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Part Four: Enhancing Freedom

My first major aim in writing this book was to establish that we are currently experiencing a period of non-linear change, and my second aim is to outline a plan for our transition to the Knowledge Age. Our challenge is to overcome the limits of capitalism and move away from a society centered on the job loop toward one that embraces the knowledge loop. This section of The World After Capital will propose changes in regulation and self-regulation that would increase human freedom and unlock the promise of the digital knowledge loop. There are three components to this:

Economic freedom. We must ensure that everyone’s needs are met without them being forced into the job loop. Once we have economic freedom, we can embrace automation and enable everyone to participate in and benefit from the digital knowledge loop.
Informational freedom. We must remove barriers to the digital knowledge loop that limit our ability to learn from existing knowledge, in order to accelerate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. At the same time, we must build systems into the digital knowledge loop that support critical inquiry.
Psychological freedom. We must free ourselves from scarcity thinking and the associated fears that impede our participation in the digital knowledge loop. Learning, creating and sharing knowledge all require us to overcome barriers in our minds, some of which are evolutionary and others the result of social pressure.

With these increased freedoms will come the possibility of a peaceful transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age that is not dictated from the top down, but results from the choices of individuals and the communities they form. There is no guarantee that these changes will be sufficient to avoid a disastrous transition, but I am convinced that without them we are headed for just that, incurring species-level risk for humanity. Later in the book I will discuss the values and systems that are necessary for successful collective action in a world of increased individual freedom.

Economic Freedom

If you were to quit your job right now, could you afford to take care of your needs? And if you are retired, what would happen if you suddenly stopped receiving your pension? If you are supported by a spouse or partner, could you still afford food, shelter and clothing without them? If you could no longer meet your needs in any of these situations, you are not economically free. Your decisions on how much of your labor to sell and whom to sell it to, whether to stay with your partner and where to live, are not free decisions.

Many people in the US are not free in this sense. A recent survey asked respondents if they had enough money to pay for a $1,000 emergency, and 60 percent said they did not (Leonhardt, 2020). Other studies have found that about 75 percent of Americans over the age of forty are behind on saving for retirement, and somewhere between a quarter and a third of all non-retired adults have no savings at all (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020; Backman, 2020). This data predates the COVID-19 pandemic which wreaked further havoc on the finances of many Americans.

If you are not economically free, you are not able to participate freely in the knowledge loop, which is why economic freedom is a cornerstone of the Knowledge Age. We must make people economically free so that they have the time to learn new knowledge, from practical skills to the latest theoretical physics. We need them to create new knowledge using what they have learned. And finally, we need them to share this knowledge with others.

Participation in the knowledge loop has never been more important: we have massive problems to overcome, including the COVID-19 pandemic and, above all, the climate crisis. To do so, we must be able to embrace automation rather than feel threatened by it.

Universal Basic Income

Economic freedom is a reality for the wealthy, for tenured professors and retirees with pensions and savings, but how can we make it a reality for everyone? The answer is to provide everyone with a guaranteed income to cover solutions to their needs, including housing, clothing and food. This income wouldn’t depend on whether someone is married or single, employed or unemployed, rich or poor—it would be unconditional (also referred to as ‘universal’).

At first glance, this idea of a ‘universal basic income’ (UBI) may seem outrageous. Getting paid simply for being alive—isn’t that akin to socialism? Where would this money come from? And won’t people simply descend into laziness and drug addiction? We will examine each of these objections to UBI in turn, but let’s first consider the arguments for UBI as a way of achieving economic freedom.

Concerns about economic freedom are by no means new. When the American republic was in its infancy, economic freedom was within the reach of those involved in the colonial project. There was plenty of land available to settler colonialists, and they could hypothetically make ends meet through small-scale farming (also known as subsistence farming). Thomas Jefferson considered formalizing the idea of land grants as a way of ensuring a free citizenry. It is important to point out that this land was being taken away from Native Americans, who were losing both their land and their freedom, on the basis of the so-called Doctrine of Discovery (“Discovery Doctrine,” 2020). Even back then, observers such as the philosopher and political activist Thomas Paine (1797) understood that land that could be appropriated and allocated to settlers as property would run out at some point, raising the specter of a time when landless citizens might have to rent themselves out as laborers in order to provide for their needs, leading him to conclude that an alternative to land would be to give people money instead. The idea of increased freedom through direct cash transfers thus dates back to the earliest days of the American republic.

If you don’t find this argument for UBI compelling, consider the case of air. We can all afford to breathe air because it is free and distributed around the globe (important side note: regulation is required to keep it clean—there were many problems with air pollution during industrialization, and it is estimated that more than seven million people still die around the world every year from air pollution) (World Health Organization, n.d.). Our freedom is thus not restricted by having to find air, and the power of UBI would be to make us equally free when it comes to our other needs, by making food, housing and clothing affordable for everyone.

As I argued earlier, our technologies are sufficiently advanced that we are capable of meeting everyone’s needs. Farming can generate enough food for everyone. We can easily make enough clothing and provide everyone with shelter. It is the knowledge and capital that humanity has created that have made this possible. And our technological progress is accelerating while global population growth is slowing, so all this will get easier—that is, as long as we generate enough new knowledge to overcome the problems we are facing, starting with the climate crisis.

The question is not whether we have the ability to meet everyone’s needs, but whether our economy and society distribute the resources fairly, and that is where UBI comes in. A UBI enables markets to function without forcing people into the job loop. It lets everyone freely choose whether and how much to participate in these markets and how much to devote to personal relationships, the pursuit of meaning, curiosity and creativity, etc.—freeing up attention and enabling people to form new communities in more affordable geographies (e.g. smaller cities or the countryside).

Industrial society presents us with two different ways of allocating resources. In one, individuals participate in a market economy; in the other, governments provide for people’s needs. Those options form the extremes of a spectrum that has a variety of ‘hybrid’ arrangements in the middle, such as government-subsidized housing, for which people pay reduced rent. UBI broadens the scope for market-based allocation, thus reducing reliance on an ever-expanding government sector. In that regard it is the opposite of socialism and communism, which rely predominantly or even entirely on government allocation.

Right after the Second World War, only about 5 percent of people in the US were employed by government, which comprised about 42 percent of the economy (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1949; OECD 2021a). In the Soviet Union, by contrast, most of the working population was employed by the state, which owned close to 100 percent of the economy, but that system turned out to be much less effective at allocating resources. Nevertheless, the size and scope of government spending has gradually expanded in the US and in Europe. In many European economies it now accounts for more than half of the economy.

Food, clothing and shelter are obvious solutions to human needs that a UBI should make affordable, but a UBI could eventually also cover the cost of education and healthcare. That might seem ambitious, given how quickly education and healthcare costs have risen over the past decades, but technology can be expected to make both of these far more affordable in the near future.

Technological Deflation

If you’re struggling to take care of your needs, the world will seem like an expensive place. Yet the data show that a lot of things have been getting cheaper for some time. In the US, as the chart below shows, the price of consumer durables has been falling since the mid-1990s.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2021d

The decline in the price of consumer durables has been made possible by technological progress. We are getting better at making stuff, and the automation of production and distribution is a big part of that. While this will hurt you if you lose your job as a result, if you have money to buy things it will help you. And with UBI everyone will have money, which as prices fall over time will buy more and more.

The decline in the price of consumer durables has made adequate clothing easily affordable. Technology is also driving down the cost of smartphones, which will themselves be essential in making education and healthcare more affordable. This declining trend will only accelerate as we begin to use technology such as additive manufacturing (also known as ‘3D printing’), manufacturing products only when they are needed and close to where they are required (Crane & Marchese, 2015). Additive manufacturing technology is even making it much cheaper to put up a building, with various structures around the world produced in this way in recent years, and one California company now offering small houses 3D printed in 24 hours for sale (Orrall, 2020).

Another way housing can be made more affordable is through improved sharing of existing housing. Digital technology, including the services offered by companies such as Airbnb and Couchsurfing, make such sharing vastly easier (note: a degree of regulation is required to avoid detrimental impact on some local housing markets). Despite such progress, it still costs a fortune to live in places where demand for housing exceeds the available supply, such as New York and San Francisco. With UBI, people can choose to live where housing is more affordable.

In recent years, the city of Detroit gave away houses as an alternative to demolishing them, and in some rural areas of the US you can rent a home for as little as a few hundred dollars per month (Macguire, 2014). In fact, there are around 30 million units renting for less than $600 a month, accounting for 25 percent of the national rental stock (The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2020). The most affordable way to do this is to share a place with friends. This could simply mean having roommates or go as far as purchasing and fixing up an abandoned village as friends of mine have done in Germany. Many people can’t currently take advantage of these opportunities, since they can’t find a job in these locations. By contrast, UBI provides geographic freedom. People who want to move would no longer be trapped in expensive cities just so they can meet their basic needs (often by holding down multiple jobs).

One large group of people is already free of the constraints of work: retirees. And sure enough, many people move away from expensive cities when they retire, to places where real estate is more affordable. When considering the cost of shelter, rather than analyzing how much people need to pay to live where they live today, we should therefore look at what the cost could be in a world that has UBI. Crucially UBI doesn’t prevent someone from applying their entire payment to whatever rent they are currently paying. That is the great power of providing cash which is completely fungible, meaning it can be used to purchase anything (unlike say a housing voucher which could be applied to housing only).

Food is another area where technology stands to offer massive gains. While some argue that genetically modified foods hold the key to feeding the planet affordably, other near-term breakthroughs don’t carry the potential issues that GMOs pose. Indoor vertical farming, for instance, allows for a precise delivery of nutrients and light to plants, as well as enabling huge increases in future productivity through the use of robotics. It also allows food to be grown much nearer to where it is consumed, reducing the costs associated with transportation. In the extreme, using new hydroponic systems, lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables can be grown right inside of apartments. Over time, as these innovations progress, they will add up to significant cost reductions and increases in availability of food.

Technology also promises a dramatic decline in the cost of education. Over the last decade, the availability of online learning resources has grown rapidly, including many free platforms, such as the language learning app Duolingo. In addition to online courses such as edX and Khan Academy, there are millions of blog posts that explain specific topics. And of course, YouTube is bursting with educational videos on a near-infinite range of subjects, from sailing to quantum computing.

There is evidence that the exorbitant rise in the cost of college tuition in the US is beginning to slow. When analyzing this data, we must remember that there is a huge amount of inertia in our educational system and job market. Many employers continue to believe they must hire graduates from the best universities, which drives up prices for higher education, with a ripple effect that extends all the way down to private nursery schools. This year, Google announced that they would be offering specialized six-month programs for fifty dollars a month, which they committed to treating as equivalent to four-year college degrees in their own hiring (Bariso, 2020). It will be some time before most students turn to free or affordable online resources for all their learning needs, but at least the possibility now exists. The COVID-19 crisis has shown the potential of online education, with schools all around the world switching from in-person instruction to prevent the pandemic from spreading faster.

