If you’re paying your rent by playing video games on Twitch, how far are you, really, from living on universal basic income?
We tend to imagine universal basic income arriving as a conspicuous break with the present. Machines do the work, governments send checks, and suddenly everyone has to figure out how to fill their days. We debate whether people would still have ambition, whether they would find purpose, whether they would succumb to a sort of terminal languor. The visual reference is often something like WALL-E: people reclining in floating chairs, drinking their meals, having largely surrendered the business of being alive.
Meanwhile, someone on Twitch is spending the afternoon playing a video game, talking to the people watching, answering questions, getting distracted by something in the chat. People come back the next day. Some pay for a subscription. Enough of them do, and this pays the rent. From the outside, it can look like an elaborate way to avoid getting a real job. What, exactly, is the audience buying?
I recently spent three weeks shopping for a new backpack.
It turns out there are backpacks for almost any version of yourself you’d like to be. There’s one for the person who spends weekends in the mountains, one for the person who runs a company from an airport lounge, and one for the person whose life is sufficiently under control that every charging cable has its own little compartment.
Most of these backpacks will do a perfectly good job of carrying your laptop to a coffee shop.
There are real differences, of course. A comfortable harness matters if you’re carrying forty pounds up a mountain. Waterproofing matters if it rains. But once a bag meets the fairly modest requirements of your actual life, there’s still an extraordinary amount left to consider. Its provenance. Its aesthetic. Its environmental credentials. Whether it suggests you’re the sort of person who might spontaneously disappear into Patagonia, even if the furthest you’re likely to venture this week is the other side of the office.
Somewhere in this process, replacing a bag became an inquiry into the nature of the self. Who am I? Can one bag represent all that I am? I contain multitudes!
One night I stayed up until 2 a.m. and bought nothing.
The same deliberation goes into much of what fills our homes. We’re choosing among perfectly adequate products, and spending considerable effort on what those choices say about us. Toothpaste, deodorant, coffee, protein powder: familiar categories with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new entrants, each offering a slightly different account of the person you become by buying it.
You can care about what goes into your body, what happens to animals, or how the people making your stuff are treated. Those are substantive preferences. You can also care about the kind of person who shares those preferences, and whether you’re one of them. A purchase can serve all of these purposes at once.
It would be easy to dismiss this as frivolous consumerism. But consider what we’re actually buying: a sense of belonging, an expression of our values, the pleasure of a beautiful object, or the small reassurance that we’ve found people who see the world the way we do. These things have value even when our teeth don’t get any cleaner.
When finding enough to eat occupies most of your attention, there’s limited room to worry about whether your backpack reflects your philosophy of life. As material needs become more reliably met, other desires get more of our attention—and money. In the language of Maslow’s hierarchy, belonging, esteem, and self-expression have more room to assert themselves. People have always wanted these things, including under conditions of terrible deprivation. Abundance gives us more means to pursue them.
Material sufficiency is uneven. The world already produces enough food to feed everyone, yet hundreds of millions still experience hunger. An abundance of consumer goods doesn’t solve unaffordable housing or medical care. But the circumstances of people whose needs are met reveal something about what an economy does with the capacity left over.
Someone whose needs are comfortably covered can spend money on a game, a community, a creator, or an unusually persuasive account of why this particular deodorant expresses their commitment to human flourishing. That spending becomes someone else’s income. It pays for groceries and rent. The demand for experiences and identities supports livelihoods whose work contributes little to the underlying supply of material necessities.
AI will push this process into categories where we still assume functionality will do most of the differentiating.
Consider enterprise software. If building a competent CRM becomes dramatically easier, then the mere ability to store contacts, track deals, and generate reports becomes less compelling as a reason to choose one vendor. Reliability, security, and integration will still matter. But as more products meet a buyer’s requirements, the remaining decision can depend increasingly on trust, familiarity, taste, and the story a company tells about how people like you should work.
We’ll have more versions of the backpack problem: several things that do the job, and a great deal of human activity devoted to deciding which one feels right.
