Basic Income Research Proposal

A basic income makes it possible for, say, 100 software developers to choose to work together on the same project of their own choosing and of their own free will -- as opposed to having to work for someone else on someone else's choice of project just to be able to pay for food and rent. That's the difference a BI would make.

Now, getting 100 software developers top agree to work together on the same project might not be easy ("herding cats"). But it seems doable, as we can point to quite a few projects (including big names like Linux, WordPress, Apache, and Python) where it has happened. And there are even some books out there on how to create and manage FOSS projects.

Granted, those particular big-name projects have also had commercial support eventually -- so we don't know all the details of what might be possible otherwise. But there are plenty of examples of voluntary groups of significant size dedicated to a common purpose (fire companies, sports clubs, historical societies, and so on) so it is not inconceivable the same will continue to happen for software if people have the free time to participate in them.

I watched the development and later commercialization of all four of those. I even contributed a bit like by getting Python approved inside IBM Research for internal use around 1999 back when using "Open Source" software was a novel idea to many companies, and I also tried to popularize Linux a bit inside IBM Research at the time.

Linux and WordPress were both started with one or two people, and it was years before a lot of corporate money jumped onboard after they were starting to show success. It took thousands of people who cared about FOSS quietly lobbying for it in the companies they worked for (as I did at IBM Research) and also others to turn that interest into companies like Cygnus and RedHat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress "WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg[1] and Mike Little,[9] as a fork of b2/cafelog."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic "Automattic, Inc. is a web development corporation founded in August 2005."

On the commercialization of Linux and how it took coordinated effort to promote it before companies adopted it: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/02/03/0039223/commercial... which references: https://web.archive.org/web/20020206225729/http://www.linuxw...

I understand this BI approach may not work for you right now. It may not even work for most software developers right now.

But, as a counter example, there are about eleven million graduate students in the world, many living on about a Basic Income level of funding. That is proof that millions of people are willing to live for years at poverty level wages (or even taking on debt) in order to do something they care about -- even if quite a few could get jobs paying a lot more by pursuing more immediate commercial success. Granted many may aspire to a better paying job as a tenured professor, but any look at the statistics show that is not going to happen for 90%+ of such students. Most of these people in graduate programs are generally not there because they are "useless due to their poor skills or inability to work in [a] team." http://www.richardprice.io/post/12855561694/the-number-of-ac...

See also: "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet" by Micky Z. From the book blurb: "Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors’ essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."

=== A tangent on what I want to do, making public intelligence tools for civic sensemaking, and how a BI could help

Here is a different path to a similar place instead of a BI, but it is much less compatible with our current economic system: :-) https://web.archive.org/web/20090219001429/http://whywork.or... "It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other. I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. ..."

As I see it, 99% of commercial programming every year is not needed -- and worse, just makes work for other programmers supporting poorly implemented redundant garbage code. Really, how many accounting systems do we need? How many online shopping systems? How many medical records systems? How many email systems? How many EDI standards? How many programming languages? How many OSs? How many libraries for basic embedded control tasks?

I'm all for diversity and experiment and playfulness and for everyone who wants to learning to code and writing their own applications, languages, and OSes for fun and self-education and even some personal security in knowing for sure what the code they use does because they wrote it. But, at the same time, as I see it, almost all commercial programming done today is completely unneeded (or 100X harder than it should be) compared to if we had a few solid agreed upon standards that were well thought out and implemented in FOSS and maintained in a cooperative way which supported flexible adaptation. (See Alfie Kohn and "The Case Against Competition").

But we have the mess we do because of vast amounts of commercial competition introducing vast inefficiencies into the software development process because programmers were not allowed by their companies to cooperate and coordinate with other programmers in different organizations. For example, Microsoft sabotaged the web and JavaScript for along time via "embrace, extend, and extinguish". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

Are we really that much better off now as software developers than when people were, say, running Rexx under an IBM VM in the 1980? http://www.rexxla.org/rexxlang/mfc/rexxadv.html Or, better even, using Smalltalk? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

For example, in my opinion, most application software has gone downhill since Smalltalk-80 and the 1990 version of "Analyst"... :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.smalltalk/... "... The Analyst Spreadsheet (which was also sold as a separate package) was simply the best. Cells could contain arbitrary Smalltalk objects, and formula were arbitrary Smalltalk code. When we showed people things like image manipulation within spreadsheet cells or computing inverses of matrices containing fractions and/or complex numbers, they often could not believe what they saw :-) ..."

I'm trying to recreate that sort of thing two decades later in JavaScript as FOSS in my spare time from descriptions... And more, perhaps crossed with HyperCard, Augment, Thunderbird, a Federated Wiki, Diaspora, Matrix.org, MatterMost, SEAS, Angler, IBIS, and a Semantic Desktop. My latest version exploring some ideas (still a long way to go): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7

I am doing it for these sorts of reasons: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

Also related: "Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691

I've worked on successful commercial and governmental intelligence systems before so it as not quite as far-fetched a stretch for me to do that as it might seem. But I still need to earn a living, so it has to be a spare time thing right now. With a BI for everyone in my family (so, BI x N), I could have been doing that full time (or at least, a lot more than now) for many years -- rather than my current pattern of earning money working for others to to buy my own free time to do such projects.

So, imagine 100 dedicated programmers willing to live on a BI to make something like that that happen. It might be an organization similar in spirit to, say, Project Vote Smart (but without as much drama or a physical site) which has 40 lowly-paid interns (again showing there are people willing to make that financial tradeoff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vote_Smart https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Project-Vote-Smart-Intern-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Project-Vote-Smart-Salaries...

Sure, maybe you would not want to be part of such an effort yourself today. But with a BI, I feel there might be enough people working on it to make a real difference while having a lot of "hard fun" along the way -- people who choose to participate in civic ventures and who would finally have the time to volunteer since they have a BI. And then maybe the result will be the next Linux/WordPress/Apache/Python/etc.. Of course, odds are any specific such project would fail -- or even if it succeeds, it would be ignored. But if enough people can do the same using the free time a BI provides, eventually one such project will be a success, just like for every Linux there were probably 1000s of people playing around with starting their own OSs that never went anywhere. And if our economic system still exists in its current form then, likely companies will come along to commercialize that success and expand on it, same as with Linux.

Of course, without a BI such a project is still possible, in the way Project Vote Smart is possible (via volunteerism and interns and small grants), or Linux or Python or even the early Web got built in people's spare time until finding organizations that supported the main developer for long-term full-time work, or Mozilla exists (for at least another couple of years), or the Chandler Project existed for a time. It was unfortunate to see Mozilla waste literally hundreds of millions of US dollars that could have gone to a FOSS project like this for organizing information (including web content, search results, and email). And it was also saddening to watch the Chandler Project spend millions on an information organizer with not much to show for it and then dissolve -- but at least their heart was in the right place and with 10X to 100X more time and more funding they might have succeeded after going up some painful learning curves. But sometimes it just takes many failures before a success (part of the theory of Y Combinator, for example).

A good resource by Karl Fogel on: "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" http://producingoss.com/