Healthcare is a similar story. Per capita spending in the United States far exceeds that of other countries, having risen much more quickly than the rate of inflation for many years, but that hasn’t translated into better care. For instance, Cuba has for many years had an almost identical life expectancy to the US, despite spending less than a tenth of the amount on healthcare per capita (Hamblin, 2016). Debates have raged as to whether the Affordable Care Act or other legislative interventions will decrease healthcare costs or increase insurance premiums. Regardless of these issues, there are a number of reasons why we can count on progress in digital technology bringing down healthcare costs.

Source: OECD, 2021b

First, digital technology can make prices on medical procedures more transparent, enabling more competition to push prices down (this could be assisted further by regulation). Second, with people using technology to track their own health data, we can live healthier lives and require less care, especially over the long term. And third, technology will lead to faster and better diagnosis and treatment. The online medical crowdsourcing platform CrowdMed has helped many people whose conditions previously went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx) is also working on a system to help improve the accuracy of diagnoses.

Figure 1 is a platform that lets doctors exchange images and other observations relating to medical cases, and Flatiron Health pools data on oncology patients to enable targeted treatment. In addition, a number of companies are bringing telemedicine into the app era: HealthTap, Doctor On Demand, Teladoc Health and Nurx all promise to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering care.

You might think that a large proportion of healthcare cost results from pharmaceuticals rather than doctors’ visits, but in fact in the US they account for only a tenth of total health spending (The American Academy of Actuaries, 2018; OECD, 2019). However, technology will likely drive costs down here, too. One pharma entrepreneur told me about the potential for personalized drugs that could dramatically improve the effectiveness of treatments for a wide range of conditions that account for large expenses, including many cancers, motor neuron disease and Alzheimer’s. And in the longer term, technologies such as CRISPR gene editing will give us unprecedented abilities to fix genetic defects that currently result in large and ongoing expenses, such as cystic fibrosis (Mosse, 2015).

But Isn't Deflation a Bad Thing?

You might be confused by my presentation of deflation as a positive thing. Economists, after all, tend to portray it as an evil that should be avoided at all costs. They are primarily concerned about growth as measured by GDP, which they argue makes us all better off. They assert that if people anticipate that prices will drop, they will be less likely to spend money, which will decrease output and lead owners of capital to make fewer investments, resulting in less innovation and lower employment. That, in turn, makes people spend even less, causing the economy to contract further. Economists point to Japan as a country that has been experiencing deflation and contracting output. To avoid this scenario, they argue for policies designed to achieve some amount of inflation, including the Federal Reserve’s so-called ‘quantitative easing’, which is intended to expand the supply of money and thus increase the nominal prices of things.

However, in a world where digital technology drives technological deflation, this reasoning is flawed. GDP is an increasingly problematic measure of progress because it ignores both positive and negative externalities. For instance, on the side of positive externalities, making education and healthcare radically cheaper could lower GDP while clearly making people better off. A second flaw in economists’ reasoning is that it assumes technological progress requires growth in paid production. A great counterexample is open-source software, which has driven a lot of technological progress outside of the traditional economic model. Increases in economic, informational and psychological freedom will allow us to accelerate the knowledge loop, which is the foundation of the progress that enables technological deflation.

Technological deflation is what puts society in a position where UBI becomes both possible and increasingly helpful. The total price of all the solutions that a person requires to take care of their needs has already started to decline, and will be lower still in the future. Technological deflation is what allows people to break out of the job loop.

UBI is Affordable

With all this background information, you might wonder how much a universal basic income should be. My working proposal for the United States is $1,000 per month for everyone over the age of 18, $400 per month for everyone over the age of 12 and $200 per month for every child. These numbers might seem low, but bear in mind that the goal of UBI isn’t to make people well off—it’s just to allow them to take care of their needs without being forced into the job loop. Our collective thinking about the amounts required is muddled because we have mistakenly come to embrace the fulfillment of our unlimited wants, instead of focusing on the freedom to find purpose that comes from being able to take care of our needs. In addition to showing that capital is no longer our binding constraint, this is the second crucial reason for the earlier section on re-establishing a clear distinction between wants and needs. We should also remember that technological deflation will make fulfilling our needs progressively cheaper, while UBI won’t be introduced overnight. My numbers are intended to work over time, as some other government programs are phased out and a UBI is phased in.

Let’s consider these numbers further. While everyone will spend their UBI in different ways, a possible allocation for an adult might break down roughly as follows on a monthly basis: $400 for housing, $300 for food, $100 for transportation, $50 for clothing, and $50 for Internet access and associated equipment, with the balance spent differently each month (for example, on healthcare as required).

You might wonder why I propose a lower payment for children and teenagers. The answer is, first, we can meet many of their needs more cheaply than we can for adults. And second, there is historic evidence that the number of children people have is partially determined by economics. UBI should not incentivize adults to have more children, so as to ‘skim’ their income. That’s especially important because, again, we want the birth rate to decline globally so we eventually reach peak population.

When you calculate how much money would be required to provide a UBI in the United States, based on the 2019 population, you wind up with an annual figure of about $3 trillion (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). While that is a huge sum, it represents just 14 percent of the economy as measured by GDP in 2019, and under 8 percent of gross output, which measures not just final output but also intermediate steps (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2020; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2021e). Where will this money come from? Two sources: government budgets (paid for by taxes) and money creation.

In the US in 2019, the total revenues of all levels of government from taxation and fees were on the order of $5 trillion, so the money for a UBI could, in theory, come from redirecting existing budgets (OECD, 2020). There would then be another $2 trillion of money for critical government activities, such as law enforcement and national defense (the budget for the latter was $0.7 trillion in 2019) (“Military Budget of the United States,” 2020). Setting aside the question of the political process that might allow such a reallocation to be accomplished, it is not ruled out by sheer arithmetic.

UBI would also substantially increase government revenues. At the moment, nearly half of all earners don’t get paid enough to owe federal income tax. Once people have a UBI, every dollar earned from work, or from other sources such as interest or capital gains, could be taxed. For instance, if you are currently single and earn $10,000 in employment income, you do not need to file a federal income tax return. With a UBI, that could be taxed at a rate of 25 per cent, generating $2,500 in tax revenue. This could provide as much as $0.3 trillion based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. People who already pay taxes would of course also effectively be paying back some of their UBI through these taxes. Applying a 25 percent tax rate to that group, which would receive roughly half of all UBI payments, would decrease the required amount by an additional $0.4 trillion. In other words, the net amount required for a UBI with a 25 per cent federal tax rate applied starting with the first dollar earned would about $2.3 trillion.

Government revenues can also be expanded in ways that accomplish other goals. For instance, we should increase taxation on pollution, in particular greenhouse gas emissions. Taxes are a well-established way of dealing with negative externalities, and we have made good use of this effect. Aggressively taxing cigarettes, for instance, has resulted in diminished consumption and higher gasoline taxes in Europe have contributed to more efficient cars. Estimates of the potential revenue from a carbon tax are around $0.3 trillion per year, and might be even higher. So, between offsets from income tax (which would occur automatically) and a greenhouse gas tax (which we need anyway), the funds needed for UBI could be reduced to about $2 trillion. Though that’s a massive number, social security and Medicare/Medicaid each cost about $1 trillion. So in the extreme, UBI could be financed through a massive reallocation of existing programs.

There is, however, another way to provide much or all of the money needed for UBI. This solution would require moving away from today’s banking system, where the power to ‘create’ money is delegated to banks, to a system where money is issued directly to people instead. In today’s fractional reserve banking system, commercial banks extend more credit than they have deposits, with the Federal Reserve Bank acting as the so-called lender of last resort. For instance, in the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed bought up potentially bad assets to provide banks with liquidity. Europe too has had a policy of ‘quantitative easing’ (often abbreviated as QE), where a central bank infuses large amounts of money directly into commercial banks through loans and asset purchases on highly favorable terms, in the hope that the banks in turn will use this money to extend loans.

The idea is that by extending loans to businesses that need to finance the purchase of equipment or that require more working capital (to hire more salespeople, for example), banks will help the economy grow. But while banks have done that to some degree, they have increasingly focused on lending to large corporations and to wealthy people, to acquire second homes or even for financial speculation. Meanwhile, poor people have virtually no access to affordable credit, and lending to small businesses has been decreasing. The net result has been a rise in wealth and income inequality. Interestingly, this lopsided effect of bank-based money creation was understood as early as the 18th century in the writings of the French banker and economist Richard Cantillon, and has become known as the ‘Cantillon Effect’ (Stoller, 2020).

An alternative system would be to take money creation out of the hands of banks by forcing them to hold demand deposits at the Fed, or the corresponding central bank, in other countries. Known as ‘full-reserve banking,’ this system dramatically reduces risk in the banking sector by eliminating the possibility of bank runs and allows for new competitive banks to be formed without big upfront equity requirements. Credit extension would take place on the basis of long term deposits, and also happen via marketplace lending, as enabled by companies such as LendingClub, for individuals, and Funding Circle, for businesses. Money creation would happen simply by giving the new money directly to people as part of their UBI payments, a system sometimes referred to as “QE for the people.”

What orders of magnitude are we talking about? The terms M0, M1, M2 and M3 are progressively more encompassing measures of how much money has been created in the economy (meaning M3 is greater than M2, which is greater than M1, etc.). In the US, we no longer track the larger monetary aggregates, such as M3, and only use narrower measures, such as M2, and even that measure has been growing by about $1 trillion each year over the last decade. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the Federal Reserve has created an astonishing additional $15 trillion of money as measured by M1.

Another way to get a sense of the total magnitude of money creation is by considering the development of debt. US households have about $10 trillion in mortgage debt, $1.2 trillion in auto loans, over $1.5 trillion in student loans and more than $900 million in credit card debt (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2020; Fontinelle, 2021; White, 2021). Total household debt can increase by as much as $1 trillion in a single year. US business debt stands at around $35 trillion, about half of which is in the financial sector (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2021f; 2021g).

The amount of money created annually is thus in the same ballpark as my proposed UBI. Historically, the idea of the government ‘printing’ money is associated with fears of runaway inflation of the sort that occurred in Germany’s Weimar Republic. There are several reasons why this would not be the case with a proper UBI scheme. First, the amount of new money created would be fixed and known in advance. Second, as we saw earlier, technology is a strong deflationary force. Third, the net amount of money created can be reduced over time by removing money from the economy, which could be accomplished through negative interest rates on bank deposits above a certain amount, with payment collected by the central bank. Alternatively, a system of ‘demurrage’ could be implemented, in which a fee is levied on all currency holdings or the holdings are automatically shrunk (with digital currencies, the latter is now possible automatically).

I expect the path to UBI to involve some combination of changes to government budgets, taxation and the monetary system. As we will see later it is also possible that UBI emerges outside of government through a decentralized project using blockchain technology. However we wind up getting there, my back-of-the-envelope calculations above show that UBI is affordable in the United States today. Similar calculations have been carried out for other countries and show affordability even in many lesser developed countries. Economic freedom for all is already within our reach.