That leaves plenty of room for consequential innovation. Energy, medicine, robotics, and the infrastructure on which the whole arrangement depends still present enormous challenges. The work of expanding what’s possible can coexist with people finding increasingly elaborate ways to enjoy what’s already possible.
We can miss changes like this because we’re waiting for them to take a particular form.
Think about how much of driving we’ve gradually handed over to machines. An automatic transmission chooses gears. Cruise control maintains speed. There’s also anti-lock brakes, lane assist, park assist, and so on. Full autonomy involves much more than adding these features together, but the reduction in the driver’s workload is already visible in the individual tasks. Each arrives as a feature, becomes familiar, and eventually seems unremarkable. We update our expectations along with it.
Something similar can happen with our picture of work. Each new occupation arrives as an oddity, acquires customers, and becomes another way to make a living. We can absorb a remarkable amount of change this way while continuing to imagine that the real transformation is somewhere ahead of us.
The person on Twitch is participating in this same economy. So are the people explaining their skincare routine, documenting the restoration of a motorcycle, reviewing coffee equipment, or otherwise spending an improbable amount of time thinking about things most of us would never have thought to think about at all.
The creator economy makes it particularly easy to see how an audience’s enjoyment becomes someone’s livelihood—even when the experience meets no material need. People return for the next video, essay, or episode, join the conversation, and pay to support the person providing the experience. The value may be skill, humor, companionship, or the pleasure of participating in a little world with its own rituals and running jokes. To someone outside that world, the whole thing can look baffling. To someone inside it, the value is obvious enough to pay for.
These livelihoods are supported by people with enough money left over to pay for things they find interesting. Sometimes the payment is direct, through a subscription. Sometimes it comes from an advertiser hoping to sell the viewer a backpack. Either way, a market for attention and affiliation connects someone’s discretionary spending to someone else’s livelihood. This is a decentralized way of distributing some of our abundance—a form of proto-UBI built through markets for identity, entertainment, and belonging.
Entertainment and patronage are hardly new. Neither is using possessions to express an identity. Material sufficiency allows an economy to support more of this activity: more people making a living by contributing to the experience of being alive.
A life supported by abundance still involves plenty of work. Building an audience requires discipline, repetition, ingenuity, and an exhausting amount of attention to other people’s expectations.
Paid employment isn’t the only source of activity or purpose. Raising children, organizing a community, learning an instrument, caring for someone: none requires a job title to matter. People pursue difficult things for reasons other than avoiding starvation. They want to become good at something, to be recognized, to belong, to make something they’re proud of. Having enough to live on doesn’t extinguish those desires.
The difficulty can itself be part of the attraction. Imagine a video game in which you succeed at everything immediately. Every opponent falls over, every puzzle solves itself, every attempt earns a reward. After a brief period of feeling omnipotent, what would keep you playing?
Games give us resistance on purpose. Balancing challenge against a player’s abilities is one way to sustain the absorption we call flow: too much difficulty becomes frustrating, too little becomes boring. Learning, improving, and occasionally failing give the experience its texture. We go looking for these things even when no one requires us to.
The same appetite for challenge can animate a creative life. Making something worth watching, finding an audience, getting better at the craft: the effort is part of the attraction. People turn their freedom into new obligations with remarkable enthusiasm.
That creative effort also goes into ordinary consumer products. We already devote entire careers to the emotional positioning of deodorant: figuring out what people value, who they want to be, and how a purchase might express it.
AI will extend this pattern into more categories. As competent software becomes easier to build, choosing a CRM starts to resemble choosing a backpack: several products meet your needs and more of the decision rests on taste, identity, and the sense that this is how people like you work.
The anxiety about abundance is so often an anxiety about people becoming less human: passive, purposeless, disconnected. Yet abundance creates more opportunities for play, belonging, connection, and the satisfaction of getting good at something and sharing it with someone else—the very things we’re afraid of losing.
We keep expecting an abundant future to announce itself through the disappearance of work. Meanwhile, we’re already building an economy in which people can make a living doing the things we once hoped prosperity would give us time for. We can be remarkably disappointed by getting much of what we wanted in a form we hadn’t imagined.