusions of the study suggest. But we disagree. People want to be engaged in meaningful work, not for the mere sake of making money, but to make a difference in the world. If people have their basic needs met (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) then they will naturally pursue higher, more altruistic aspirations, like helping other people, animals or the planet. So they don’t want jobs per se, just to put food on the table. If their basic needs are provided for, which is what UBI intends to do, then people will want meaningful work for its own sake.
Bullshit Jobs
In his new book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. According to Graeber, a bullshit job is a job which is so pointless, or even pernicious, that even the person doing the job secretly believes that it shouldn’t exist. This powerful quote from Graeber’s book summarizes the state of our jobs-based society:
“I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work — not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities — usually under the orders of a person we dislike — is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.”
So does the World Summit!
Beyond Centralization — World Summit Peer-to-Peer Gift-Based Income Model (GBI’s)
A major problem with the current notion of UBI is that it would be centralized, provided by some combination of government and industry funding (robot taxes). While some may argue that this is what our taxes should be used for, rather than on things like military spending, nevertheless it would put us further into a position of dependency on the state and corporations, which are themselves the problem, in our view. The World Summit’s mission is to bypass our outdated existing political and economic systems that divide and control us, to flip the paradigm towards an ecologically sustainable, post-scarcity, post-capitalism world that works for everyone. So it doesn’t make any sense to become more dependent on the inherently flawed systems that we need to transcend.
What if it were possible to create something like a “People’s Basic Income”, provided by the people, for the people? The World Summit is doing just that. We have created a “World Summit Gift-Based Income” model that is based upon distributed, peer-to-peer, decentralized gifting and sharing culture. Actually, our GBI system is already proven to work and has gotten us this far. Now, we just need to scale it up. We believe this model will help bring us back to the gift economy that we have had for most of our human existence. In going back, we are actually going forward in an evolutionary jump to a new world based on abundance, meaning, sharing and caring unlike anything we’ve had since before money was invented over 5,000 years ago (see Graeber’s book, Debt, This First 5,000 years).
The Power of Individual Gifters
Herein lies our power: According to the report Giving USA 2017, as of 2016 an estimated $360 billion was given to charitable causes in the U.S. alone. This figure went up to $410 billion in 2017. “If you add in gifts from bequests, then the category accounts for nearly 80% of all giving [that comes from individuals]. In other words, the donating public, not big foundations or corporations, is responsible for the vast majority of annual donations.”
With all of the billions of dollars that have been donated every year one could expect that the problems confronting us would have been solved by now. Yet somehow they have not, and don’t appear to be any time soon. (Please watch the documentary Poverty, Inc. to understand the charity model’s global failure.)
But here is the conundrum— almost ALL charities, NGOs and protest groups around the world are fighting symptoms of the illness. They do not address the root cause — our outdated socio-economic system itself. This is what the World Summit is tackling, head on.
The Plan — Shifting the Gifting
So here is the plan: we shift a fraction of our collective donations towards funding the World Summit’s GBI model. This will allow us to cover the basic needs of the delegates, freeing them up from bullshit jobs so they can focus on doing the most meaningful work of all — helping us usher in the more beautiful world we know is possible.
We are beginning the recruitment of 100 delegates to come to Mexico to help us continue our unification with groups around the world. With the exponential number of man-hours of outreach work that this will afford us, in no time we will be shifting from outreach to onboarding new members to continue the core work with us. This means we will have thousands of delegates working with us to help create the World Summit event in June 2019, when everything flips.
If We Build It, the Funding Will Come
As we build this model, we are convinced the funding will come, in many alternative forms…because there is nothing else like this to finally address the root cause of our socio-economic paradgim and unify humanity. This will snowball. People will know that finally their charity dollars will make a real difference. The dozens of groups already joining us are seeing that this is how we flip the paradigm.
The Delegates and Ambassadors — Each delegate or traveling ambassador that works for the World Summit will receive $1000 USD per month. It is all based on trust and integrity. There will be no performance reviews or bosses or punching the clock. The delegates will each have an individual Patreon account where monthly financial donations will be paid directly by our gifters. The World Summit will direct donors to gift to the delegates that need it, up to $1000 per month, as shown on their Patreon widget. If by chance any delegate exceeds $1000 on their Patreon account, the funds will be re-allocated to another delegate.
The Gifters — Sponsorship of our delegates is all based on principles of gifting, not on getting something in return. There will be no receipts for tax write-offs, no complicated accounting and need for CPA’s. Our gifters will provide regular monthly contributions to individual delegates’ Patreon accounts. This means you will be a patron of the greatest creative art project of all time, creating a new world. You will be helping to support the thousands of “cultural creatives” one on one, in a peer-to-peer, distributed gift-based system.
One Purse, One Planet — The World Summit does not have a bank account, doesn’t register with any government, and does not receive direct donations. We have intentionally chosen to be a non-monied, non-entitied organization so that our integrity is beyond reproach and corruption. However, to receive larger donations to cover expenses related to the event itself, we are partnering with One Purse, One Planet (OPOP) to initiate setting up an account under the trusteeship of their own organization, but funds will be earmarked for distribution to the World Summit as needed. OPOP is a registered umbrella charity that has added the World Summit as a project to their existing structure, so that our delegates can focus on flipping the paradigm, rather than on dealing with the cost, compliance and administrative functions required by governments for registered charity status.
We are Ready to Get to Work. Are You?
Whether you want to work directly with the World Summit as a delegate, as a traveling ambassador, as a WS Café host, as a WS Synergy Hub co-working or co-living space, or as a sponsor…your partnership is needed. Let’s get busy with the meaningful, exciting and hopeful work of creating the more beautiful world that works for all of us. If thousands of us, the critical mass, support and work for the World Summit, we will bring about a new post-capitalism paradigm that will obsolete the notion of “labor-for-income” altogether. This is a revolution.