Impact of UBI on the Labor Market

One of the many attractive features of UBI is that it doesn’t remove people’s ability to sell their labor. Suppose someone offers you $5 per hour to look after their dog. Under UBI you are completely free to accept or reject that proposal, without distortion from a minimum wage. The reason we need a minimum wage in the current system is to guard against exploitation, but this problem exists primarily because people do not have the option to walk away from exploitive employment. If UBI was in place, they would.

The example of dog-sitting shows why a minimum wage is a crude instrument that results in distortion. If you like dogs, you might happily take the work for $5 per hour. You might be able to do it while writing a blog post or watching videos on YouTube. Government should not interfere with such transactions. The same is true of working in a fast food restaurant. If employees have the option of walking away from a job, the labor market will naturally find out how much it takes to get someone to work at, say, McDonalds. That might turn out to be $5 per hour or it might turn out to be $30 per hour (the former being exceedingly unlikely for McDonalds but might be the case for a local burger joint that people love working at). Finally, with the existence of UBI labor organizing for collective bargaining would become easier, as various tactics currently used by employers rely on the threat of unemployment and the large demand for even poorly compensated jobs from the ‘precariat’ (a term used by Guy Standing to describe the growing group of people who lead a precarious existence as the result of intermittent employment and other forms of underemployment).

One concern often expressed about UBI is that people would stop working altogether and cause the labor market to collapse. Experiments with UBI, such as the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment in Canada in the 1970s, showed that while people somewhat reduced their working hours when they were paid such income, there was no dramatic labor shortage. People will generally want to earn more than their basic income provides, and the increase in the price of labor will make working more attractive. Furthermore, in conjunction with the income tax change discussed in the previous section, UBI avoids a major issue with many existing welfare programs in which people lose their entire benefit when they start to work, resulting in effective tax rates above 100 per cent (i.e. people make less working than not). With UBI, whatever you earn is in addition to your basic income and you pay the normal marginal tax rate on that. There is no benefit cliff and hence no disincentive to paid work.

But what about dirty or dangerous jobs? Will there be a price of labor high enough to motivate anyone to do them, and will the companies that need this labor be able to stay in business? Businesses will have a choice between paying people more to do such work or investing in automation. In all likelihood, the answer will be a combination of both. As we already saw earlier, expensive labor has historically been a driver of innovation. Because our ability to automate has gone up dramatically with digital technology we can in fact now automate these dirty and dangerous jobs. That also means that we do not have to worry about labor-price induced inflation. Put differently, technological deflation can continue even if the cost for some labor increases.

UBI would have three other important impacts on the labor market. The first has to do with volunteering. Currently, there are not enough people looking after the environment or taking care of the sick and elderly. Labor is frequently undersupplied in these sectors, because the demand isn’t backed by enough money, and these activities thus rely largely on donations. Many elderly people don’t have sufficient savings to afford personal care. When people have to work pretty much every free hour to meet their needs they don’t have time to volunteer. Providing them with UBI could vastly increase the number of volunteers (we observe increased volunteering among pensioners, who are effectively already on a UBI).

The second big effect UBI would have on the labor market is a dramatic expansion of the scope for entrepreneurial activity. A lot of people who would like to start a local business, such as a nail salon or a restaurant, have no financial cushion and can never quit their jobs to give it a try. I sometimes refer to UBI as ‘seed money for everyone’: more businesses getting started in a community would mean more opportunities for fulfilling local employment.

Once they get going, some of these new ventures would receive traditional financing, including bank loans and venture capital, but UBI also has the potential to significantly expand the reach and importance of crowdfunding. If you feel confident that your needs are taken care of, you will be more likely to start an activity that has the potential to attract support via crowdfunding, such as recording music videos and putting them up on YouTube. Also, if your needs are taken care of, you will be more likely to use a fraction of any income you receive on top of UBI to support crowdfunded projects.

The third big impact of UBI on the labor market would be the growth of human qua human jobs (credit for this concept goes to Yochai Benkler, who mentioned it to me in a conversation). There are certain jobs that even when we can automate them we will sometimes have a preference for a human instead. Examples of these include food preparation and serving, massage and mental health therapy, and of course arts and crafts. A great example for this desire is the persistence and even growth of live music following the invention of sound recording. There is something special about a performance that results from a sense of shared humanity. It is our intuitive understanding that the performer has an inner life of thoughts and emotions akin to our own that makes live music special. Conversely it can be highly pleasurable to perform for somebody or to cook a meal for someone. UBI will greatly increase the room for people to participate on both sides of these human qua human labor markets.

Other Objections to UBI

I have addressed the three biggest objections to UBI by showing that it is affordable, that it will not result in inflation, and that it will have a positive impact on the labor market and innovation. There are some other common objections that are worth addressing, including a moral objection that people have done nothing to deserve such an income, which is answered in its own section below.

One other objection to UBI is that it diminishes the value of work in society. In fact the opposite is true: UBI recognizes how much unpaid work exists in the world, including child rearing. We have created a situation where the word ‘work’ has become synonymous with getting paid. As things stand, if you don’t get paid for doing something, it’s not considered work. An example of another approach is the one taken by Montessori Schools, which base their teaching on creativity and problem-solving: they use “work” to refer to any “purposeful activity.”

A further objection is that UBI robs people of the sense of purpose that work provides if they stop working or stop looking for work. However, the idea of work as a source of human purpose is a relatively new one, and it is largely attributable to the Protestant work ethic. Earlier, human purpose tended to be rooted in religion, which offered meaning in return for adhering to certain precepts (those might include work as one of several commandments, but not as a source of purpose in itself). The source of human purpose is thus subject to redefinition over time. As we transition to the Knowledge Age, contributing to or sustaining the knowledge loop is a more suitable focus. So is carrying out the responsibilities that we as humans have because of the power that knowledge has given to us.

One other frequent objection is that people will spend their basic income on alcohol and drugs, an assertion often accompanied by claims that the casino money received by Native Americans has caused drug problems among that population. There is no evidence to support this objection: no UBI pilots have found a significant increase in drug or alcohol abuse, and in the meantime the opioid crisis has been the largest drug epidemic in US history. Research shows that, contrary to widely held belief, casino money has contributed to declines in obesity, smoking and heavy drinking (Wolfe et al., 2012).

Some people object to UBI not because they think it won’t work, but because they claim it is a cynical ploy by the rich to silence the poor and keep them from rebelling. Some who voice this criticism genuinely believe it, but others use it as a tool of political division. Whatever the case, the impact of UBI is likely to be the opposite, as Thomas Paine recognized. In many parts of the world, including the United States, the poor are effectively excluded from the political process. They are too busy holding down one or more jobs to be able to run for office—or sometimes even to vote. American elections are held on a weekday, and employers are not required to give employees time off work to go to the polling station. Outside of elections many democratic processes, such as organizing protests or even strikes, relies on people who can contribute time to the effort. UBI will dramatically improve the ability of people to engage this way and thus challenge the status quo.

UBI as a Moral Imperative

Before we examine informational freedom, we should remind ourselves why individuals deserve to have enough to take care of their needs, regardless of any economic contributions they may have made.

Consider the air we breathe. None of us did anything to make it: we just inherited it from the planet. Similarly, no one who is alive today did anything to invent electricity. It had already been invented, and we have inherited its benefits. You might point out that electricity costs money and people have to pay for it, but they pay for the cost of producing it rather than the cost of its invention. Here we might substitute many other amazing examples of our collectively inherited human knowledge, such as antibiotics, the wheel, sliced bread, etc.

We are incredibly fortunate to have been born into a world where capital is no longer scarce. This means that using our knowledge to take care of everyone’s needs is a moral imperative. UBI accomplishes that by giving people economic freedom, allowing them to escape the job loop, and accelerating the knowledge loop that gave us this incredible knowledge in the first place.

Informational Freedom

Can you read any book you want to at the push of a button? Can you listen to any music ever recorded the moment you feel like it? Do you have instant access to any academic publication from around the world that you wish to consult? In the past, when copying and distributing information was expensive, asking such seemingly outrageous questions would not have made any sense. In the early days of writing, when books were copied by hand, they were rare, costly and subject to errors. Very few people had access to them. And even as recently as the last years of the 20th century, it typically took physically costly processes of production and distribution to get books, musical recordings and other items into people’s hands.

But in the digital age, when the marginal cost of making and distributing a copy has shrunk to zero, all limitations on digital information are artificial. They involve adding costs to the system in order to impose scarcity on something that is abundant. For example, billions of dollars have been spent on preventing people from copying and sharing digital music files (CBS News, 2001).

Why are we spending money to make information less accessible? When information existed only in analog form, the cost of copying and distributing it allowed us to build an economy and a society that was based on information scarcity. A record label, for instance, had to recruit musical talent, record in expensive studios, market the music, and make and distribute physical records. Charging for the records allowed the label to cover its costs and turn a profit. Now that individuals can make music on a laptop and distribute it for free, the fixed costs are dramatically lower and the marginal cost of each listen is zero. In this context, the business model of charging per record, per song or per listen, and the copyright protections required to sustain it, no longer make sense. Despite the ridiculous fight put up by the music industry, our listening is generally either free (meaning that it is ad-supported) or part of a subscription. In either case, the marginal cost of each listen is zero.

Despite this progress in the music industry, we accept many other artificial restrictions on information access because this is the only system we know. To transition into the Knowledge Age, however, we should strive for an increase in informational freedom. This is not unprecedented in human history: prior to the advent of the printing press, stories and music were passed on orally or through copying by hand. There were no restrictions on who could tell a story or perform a song.

To be clear, information is not the same as knowledge. Information, for instance, includes the huge number of log files generated every day by computers around the world, many of which may never be analyzed. We don’t know in advance what information will turn out to be the basis for knowledge, so it makes sense to retain as much information as possible and make access to it as broad as possible. This section will explore various ways in which we can expand informational freedom, the second important step that will facilitate our transition to a Knowledge Age.

Access to the Internet

The Internet has been derided by some who claim it is a small innovation compared to, say, electricity or vaccinations—but they are mistaken. The Internet allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to learn how electricity or vaccinations work. Setting aside artificial limitations imposed on the flow of information, the Internet provides the means to access and distribute all human knowledge to all of humanity. As such, it is the crucial enabler of the digital knowledge loop. Access to the Internet is a core component of informational freedom.

At present, over four and half billion people are connected to the Internet, a number that is increasing by hundreds of millions every year (Kemp, 2020). This tremendous growth has become possible because the cost of access has fallen dramatically. A capable smartphone costs less than $100 to manufacture. In places with competitive markets, 4G bandwidth is provided at prices as low as $0.10 per GB (Roy, 2019).

Even connecting people who live in remote parts of the world is getting much cheaper, as the cost for wireless networking is decreasing and we are increasing our satellite capacity. For instance, there is a project underway to connect rural communities in Mexico for less than $10,000 per community (Rostad, 2018). At the same time, in highly developed economies such as the US, ongoing technological innovation such as MIMO wireless technology will further lower prices for bandwidth in densely populated urban areas (“MIMO,” 2020).

All of this means that even at relatively low levels, UBI would cover the cost of Internet access, provided that we keep innovating and maintain highly competitive and properly regulated markets for access to it. This is an example of how the three different freedoms reinforce each other: economic freedom allows people to access the Internet, which is the foundation for informational freedom, and, as we will see later, using it to contribute to the knowledge loop requires psychological freedom.

As we work to make affordable Internet access universal, we must also address limitations to the flow of information on the network. In particular, we should fight against restrictions on the Internet imposed by governments and Internet service providers (ISPs). Both are artificial limitations, driven by a range of economic and policy considerations opposed to the imperative of informational freedom.

One Global Internet

By design, the Internet has no built-in concept of geography. Most fundamentally, it constitutes a way to connect networks with one another (hence its name), regardless of where the machines involved are located. Any geographic restrictions have been added in, often at great cost. Australia and the UK have recently mandated so-called ‘firewalls’ around their countries, not unlike China’s own “Great Firewall” (“Great Firewall,” 2020), and countries like Turkey have had one in place for some time. These ‘firewalls’ place the Internet under government control, restricting informational freedom. For instance, Wikipedia was not accessible in Turkey for many years. Furthermore, both China and Russia have banned the use virtual private network services, tools that allow individuals to circumvent these artificial restrictions (Wenger, 2017a). As citizens, we should be outraged that governments are cutting us off from accessing information freely around the world, both on principle and on the basis of this being a bad use of resources. Imagine governments in an earlier age spending taxpayer money so citizens could dial fewer phone numbers.

No Artificial Fast and Slow Lanes

The same equipment used by governments to impose geographic boundaries on the Internet is used by ISPs to extract more money from customers, distorting access in the process through practices including paid prioritization and zero-rating. To understand why they are a problem, let’s take a brief technical detour.

When you buy access to the Internet, you pay for a connection of a certain capacity. If it provides 10 megabits per second and you use that connection fully for sixty seconds, you would have downloaded (or uploaded, for that matter) 600 megabits, the equivalent of 15–25 songs on Spotify or SoundCloud (assuming 3–5 megabytes per song). The fantastic thing about digital information is that all bits are the same. It doesn’t matter whether you accessed Wikipedia or looked at pictures of kittens: you’ve paid for the bandwidth, and you should be free to use it to access whatever parts of human knowledge you want.

That principle, however, doesn’t maximize profit for the ISP. In order to do that, they seek to discriminate between different types of information, based on consumer demand and the supplier’s ability to pay. First they install equipment that lets them identify bits based on their origin. Then they go to a company like YouTube or Netflix and ask them to pay to have their traffic ’prioritized’ relative to traffic from other sources. Another form of manipulation that is common among wireless providers is so-called zero-rating, where some services pay to be excluded from monthly bandwidth caps. If permitted, ISPs will go a step further: in early 2017, the US Senate voted to allow them to sell customer data, including browsing history, without customer consent (Wenger, 2017b).

The regulatory solution to this problem is blandly referred to as ‘net neutrality’, but what is at stake here is informational freedom itself. Our access to human knowledge should not be skewed by our ISPs’ financial incentives. We might consider switching to another ISP that provides neutral access, but in most geographic areas, especially in the United States, there is no competitive market for broadband Internet access. ISPs either have outright monopolies (often granted by regulators) or operate in small oligopolies. For instance, in the part of New York City where I live, there is just one broadband ISP.

Over time, technological advances such as wireless broadband may make the market more competitive, but until then we need regulation to avoid ISPs limiting our informational freedom. This concern is shared by people all over the world: in 2016, India objected to a plan by Facebook to provide subsidized Internet access that would have given priority to their own services, and outlawed ‘zero rating’ altogether (Vincent, 2016).

Bots for All of Us

Once you have access to the Internet, you need software to connect to its many information sources. When Tim Berners-Lee first invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he specified an open protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), that anyone could use both to make information available and to access it ("Tim Berners-Lee," n.d.). In doing this, Berners-Lee enabled anyone to build software, so-called Web servers and browsers that would be compatible with this protocol. Many people did, including Marc Andreessen with Netscape, and many web servers and browsers were available as open-source or for free.

The combination of an open protocol and free software meant permissionless publishing and complete user control. If you wanted to add a page to the Web, you could just download a Web server, run it on a computer connected to the Internet and add content in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format. Not surprisingly, the amount of content on the Web proliferated rapidly. Want to post a picture of your cat? Upload it to your Web server. Want to write something about the latest progress on your research project? There was no need to convince an academic publisher of its merits—you could just put up a web page.

People accessing the Web benefited from their ability to completely control their own web browser. In fact, in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the web browser is referred to as a ‘user agent’ that accesses the Web on behalf of the user. Want to see the raw HTML as delivered by the server? Right click on your screen and use ‘View Page Source’. Want to see only text? Instruct your user agent to turn off all images. Want to fill out a web form but keep a copy of what you are submitting for yourself? Create a script to have your browser save all form submissions locally.

Over time, the platforms that have increasingly dominated the Web have interfered with some of the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by early users. I went on Facebook recently to find a note I posted some time ago on a friend’s wall. But it turns out that you can’t search through all the wall posts you have written: instead you have to scroll backwards in time for each friend, trying to remember when you posted what where. Facebook has all the data, but they’ve decided not to make it searchable. Whether or not you attribute this to intentional misconduct on their part: my point is that you experience Facebook the way they want you to experience it. If you don’t like how Facebook’s algorithms prioritize your friends’ posts in your newsfeed, tough luck.

Imagine what would happen if everything you did on Facebook was mediated by a software program—a ‘bot’—that you could control. You could instruct it to go through and automate the cumbersome steps that Facebook lays out for finding old wall posts. Even better, if you had been using this bot all along, it could have kept your own archive of wall posts in your own data store and you could simply instruct it to search your archive. If we all used bots to interact with Facebook and didn’t like how our newsfeed was prioritized, we could ask our friends to instruct their bots to send us status updates directly, so that we could form our own feeds. This was entirely possible on the Web because of the open protocol, but it is not possible in a world of proprietary and closed apps on smartphones.

Although this example might sound trivial, bots have profound implications in a networked world. Consider the on-demand car services provided by companies such as Uber and Lyft. As drivers for these services know, each of them provides a separate app for them to use. You can try to run both apps on one phone or you can even have two phones, as some drivers do, but the closed nature of the apps means that you cannot use your phone’s computing power to evaluate competing offers. If you had access to bots that could interact with the networks on your behalf, you could simultaneously participate in these various marketplaces and play one off against the other.

Using a bot, you could set your own criteria for which rides you want to accept, including whether a commission charged by a given network was below a certain threshold. The bot would then allow you to accept only rides that maximize the fare you receive. Ride-sharing companies would no longer be able to charge excessive commissions, since new networks could arise to undercut them. Similarly, as a passenger, using a bot would allow you to simultaneously evaluate the prices between different services and choose the one with the lowest price for a particular trip.

We could also use bots as an alternative to antitrust regulation, in order to counter the power of technology giants like Google or Facebook without foregoing the benefits of their large networks. These companies derive much of their revenue from advertising, and consumers currently have no way of blocking ads on mobile devices. But what if users could control mobile apps to add ad-blocking functionality, just as they can with Web browsers?

Many people decry ad-blocking as an attack on journalism that dooms the independent Web, but that is a pessimistic view. In the early days of the Web, it was full of ad-free content published by individuals. When companies joined in, they brought their offline business models with them, including paid subscriptions and advertising. Along with the emergence of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with strong network effects, this resulted in a centralization of the Web—content was increasingly either produced on a platform or moved behind a paywall.

Ad-blocking is an assertion of power by the end user, which is a good thing in all respects. Just as a New York City judge found in 2015 that taxi companies have no special right to see their business model protected from ridesharing companies (Whitford, 2015), neither do ad-supported publishers. And while this might result in a downturn for publishers in the short term, in the long run it will mean more growth for content that is paid for more directly by end users (for example, through subscriptions or crowdfunding).

To curtail the centralizing power of network effects, we should shift power to the end users by allowing them to have user agents for mobile apps, just as we did with the Web. The reason users don’t wield the same power on mobile is that native apps relegate end users to interacting with services using our eyes, ears, brain and fingers. We cannot use the computing capabilities of our smartphones, which are as powerful as supercomputers were until quite recently, in order to interact with the apps on our behalf. The apps control us, instead of us controlling the apps. Like a Web browser, a mobile user agent could do things such as block ads, keep copies of responses to services and let users participate in multiple services simultaneously. The way to help end users is not to break up big tech companies, but to empower individuals to use code that executes on their behalf.

What would it take to make this a reality? One approach would be to require companies like Uber, Google and Facebook to expose their functionality, not just through apps and websites, but also through so-called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). An API is what a bot uses to carry out operations, such as posting a status update on a user’s behalf. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter have them, but they tend to have limited capabilities. Also, companies have the right to shut down bots, even when a user has authorized them to act on their behalf.

Why can’t I simply write code that interfaces with Facebook on my behalf? After all, Facebook’s app itself uses an API to talk to the Facebook servers. But in order to do that I would have to hack the Facebook app to figure out what the API calls are, and how to authenticate myself to them. Unfortunately, in the US there are three separate laws that make those steps illegal. The first is the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The second is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). And the third is the legal construction that by clicking ‘I accept’ on an End User License Agreement (EULA) or a set of Terms of Service (TOS), I am legally bound to respect whatever restrictions Facebook decides to impose. The last of these three is a civil matter, but criminal convictions under the first two laws carry mandatory prison sentences.

If we were willing to remove these three legal obstacles, hacking an app to give programmatic access to systems would be possible. People might argue that those provisions were created to solve important problems, but that is not entirely clear. The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA was put in place to allow the creation of digital rights management systems for copyright enforcement. What you think of this depends on what you think about copyright, a subject we will look at in the next section.

The scope of the CFAA could be substantially decreased without limiting its potential for prosecuting fraud and abuse, and the same goes for restrictions on usage a company might impose via a license agreement or a terms of service. If I only take actions that are also available inside the company’s app but happen to take them via a program of my own choice, why should that constitute a violation?

But, you might object, don’t companies need to protect the cryptographic keys that they use to encrypt communications? Aren’t ’botnets’ behind those infamous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where vast networks of computers flood a service with so many requests that no one can access it? It’s true that there are a lot of compromised machines in the world that are used for nefarious purposes, including set-top boxes and home routers. But that only demonstrates how ineffective the existing laws are at stopping illegal bots. As a result, companies have developed the technological infrastructure to deal with them.

How would we prevent people from using bots that turn out to be malicious code? For one, open-source code would allow people to inspect it to make sure it does what it claims. However, open source is not the only answer. Once people can legally be represented by bots, many markets currently dominated by large companies will face competition from smaller startups that will build, operate and maintain these bots on behalf of their end users. These companies will compete in part on establishing and maintaining a trust relationship with their customers, much like an insurance broker represents a customer in relationship with multiple insurance carriers.

Legalizing representation by bots would put pressure on the revenues of the currently dominant companies. We might worry that they would respond by slowing their investment in infrastructure, but there are contravening forces as more money will be invested in competitors. For example Uber’s ‘take rate’ (the percentage of the money paid for rides that they keep) is 25 percent. If competition forced that rate down to 5 percent, Uber’s value might fall from $90 billion to $10 billion, but that is still a huge figure, and plenty of capital would be available for investing in competitive companies that can achieve that kind of outcome.

That is not to say that there should not be limitations on bots. A bot representing me should have access to any functionality that I can access, but it should not be able to do things I can’t do, such as pretend to be another user or gain access to other people’s private posts. Companies can use technology to enforce such access limits for bots without relying on regulation that prevents bot representation in general.

Even if you are now convinced of the merits of bots, you might be wondering how we will get there. The answer is that we can start very small. We could run an experiment in a city like New York, where the city’s municipal authorities control how on-demand transportation services operate. They might say, “If you want to operate here, you have to let drivers interact with your service through a program.” Given how big a market the city is, I’m confident these services would agree. Eventually we could mandate APIs for all Internet services that have more than some threshold number of users, including all the social networks and even the big search platforms, such as Google.

To see that this is possible in principle, one need look no further than the UK’s Open Banking and the European Union’s Payment Services Directive, which require banks to offer an API for bank accounts (Manthorpe, 2018). This means that consumers can access third-party services, such as bill payment and insurance, by authorizing them to have access via the API instead of having to open a new account with a separate company. This dramatically lowers switching costs, and is making the market for financial services more competitive. The ACCESS Act, introduced by Senators Mark Warner and Josh Hawley in the US, was the first attempt to provide a similar concept for social media companies. While this particular effort hasn’t gone very far to date, it points to the possibility that bots could be used as an important alternative to Industrial Age antitrust regulation for shifting power back to end users.

After we have fought against geographical and prioritization limits and have bots that represent us online, we will still face legal limits that restrict what we can create and share. I will first examine copyright and patent laws and suggest ways to reduce how much they limit the knowledge loop. Then I’ll turn to privacy laws.

Earlier I noted how expensive it was to make copies of books when they had to be copied one letter at a time. Eventually, the printing press and movable type were invented. Together, the two made reproducing information faster and cheaper. Even back then, governments and churches saw cheaper information dissemination as a threat to their authority. In England, the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 made the government’s approval to operate a printing press a legal requirement (Nipps, 2014). This approval depended on agreeing to censor content that was critical of the government or that ran counter to the teachings of the Church of England. The origins of copyright laws (i.e., the legal right to make copies) are thus tied up with censorship.

Those who had the right to make copies, effectively had monopolies on the copyrighted content which proved to be economically attractive. Censorship, however, does not make for a popular argument to support an ongoing monopoly and so relatively quickly the argument for sustaining such an arrangement shifted to the suggestion that copyright was necessary as an inducement or incentive to produce content in the first place. The time and effort authors put into learning and writing not only made written works morally their property, the writer Daniel Defoe and others argued in the early 18th century: to motivate people to do those things, the production of “pyrated copies” had to be stopped (Deazley, 2004). While this argument sounds much more compelling than censorship, in practice, copyright was rarely held by the original creator even back then. Instead, the economic benefits of copyright have largely accrued to publishers, who for the most part acquire the copyright for a one-time payment to the author or songwriter.

There is another problem with the incentive argument. It ignores a long history of prior content creation. Let’s take music as an example. Musical instruments were made as far back as 30,000 years ago, pre-dating the idea of copyright by many millennia. Even the earliest known encoding of a song, which marks music’s transition from information to knowledge, is around 3,400 years old (Andrews, 2018; Wulstan, 1971). Clearly then, people made and shared music long before copyright existed. In fact, the period during which it’s been possible for someone to earn a lot of money from making and then selling recorded music has been extraordinarily short. It started with the invention of the gramophone in the 1870s and peaked in 1999, the year that saw the biggest profits in the music industry, although the industry’s revenues have been gradually increasing again in recent years with the advent of streaming (Smith, 2020).

Before this short period, musicians made a living either from live performances or through patronage. If copyrighted music ceased to exist, musicians would still compose, perform and record music, and they would make money in the ways that they did prior to the rise of copyright. Indeed, as Steven Johnson found when he examined this issue, that is already happening, to some degree: “the decline in recorded-music revenue has been accompanied by an increase in revenues from live music... Recorded music, then, becomes a kind of marketing expense for the main event of live shows” (Johnson, 2015). Many musicians already choose to give away digital versions of their music, releasing tracks for free on SoundCloud or YouTube and making money from performing live (which during the COVID-19 pandemic had to shift to live streaming) or through crowdfunding methods such as Kickstarter and Patreon.

Over time, copyright holders have strengthened their claims and extended their reach. For instance, with the passing of the US Copyright Act of 1976, the requirement to register a copyright was removed: if you created content, you automatically held copyright in it (U.S. Copyright Office, 2019). Then, in 1998, the US Copyright Term Extension Act extended the length of a term of copyright from 50 to 70 years beyond the life of the author. This became known as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” because Disney had lobbied for it: having built a profitable business based on protected content, they were mindful that a number of their copyrights were due to expire (Slaton, 1999).

More recently, copyright lobbying has attempted to interfere with the publication of content on the Internet, through proposed legislation such as the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, and language in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal that the United States did not ultimately join (after the United States withdrew, the language was removed). In these latest attempts at expansion, the conflict between copyright and the digital knowledge loop has become especially clear. Copyright limits what you can do with content that you have access to, essentially restricting you to consuming it. It dramatically curtails your ability to share content and to create other works that use some or all of it. Some of the more extreme examples include takedowns of videos from YouTube that used the song “Happy Birthday to You,” which was under copyright until just a few years ago.

From a societal standpoint, it is never optimal to prevent someone from listening to or watching content that has already been created. Since the marginal cost of accessing a digital copy is zero, the world is better off if that person gets enjoyment from that content. And if that person becomes motivated to create some new inspiring content themselves, then the world is a lot better off.

Although the marginal cost for copying content is zero, you might wonder about the fixed and variable cost that goes into making it in the first place. If all content were to be free, then where would the money to produce it come from? Some degree of copyright is needed for content creation, especially for large-scale projects such as Hollywood movies or elaborate video games: it is likely that nobody would make them if, in the absence of copyright protection, they weren’t economically viable. Yet even for such big projects there should be constraints on enforcement. For instance, you shouldn’t be able to take down an entire service because it hosts a link to a pirated movie, as long as the link is promptly removed. More generally, I believe that copyright should be dramatically reduced in scope and made much more costly to obtain. The only automatic right accruing to content should be attribution. Reserving additional rights should require a registration fee, because you are asking for content to be restricted within the digital knowledge loop.

Imagine a situation where the only automatic right accruing to an intellectual work was attribution. Anyone wanting to copy or distribute your song would only have to credit you, something that would not inhibit any part of the knowledge loop. Attribution imposes no restrictions on making, accessing and distributing copies, or on creating or sharing derivative works. It can include referencing who wrote the lyrics, who composed the music, who played which instrument and so on. It can also include where you found this particular piece of music. This practice of attribution is already becoming popular for digital text and images using the Creative Commons License, or the MIT License in open source software development.

If you don’t want other people to use your music without paying you, you are asking for its potential contributions to the knowledge loop to be restricted, thus reducing the benefits that the loop confers upon society. You should pay for that right, which not only represents a loss to society but will also be costly to enforce. The registration fee should be paid on a monthly or annual basis, and when you stop paying it, your work should revert to attribution-only status.

In order to reserve rights, you should have to register your music with a registry, with some part of the copyright fee going towards maintaining the registry. Thanks to blockchains, which allow the operation of decentralized databases that are not owned or controlled by any one entity, there can be competing registries that access the same global database. The registries would be free to search, and registration would involve a check that you are not trying to register someone else’s work. The registries could be built in a way that anyone operating a music streaming service, such as Spotify or SoundCloud, could easily implement compliance to make sure they are not freely sharing music that has reserved rights.

It would even be possible to make the registration fee dependent on what rights you wanted to retain. For instance, your fee might be lower if you were prepared to allow non-commercial use of your music and to allow others to create derivative works, while it might increase significantly if you wanted all your rights reserved. Similar systems could be used for all types of content, including text, images and video.

Critics might object that the system would impose a financial burden on creators, but it is important to remember that removing content from the knowledge loop imposes a cost on society. And enforcing this removal, by finding people who are infringing and penalizing them, incurs additional costs for society. For these reasons, asking creators to pay is fair, especially if their economic freedom is already assured by UBI.

UBI also provides an answer to another argument that is frequently wielded in support of excessive copyright: employment by publishers. This argument is relatively weak, as the major music labels combined employ only a little over twenty thousand people ("Sony Music," n.d.; “Universal Music Group,” n.d; “Warner Music Group,” n.d). On top of that, the existence of this employment to some degree reflects the societal cost of copyright. The owners, managers and employees of record labels are, for the most part, not the creators of the music.

Let me point out one more reason why a system of paid registration makes sense. No intellectual works are created in a vacuum. All authors have read books by other people, all musicians have listened to tons of music, and all filmmakers have watched countless movies. Much of what makes art so enjoyable is the existence of a vast body of art that it draws upon and can reference, whether explicitly or implicitly. We are all part of the knowledge loop that has existed for millennia.

While copyright limits our ability to share knowledge, patents limit our ability to use knowledge to create something new. Just as having a copyright confers a monopoly on the reproduction of content, a patent confers a monopoly on its application. The rationale for patents is similar to the argument for copyright: the monopoly that is granted results in profits that are supposed to provide an incentive for people to invest in research and development.

Here, as with copyright, this incentive argument should be viewed with suspicion. People invented things long before patents existed, and many have continued to invent without seeking them (Kinsella, 2013). Mathematics is a great example of the power of what is known as ‘intrinsic motivation’: the drive to do something for its own sake, and not because it will be financially rewarded. People who might have otherwise spent their time in a more lucrative way often dedicate years of their lives to work on a single mathematical problem (frequently without success). It is because of the intrinsic human drive to solve problems that the field has made extraordinary advances, entirely in the absence of patents, which thankfully were never extended to include mathematical formulas and proofs. As we will see momentarily, this problem solving drive can and has been successfully amplified through other means.

The first patent system was established in Venice in the mid-fifteenth century, and Britain had a fairly well-established system by the seventeenth (“History of Patent Law,” 2020). That leaves thousands of years of invention, a time that saw such critical breakthroughs as the alphabet, movable type, the invention of the wheel and gears. This is to say nothing of those inventors who have chosen not to patent their inventions because they saw how that would impose a loss on society. A well-known example is Jonas Salk, who created the polio vaccine. Other important inventions that were never patented include X-rays, penicillin and the use of ether as an anesthetic (Boldrin & Levine, 2010). Since we know that limits on the use of knowledge impose a cost, we should ask what alternatives to patents exist which might stimulate innovation.

Many people are motivated by wanting to solve a problem, whether it’s one they have themselves or something that impacts the world at large. With UBI, more of these people will be able to spend their time on inventing. We will also see more innovation because digital technologies are reducing the cost of inventing. One example of this is the company Science Exchange, which has created a marketplace for laboratory experiments. Say you have an idea that requires you to sequence a bunch of genes. The fastest gene sequencing available is from a company called Illumina, whose fastest machines used to cost more than $0.5 million to buy (Next Gen Seek, 2021). Through Science Exchange, however, you were able to access such a machine for less than $1,000 per use (“Illumina Next Generation Sequencing,” 2021). Furthermore, the next generation of sequencing machines is on the way, and these will further reduce the cost—technological deflation at work.

A lot of legislation has significantly inflated the cost of innovation. In particular, FDA rules around drug trials have made drug discovery prohibitively expensive, with the cost of bringing a drug to market exceeding $1 billion. While it is obviously important to protect patients, there are novel statistical techniques that would allow for smaller and faster trials (Berry et al., 2010). A small step was taken recently with the compassionate use of not-yet-approved drugs for fatally ill patients. Excessive medical damage claims have presented another barrier to innovation. As a result of these costs, many drugs are either not developed at all or are withdrawn from the market, despite their efficacy. For example, the vaccine against Lyme disease, Lymerix, is no longer available for humans following damage claims (Willyard, 2019).

Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation. Another historically successful strategy has been the offering of prizes. In 1714, Britain famously offered rewards to encourage a solution to the problem of determining a ship’s longitude at sea. Several people were awarded prizes for their designs of chronometers, lunar distance tables and other methods for determining longitude, including improvements to existing methods. Mathematics provides an interesting example of the effectiveness of prizes, which beyond money also provide recognition. In addition to the coveted Fields Medal for exceptional work by mathematicians under the age of 40, there are also the seven so-called Millennium Prize Problems, each with a $1 million reward (only one of which has been solved to date—and Grigori Perelman, the Russian mathematician who solved it, famously turned down the prize money opting only for the recognition).

At a time when we wish to accelerate the knowledge loop, we must shift the balance towards knowledge that can be used freely. The success of recent prize programs, such as the X Prizes, the DARPA Grand Challenge and NIST competitions, is promising, and the potential exists to crowdfund future prizes. Medical research should be a particular target for prizes, to help bring down the cost of healthcare.

Though prizes can help accelerate the knowledge loop, that still leaves a lot of existing patents in place. I believe much can be done to make the system more functional, in particular by reducing the impact of so-called non-practicing entities (NPEs, commonly referred to as “patent trolls”). These companies have no operating business of their own, and exist solely for the purpose of litigating patents. They tend to sue not just a company but also that company’s customers, forcing a lot of companies into a quick settlement. The NPE then uses the settlement money to finance further lawsuits. Fortunately, a recent Supreme Court ruling placed limits on where patent lawsuits can be filed, which might curtail the activity of NPEs (Liptak, 2017).

As a central step in patent reform, we must make it easier to invalidate existing patents, while at the same time making it more difficult to obtain new ones. We have seen some progress on both counts in the US, but there is still a long way to go. Large parts of what is currently patentable should be excluded from patentability, including university research that has received even small amounts of public funding. Universities have frequently delayed the publication of research in areas where they have hoped for patents that they could subsequently license out, a practice that has a damaging impact on the knowledge loop.

We have also gone astray in our celebration of patents as a measure of technological progress, when we should instead treat them at best as a necessary evil. Ideally, we would roll back the reach of existing patents and raise the bar for new ones, while also inducing as much unencumbered innovation as possible through prizes and social recognition.

Getting Over Privacy

Copyrights and patents aren’t the only legal limitations that slow down the digital knowledge loop. We’re also actively creating new restrictions in the form of well-intentioned privacy regulations. Not only do these measures restrict informational freedom, but as I will argue below, in the long run privacy is fundamentally incompatible with technological progress. Instead of clinging to our current conception of privacy, we therefore need to understand how to be free in a world where information is widely shared. Privacy has been a strategy for achieving and protecting freedom. To get over this idea while staying free, we need to expand economic, informational and psychological freedom.

Before I expand on this position, let me first note that countries and individuals already take dramatically different approaches to the privacy of certain types of information. For example, for many years Sweden and Finland have published everyone’s tax return, and some people, including the Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, have published their entire medical history on the Internet (Doyle & Scrutton, 2016; Zorabedian, 2015). This shows that under certain conditions it is eminently possible to publicly share exactly the type of information that some insist must absolutely remain private. As we will see, such sharing turns out not only to be possible but also extremely useful.

To better understand this perspective, compare the costs and benefits of keeping information private with the costs and benefits of sharing it widely. Digital technology is dramatically shifting this tradeoff in favor of sharing. Take a radiology image, for example. Analog X-ray technology produced an image on a physical film that had to be developed, and could only be examined by holding it up against a backlight. If you wanted to protect the information on it, you would put it in a file and lock it in a drawer. If you wanted a second opinion, you had to have the file sent to another doctor by mail. That process was costly, time-consuming and prone to errors. The upside of analog X-rays was the ease of keeping the information secret; the downside was the difficulty of putting it to use.

Now compare analog X-rays to digital X-rays. You can instantly walk out of your doctor’s office with a copy of the digital image on a thumb drive or have it emailed to you, put in a Dropbox or shared in some other way via the Internet. Thanks to this technology, you can now get a near-instant second opinion. And if everyone you contacted was stumped, you could post the image on the Internet for everyone to see. A doctor, or a patient, or simply an astute observer, somewhere in the world may have seen something similar before, even if it is incredibly rare. This has happened repeatedly via Figure 1, a company that provides an image sharing network for medical professionals.

But this power comes at a price: protecting your digital X-ray image from others who might wish to see it is virtually impossible. Every doctor who looks at the image could make a copy—for free, instantly and with perfect fidelity—and send it to someone else. And the same goes for others who might have access to the image, such as your insurance company.

Critics will make claims about how we can use encryption to prevent the unauthorized use of your image, but those claims come with important caveats, and they are dangerous if pursued to their ultimate conclusion. In summary, the upside of a digital X-ray image is how easy it makes it to get help; the downside is how hard it is to protect digital information.

But the analysis doesn’t end there. The benefits of your digital X-ray image go beyond just you. Imagine a huge collection of digital X-ray images, all labeled with diagnoses. We might use computers to search through them and get machines to learn what to look for. And these systems, because of the magic of zero marginal cost, can eventually provide future diagnoses for free. This is exactly what we want to happen, but how rapidly we get there and who controls the results will depend on who has access to digital X-ray images.

If we made all healthcare information public, we would dramatically accelerate innovation in diagnosing and treating diseases. At present, only well-funded pharma companies and a few university research projects are able to develop new medical insights and drugs, since only they have the money required to get sufficient numbers of patients to participate in research. Many scientists therefore wind up joining big pharma companies, so the results of their work are protected by patents. Even at universities, the research agenda tends to be tightly controlled, and access to information is seen as a competitive advantage. While I understand that we have a lot of work to do to create a world in which the sharing of health information is widely accepted and has limited downsides, this is what we should be aiming for.

You might wonder why I keep asserting that assuring privacy is impossible. After all, don’t we have encryption? Well, there are several problems that encryption can’t solve. The first is that the cryptographic keys used for encryption and decryption are just digital information themselves, so keeping them secure is another instance of the original problem. Even generating a key on your own machine offers limited protection, unless you are willing to risk that the data you’re protecting will be lost forever if you lose the key. As a result, most systems include some kind of cloud-based backup, making it possible that someone will access your data, either through technical interception or by tricking a human being to unwittingly participate in a security breach. If you want a sense of how hard this problem is, consider the millions of dollars in cryptocurrency that can no longer be accessed by people who lost their key or who had them taken over through some form of attack. The few cryptocurrency exchanges that have a decent track record have invested massively in security procedures, personnel screening and operational secrecy.

The second problem is known as ‘endpoint security’. The doctor you’re sending your X-ray to for a second opinion might have a program on their computer that can access anything shown on the screen. In order to view your X-ray, the doctor has to decrypt and display it, so this program will have access to the image. Avoiding such a scenario would require us to lock down all computing devices, but that would mean preventing end users from installing software on them. Furthermore, even a locked-down endpoint is still subject to the “analog hole”: someone could simply take a picture of the screen, which itself could then be shared.

Locked-down computing devices reduce informational freedom and constrict innovation, but they also pose a huge threat to the knowledge loop and democracy. Handing over control of what you can compute and who you can exchange information with would essentially amount to submitting to a dictatorial system. In mobile computation we’re already heading in this direction, partly on the pretext of a need to protect privacy. Apple uses this as an argument to explain why the only way to install apps on an iPhone is through the App Store, which they control. Imagine this type of regime extended to all computing devices, including your laptop and cloud-based servers, and you have one way in which privacy is incompatible with technological progress. We can either have strong privacy assurance or open general-purpose computing, but we can’t have both.

Many people contend that there must be some way to preserve privacy and keep innovating, but I challenge anyone to present a coherent vision of the future where individuals control technology and privacy is meaningfully protected. Whenever you leave your house, you might be filmed, since every smartphone has a camera, and in the future we’ll see tiny cameras on tiny drones. Your gait identifies you almost as uniquely as your fingerprint, your face is probably somewhere on the Internet, and your car’s license plate is readable by any camera. You leave your DNA almost everywhere you go, and we will soon be able to sequence DNA at home for around $100. Should the government control all of these technologies? And if so, should penalties be enforced for using them to analyze someone else’s presence or movement? Many are tempted to reply yes to these questions, without thinking through the consequences of such legislation for innovation and for the relative power of the state versus citizens. For example, citizens recently used facial recognition technology to identify police officers who had removed IDs from their uniforms. Advocates of banning this technology are overly focused on surveillance and never seem to consider these kind of “sousveillance” use cases (from French “sous” which means below).

There is an even more profound reason why privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Entropy is a fundamental property of the universe, which means it is easier to destroy than to create. It can take hours to build a sand castle that is destroyed by a single wave washing ashore. It takes two decades of care for a human to grow up and a single bullet to end their life. Because of this inherent asymmetry, technological progress increases our ability to destroy more quickly than our ability to create. Today, it still takes twenty years for a human to grow, and yet modern weapons can kill thousands and even millions of people in an instant. So as we make technological progress, we must eventually insist on less privacy in order to protect society. Imagine a future in which anyone can create a biological weapon in their basement laboratory—for example, an even more deadly version of the COVID-19 virus. After-the-crime law enforcement becomes meaningless in such a world.

If we can’t protect privacy without passing control of technology into the hands of a few, we should embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their freedom, rather than data and privacy. We should allow more information to become public, while strengthening individual freedom. Much information is already disclosed through hacks and data breaches, and many people voluntarily share private information on blogs and social media (McCandless, 2020). The economic freedom generated by the introduction of UBI will play a key role here, because much of the fear of the disclosure of private information results from potential economic consequences. For instance, if you are worried that you might lose your job if your employer finds out that you wrote a blog post about your struggles with depression, you are much less likely to share, a situation that, repeated across many people, helps to keep the topic of depression a taboo. There are, of course, countries where the consequences of private information being leaked, such as sexual orientation or political organizing, can be deadly. To be able to achieve the kind of post-privacy world I envision here, democracy with humanist values is an essential precondition.

If a post-privacy world seems impossible or terrifying, it is worth remembering that privacy is a modern, urban construct. Although the US Constitution protects certain specific rights, it does not recognize a generalized right to privacy. For thousands of years prior to the eighteenth century, most people had no concept directly corresponding to our modern notion of privacy. Many of the functions of everyday life used to take place much more openly than they do today. And privacy still varies greatly among cultures: for example, many Westerners are shocked when they first experience the openness of traditional Chinese public restrooms (Sasha, 2013). All over the world, people in small villages live with less privacy than is common in big cities. You can either regard the lack of privacy in village as oppressive, or you can see a close-knit community as a real benefit, for instance when your neighbor notices that you are sick because you haven’t left the house and offers to go shopping for you.

“But what about my bank account?” you might ask. “If my account number was public, wouldn’t it be easier for criminals to take my money?” This is why we need to construct systems such as Apple Pay and Android Pay that require additional authentication to authorize payments. Two-factor authentication systems will become much more common in the future, and we will increasingly rely on systems such as Sift, which assesses in real time the likelihood that a transaction is fraudulent. Finally, as the Bitcoin blockchain shows, it is possible to have a public ledger that anyone can inspect, as long as the transactions on it are protected by ‘private keys’ which allow only the owner of a Bitcoin address to initiate transactions.

Another area where people are nervous about privacy is health information. We worry, for instance, that employers or insurers will discriminate against us if they learn that we have a certain disease or condition. Here the economic freedom conferred by UBI would help protect us from destitution because of discrimination. Furthermore by tightening the labor market, UBI would also make it harder for employers to refuse to hire certain groups of people in the first place. We could also enact laws that require transparency from employers to more easily detect discrimination (note that transparency is often difficult to require today because it conflicts with privacy).

Observers such as Christopher Poole, the founder of the online message board 4Chan, have worried that in the absence of privacy, individuals wouldn’t be able to engage online as freely. Privacy, they think, helps people feel comfortable assuming multiple online identities that may depart dramatically from their “real life” selves. I think, in contrast, that by keeping our online selves separate, we pay a price in the form of anxiety, neurosis and other psychological ailments. It is healthier to be transparent than to hide behind veils of privacy. Emotional health derives from the integration of our different interests into an authentic multi-dimensional personality, rather than a fragmentation of the self. This view is supported by studies of how online self-presentation impacts mental health, where inauthentic presentations were associated with higher levels of anxiety and neurosis (Twomey & O’Reilly, 2017).

Many who argue against a post-privacy approach point out that oppressive governments can use information against their citizens. Without a doubt, preserving democracy and the rule of law is essential if we want to achieve a high degree of informational freedom, and this is addressed explicitly in Part Five. Conversely, however, more public information makes dictatorial takeovers considerably harder. For instance, it is much clearer who is benefiting from political change if tax records are in the public domain.

Psychological Freedom

Imagine you live in a society that has achieved economic and informational freedom. Would you make good use of those freedoms, or would your beliefs and fears hold you back from engaging in the knowledge loop? Or worse yet, would your attention be taken up by systems designed to capture it for someone else’s benefit? Would you feel free to pursue your own interests, or would your Industrial Age beliefs keep you trapped in the job loop? Would you have a strong sense of purpose, or would you feel adrift without a clear career path and a boss telling you what to do? Would you seek out new knowledge, or would you seek to confirm what you already believe? Would you feel free to create, or would you hold yourself back out of fear? And would you recognize when your attention is being manipulated?

While the previous sections on economic and informational freedom examined changes that require collective action, this section addresses individual action. We must free ourselves from our deeply engrained Industrial Age beliefs, and we can start on that path by developing some form of mindfulness practice. This, in my view, is essential to freely directing our attention in the Knowledge Age.

I should start by acknowledging the profound psychological dimension of the transition out of the Industrial Age. Social and economic disruption were making life stressful even before the Covid-19 pandemic. The unfolding climate crisis and the ongoing escalation of political and social tensions around the world are further causes for anxiety. To make matters worse, we have yet to learn to live healthily with new technology, and we obsessively check our smartphones during meetings, while driving, and before we go to sleep. This is taking an immense psychological toll, as increases in sleep disorders, suicide rates, drug overdoses and antisocial behaviors (e.g., bullying) show.

We need to go beyond that general insight about the population at large and look at what goes on in our own heads, but that requires time and effort because our brains are easily hijacked by emotional reactions that interfere with introspection and self-awareness. Can we overcome the anxieties that might prevent us from gaining, creating and sharing knowledge? Can we put down our phones, when they are designed to draw us in? It might seem like a monumental task, but humankind is uniquely adaptable. After all, we have navigated two prior transitions that required dramatic psychological change, first from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age, and then to the Industrial Age.

We now understand why humans can adapt so well. As neuroscientists have discovered, our brains remain plastic even as we age, meaning that what and how we think can be changed. In fact, we can change it quite deliberately, with techniques such as conscious breathing, meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy (McClintock, 2020; “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” 2020). As a crude approximation, the brain can be thought of as consisting of two systems: one that instinctually produces emotions and snap judgments and one that allows for rational thought but requires effort (Kahneman, 2013). Mindfulness techniques allow us better access to our rational faculties by limiting the extent to which our instinctual reactions control our behavior.

The idiom “take a deep breath” captures this idea well: pause and reflect before acting. The larger concept of deliberately freeing the mind is found in both Eastern and Western traditions. The Stoic philosophers developed practices of thought to temper the emotions, such as imagining the loss of a possession repeatedly before it occurs. In Buddhism, meditation techniques help practitioners achieve similar psychological freedom. We now have neuroscience research that lets us begin to understand how these techniques work, showing that their persistence over time is not a matter of religious belief or superstition, but grounded in the physical reality of our brains (Yoon et al., 2019).

We will now examine what we need to free ourselves from so that we can direct our attention to contributing to the knowledge loop and other Knowledge Age activities.

Freedom from Wanting

The extraordinary success of capitalism has made us confused about work and consumption. Instead of seeing them as a means to an end, we now see them as sources of purpose in themselves. Working harder and consuming more allows the economy to grow, so that... we can work harder and consume more. Though this sounds crazy, it has become the default position. We went so far as to ingrain this view in religion, moving to a Protestant work ethic that encourages working harder and earning more (Skidelsky & Skidelsky, 2013). Similar changes have taken place throughout Asia, where other religions have undergone this transition, most prominently in the case of the “New Confucianism” as championed by Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore (Pezzutto, 2019).

Even worse, we frequently find ourselves trapped in what’s known as ‘positional consumption’, or “Keeping up with the Joneses.” This is where what matters to us are not the inherent benefits of the things we buy, but their relative prestige. If our neighbor buys a new car, we find ourselves wanting an even newer and more expensive model. Such behavior has emerged not just with respect to goods but also to services—think of the $1,000 haircut or the $595-per-person dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant (Orlo Salon, n.d.; Cross, 2020). Of course, much of this confusion has been fueled by trillions of dollars of advertising spend aimed at convincing us to buy more, flooding us with imagery of how happy we’ll be if only we do. Between economic policy, advertising and religion, it is no wonder that many people are convinced that materialism is part of human nature.

However, our addiction to consumption is exactly that—an addiction that exploits a mechanism in the brain. When you desire something, a new car for instance, your brain gets a dopamine hit based on your anticipated happiness, which makes you feel good. Once you get the car, you compare it to your prior expectations. If the car turns out to be less than you expected, your dopamine levels will decrease and this can cause extreme disappointment. If your expectations are met, your dopamine levels will stay constant. Only if your expectations are exceeded will you get another hit of dopamine. Now as you get used to having the new car your expectation adjusts and so quite quickly after the initial purchase you no longer receive any new dopamine from having a new car. The unfortunate result of all this is known as the ‘hedonic treadmill.’ When your brain grows accustomed to something like a car or an apartment, then recreating the same feeling of happiness as your original anticipation for the car or apartment now requires a faster car or a bigger apartment (Szalavitz, 2017).

That same mechanism, however, can provide long-term motivation when the anticipation is aimed at creation or exploration instead of consumption. As an artist or scientist, you can forever seek out new subjects. As a traveler, you can forever seek out new destinations. Freedom from wanting—in the sense of the delusional belief that consumption as such will bring happiness or meaning—is possible if we recognize that we can point our brain away from consumption and towards other pursuits, many of which are part of the knowledge loop. Redirecting our reward mechanism re-establishes the difference between needs and wants. You need to eat, while you may want to eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant. You need to drink water, while you may want to drink an expensive wine. This is why UBI, as discussed earlier, focuses on meeting needs rather than wants. Once you are economically free to meet your needs and are freeing yourself from wanting, you can direct your attention to the knowledge loop.

Suppose skiing is your passion and you want to keep seeking the perfect powder. How would a UBI let you focus your attention on it? On a UBI alone, you might not be able to afford an annual ski trip to the Swiss alps, but ski equipment is actually not expensive when you consider that it can last for many years and can be shared with others. And if you’re willing to hike up a mountain, you can ski as much as you want without buying a lift pass at an expensive resort.

In this instance, psychological freedom means freeing yourself of assumptions that you might have about how to go skiing. It helps, of course, to remind yourself that many of these assumptions are formed by companies that have a commercial interest in portraying skiing that way. If you can learn to reframe it as an outdoor adventure and a chance to be in nature, it needn’t be expensive. A similar logic holds for any number of other activities.

To free ourselves from wanting, we should remind ourselves of the difference between needs and wants, learn how our brain works and point our seeking away from consumption towards creative and experiential activities. For many of us, that means letting go of existing attachments to wants that we have developed over a long time. Finally, we should always cast a critical eye on the advertising we encounter, understanding that it perpetuates illusions about needs and wants and keeps us trapped in the job loop.

Freedom to Learn

Young children ask dozens of questions a day, often annoying their parents who don’t have the time to answer. Humans are naturally curious, and it is this curiosity that has driven much of our progress (Shin & Kim, 2019). At the same time, our curiosity was not well-suited to the Industrial Age. If you employ people in a factory job that has them performing the same action all day every day, curiosity is not a desirable trait. The same goes for many modern service jobs, such as operating a cash register or delivering packages.

The present-day educational system was built to support the job loop of the industrial economy, so it is not surprising that it tends to suppress rather than encourage curiosity (Gatto et al., 2017). While educators hardly ever identify “suppressing curiosity” as one of their goals, many of our educational practices do exactly that. For instance, forcing every eight-year-old to learn the same things in math, teaching for tests, and cuts to music and art classes all discourage curiosity.

A critical way that we undermine curiosity is by evaluating areas of knowledge according to whether we think they will help us get a “good job.” If your child expressed an interest in learning Swahili or wanting to play the mandolin, would you support that? Or would you say something like, “But how will you earn a living with that?” The latest iteration of this thinking is an enthusiasm for learning how to code in order to get high-paying job in tech. Here again, instead of encouraging curiosity about coding, either for its own sake or as a tool in science or art, we force it into the Industrial Age logic of the job loop.

We need to free ourselves from this instrumental view of knowledge and embrace learning for its own sake. As we’ve already seen, UBI can go a long way in allaying fears that we won’t be able to support ourselves if we let our curiosity guide our learning. But will we have enough engineers and scientists in such a world? If anything, we’ll likely have more than we do under the current system. After all, forcing kids to study something is a surefire way to squelch their natural curiosity.

The knowledge loop, accelerated by digital technology, brings to the fore other limits to learning that we must also overcome. The first of these is confirmation bias. As humans we find it easier to process information that confirms what we already believe to be true. We can access a huge amount of online content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs rather than learning something new. We risk becoming increasingly entrenched in these views, fracturing into groups with strong and self-reinforcing beliefs. This phenomenon becomes even more pronounced with the automatic personalization of many Internet systems, with ‘filter bubbles’ screening out conflicting information (Pariser, 2021).

Another barrier to learning is the human tendency to jump to conclusions on the basis of limited data. After a study suggested that smaller schools tended to produce better student performance than larger schools, educators began to create a lot of smaller schools, only for a subsequent study to find that a lot of smaller schools were also doing poorly. It turns out that the more students a school has, the more likely it is to approximate the overall distribution of students. A small school is therefore more likely to have students who perform predominantly well or poorly.

Daniel Kahneman discusses such biases in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We rely on heuristics that result in confirmation bias and storytelling because many of the systems in the human brain are optimized for speed and effortlessness. These heuristics aren’t necessarily all bad as they can contribute to important ruin avoidance mechanisms (something which Kahneman ignores), but they served us better in a world with an analog knowledge loop, where more time existed for correcting mistakes. In today’s high-velocity digital knowledge loop, we must slow ourselves down or risk passing along incorrect stories. A recent study showed that false stories spread online many times more quickly than true ones (Vosoughi et al., 2018).

The bulk of online experiences we currently interact with are designed to exploit our cognitive and emotional biases, not to help us overcome them. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter become more valuable as they capture more of our attention by appealing to what Kahneman calls “System 1”: the parts of our brain that run automatically and that are responsible for our cognitive biases (Kahneman, 2013). You are more likely to look at cute animal pictures or status updates from your friends than to read an in-depth analysis of a proposal for a carbon tax. The recent explosion of “fake news” exploits this flaw in our systems, making large-scale manipulation possible.

New systems can help here. We might, for instance, imagine an online reader that presents opposing viewpoints to a given story. For each topic, you could explore both similar and opposing views. Such a reader could be presented as a browser plug-in, so that when you’ve ventured beyond the confines of a social media platform and are looking around on the Web, you could be drawn into actively exploring beyond the bounds of your usual sources (Wenger, 2011).

Fundamentally though, we all have to actively work on engaging what Kahneman calls “System 2”: the part of our brain that requires effort, but that lets us think independently and rationally. Developing and keeping up some kind of mindfulness practice is a key enabler for overcoming biases and freeing ourselves to learn.

Freedom to Create

After learning, the next step in the knowledge loop is creating. Here again, we need to work on our freedom. As Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist [...]” As adults we censor ourselves, inhibiting the natural creativity we enjoyed as children. The educational system, with its focus on preparing for standardized tests, further crushes our creative impulses. Many people eventually come to believe that creativity is something that they’re not capable of.

The job loop further solidifies these beliefs about creativity, and even institutionalizes them. Society categorizes people into amateurs and professionals. We venerate the professional guitar player, artist or sculptor but denigrate the amateur, dismissing their work as “amateurish.” When we start to measure creativity by how much money an artist or musician makes rather than the passion they feel for a pursuit, there is no wonder that many people fear they will never measure up.

Distractions also inhibit our impulses to create. There’s always another YouTube video to watch, another email to read, another post to glance at. Our brains are poorly suited to environments that are overloaded with information specifically curated to capture our attention. We evolved in a world where potentially relevant information—for instance, the sound of an approaching animal—could be a matter of life or death, and our brains are thus easily distracted. This is an example of a maladaptation to the current environment akin to our evolutionary craving for sugar in a world with added sugar everywhere.

In order to be able to create, we need to disconnect ourselves from many of those strategically selected and concentrated stimuli. Again, a mindfulness practice will be helpful here, allowing us to tune out interruptions, and there are many hacks we can use to prevent them in the first place, such as putting our phone into Do Not Disturb (DND) mode (I keep my phone on DND at all times with only family members being able to get through—that way I use my phone when I want to and not when Facebook or Twitter want me to).

Even after we have created something, many of us fear that when we share it, it will be criticized. Someone will call our painting ugly, our code incompetent, or our proposal naive. Given the state of much online commentary and the prevalence of ‘trolling,’ those fears are well-founded—but they need not inhibit our participation in the knowledge loop. Part of the answer is to work on the inner strength to continue sharing despite criticism.

Another part of the answer is that we should cultivate empathy. Whenever we comment on the work of others online, we should keep in mind that they dared to create and share it. And we should also remember that by contributing to the knowledge loop, they have engaged in the very thing that makes us human. Those who manage online communities should provide tools for flagging and banning people who are abusive or make threats aimed at shutting down sharing.

If you live in a country that is subject to dictatorship, censorship or mob rule, sharing opinions, art or research can result in imprisonment, torture or even death. And yet despite that, we routinely find people who freely share in these places. We should take inspiration and courage from those people, and we should support people’s ability to build systems to enable sharing in these places that are censorship-resistant and that allow for pseudonymous and anonymous expression (even though these systems ultimately can provide only limited protection, as discussed in the earlier section on privacy).

In the Knowledge Age, there is such a thing as sharing too much—not sharing too much personal information, but mindlessly sharing harmful information. Threats, rumors and lies can take on lives of their own, and we can find ourselves contributing to an information cascade, in which an initial bit of information picks up speed and becomes an avalanche that destroys everything in its path. So, as with freedom in other contexts, there’s a double-edged aspect to having the psychological freedom to share. We need to free ourselves from fear to share our creations and our ideas, while also needing to control our emotional responses so that we do not poison the knowledge loop. Ask yourself whether what you’re sharing will enhance or hurt the pursuit of knowledge. If the answer is not obvious, it might be better not to share.

Psychological Freedom and Humanism

Self-regulation lies at the heart of psychological freedom, and allows us to separate our wants from our needs. It lets us consider our initial reactions to what others are saying, writing or doing without immediately reacting in anger. It lets us have empathy for others and to be open to learning something new. And it lets us overcome our fears of creating and sharing.

Still, as humans we have a need for meaning that has us searching for purpose and recognition in ways that can all too easily result in us being psychologically unfree. Existential angst can express itself in many different forms, ranging from an inability to do anything to a manic desire to do everything. The persistence of religion is partly explained by its ability to address the need for meaning. Most religions claim that our purpose is to follow a set of divinely ordained rules, and that if we follow them, the respective god or gods will recognize and potentially even reward our existence.

Many organized religions intentionally disrupt the knowledge loop. They restrict the process of critical inquiry by which knowledge improves over time, through mechanisms such as censorship and “divine knowledge,” which is often encoded in sacred texts. This serves to maintain the power of the gatekeepers to the texts and their interpretation. While adhering to a religion may meet your existential psychological need for meaning, it may also make it difficult for you to participate fully and freely in the knowledge loop.

The same is true for many informal beliefs. Belief in a preordained individual destiny can be used to fulfill the need for meaning, but it also acts as an obstacle to psychological freedom via thoughts such as “this was meant to be, there’s nothing I can do about it.” Or people can belong to communities that meet the need for meaning through recognition, but impose a strict conformity that restricts participation in the knowledge loop. It can often be difficult to recognize how much of one’s behavior is controlled by custom or peer pressure.

A new humanism, built around recognizing the importance of knowledge, can provide an alternative that enhances psychological freedom instead of inhibiting it. With participation in the knowledge loop as a key source of purpose, learning new things, being creative and sharing with others is encouraged. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to be the proverbial rocket scientist. There are a great many ways to participate in the knowledge loop, including creating art, as well as caring for others and the environment.

In order to help people be psychologically free, we need to substantially change most countries’ education systems. Today’s systems were developed to support the Industrial Age, and their goal is to shape people to participate in the job loop. We need a system that celebrates knowledge for its own sake, allows students to discover their individual interests and deepen those into a purpose, and teaches people about how to be psychologically free. In other words, we need to put humanism at the center of learning.

Humanism and the knowledge loop thus have important implications for how we can reorganize society and take responsibility for the world around us. This is the subject of Part Five.

Informational Freedom

Access to the Internet

One Global Internet

No Artificial Fast and Slow Lanes

Bots for All of Us

Getting Over Privacy

Economic Freedom

Universal Basic Income

Technological Deflation

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2021d

Source: OECD, 2021b

But Isn't Deflation a Bad Thing?

UBI is Affordable

Impact of UBI on the Labor Market

Other Objections to UBI

UBI as a Moral Imperative

Before we examine informational freedom, we should remind ourselves why individuals deserve to have enough to take care of their needs, regardless of any economic contributions they may have made.

Part Four: Enhancing Freedom

Economic Freedom

Universal Basic Income

Technological Deflation

But Isn't Deflation a Bad Thing?

UBI is Affordable

Impact of UBI on the Labor Market

Other Objections to UBI

UBI as a Moral Imperative

Informational Freedom

Access to the Internet

One Global Internet

No Artificial Fast and Slow Lanes

Bots for All of Us

Limiting the Limits to Sharing and Creating

Getting Over Privacy

Psychological Freedom

Freedom from Wanting

Freedom to Learn

Freedom to Create

Freedom to Share

Psychological Freedom and Humanism

Part Four: Enhancing Freedom

Informational Freedom

Access to the Internet

One Global Internet

No Artificial Fast and Slow Lanes

Bots for All of Us

Limiting the Limits to Sharing and Creating

Getting Over Privacy

Psychological Freedom

Freedom from Wanting

Freedom to Learn

Freedom to Create

Freedom to Share

Psychological Freedom and Humanism

Economic Freedom

Universal Basic Income

Technological Deflation

But Isn't Deflation a Bad Thing?

UBI is Affordable

Impact of UBI on the Labor Market

Other Objections to UBI

UBI as a Moral Imperative