How to Build a Movement in Record Time
By: Conrad Shaw
Tags: Politics, Basic Income, Social Media, Economics, Media

The Importance of an Informed Public

This imbalance of information and influence creates a problem. For such a populist movement as UBI, success hinges on the public being well-informed and actively engaged on the issue. Without such public involvement, and with the fate of UBI left to circles of technocratic and political influence, we would be foolish to expect a holistic and humanistic policy — one that drastically transforms our economic and social structures in the way that UBI could — to emerge.

Political will requires public awareness. (source)

As an example of this, we can look back to Richard Nixon’s administration. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of UBI had a moment in the sun. Pushed into the national conversation by welfare activists, futurists, and as a cornerstone of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s populist human rights uprising called the Poor People’s Campaign, enough momentum was generated that various UBI experiments and studies were carried out, both in Canada and in the United States. Here was a chance to truly bring this idea into the light.

Unfortunately, King was assassinated, The People were not properly kept informed of the results of the various trials, and the Nixon administration did not deliver.

The data from the Canadian Mincome trial in Dauphin, Manitoba, were boxed up and the results essentially buried for decades until 2011, when researcher Evelyn Forget decided to do an analysis of the population outcomes from the region during that time frame. She found very encouraging indicators, such as decreased hospitalization rates, increased graduation rates, and more that might have been quite helpful for the public to hear about 40 years prior.

Biased and premature reporting on the American trials largely focused on a misleading claim that it was resulting in greater divorce rates, thereby quashing a lot of public interest in the idea, especially without a powerful voice like King’s to push back publicly on that narrative. Ultimately, the public was left out of the discussion, and it was left to the powers that be in Washington DC to decide where to take it from there.

During their presidential campaigns, Nixon and McGovern each promoted versions of UBI, Nixon preferring a form of negative income tax called the Family Assistance Plan that would perhaps more clumsily and modestly seek to accomplish similar aims, but itself representing a major shift in policy in the direction of UBI. The House of Representatives even passed Nixon’s bill by a wide margin in both 1970 and 1971, but it faltered in the Senate over disagreements in how large the benefit should be — the Senate wanted something larger. Unable to come to a quick resolution, the idea fizzled out, largely because there was no significant public pressure holding these politicians’ feet to the fire to get a bill passed. It wasn’t a top-of-mind issue for most Americans, and so it was more politically safe for elected officials to just let it die.

Fast forward to 2010 and beyond and we can see similar patterns reemerge. It started this time with a quick upswelling of interest due to fears of tech-driven job loss and a sexy set of endorsements from popular figures in the technology sector, from Elon Musk to Richard Branson to Mark Zuckerberg, as they noncommittally dipped their toes into the public narrative. UBI advocates owe a lot to this turn of events, but these tech boss billionaires, having lit the spark, cannot (and do not seem eager to) remain the faces of the UBI movement.

Following this surge of interest, we’ve seen the pilot programs springing up to test the merits of various incarnations of UBI-like policies, but here again, the narrative is being largely twisted by The News. What began as a mediocre and unambitious quasi-UBI trial, begrudgingly implemented by a conservative Finnish government, somehow became the new face of the whole UBI movement thanks to The News and its excessive coverage of that particular effort. Never mind that several other trials — from start-up accelerator Y Combinator in California to nonprofit organization GiveDirectly in Kenya — were far more promising and relevant for a multitude of reasons. The News, for some unknown purpose, had decided that Finland’s trial would represent UBI, and then went on to wildly misunderstand and misreport it. When Finnish government agency Kela, which had always been lukewarm on the concept, decided not to continue the project beyond its original two-year span, copy-paste headlines ran ad nauseam claiming things like “UBI Fails in Finland” and “Finland Cancels UBI Pilot.” In fact, though, the trial at that time was still ongoing without any results released yet whatsoever.

The next round of articles loudly proclaimed things like (to paraphrase) “Finland’s Results Are In: People Don’t Work More With UBI.” The truth in this instance was that the results were very much not in. They had just released preliminary and unverified results from the first year of the two-year trial, and not only had those results demonstrated no significant change in work hours in either direction, but also they had demonstrated marked improvements in quality of life, confidence, and security among the participants during that short time. As I write this in July 2019, we are still waiting for the final results of the trial. Such misreporting notwithstanding, the first wave of these articles served as an introduction to the idea of UBI for a great many Americans, and the follow-up articles served as further implication to many that UBI is clearly a naive and unworkable idea. If you want to know what really happened in Finland and how it could be well-interpreted, this article by Scott Santens is by far the best I’ve seen.

Beyond Finland, another problematic feature of mainstream media’s coverage of UBI so far (as of July 2019) is its simplistic and cynical narrative as to the purpose and function of UBI, describing it often as simply “Free Money for Nothing” and/or as if it were some sophomoric plot to supplant all work entirely and skip immediately to a post-work utopia of sorts. The tone of this commentary and “reporting” tends to be quite dismissive and stunningly unjournalistic. In part, this seems to be because many outlets don’t dig any deeper than reading other poorly-researched articles on the subject. Alternatively, they defer to the mainstream-type economists and thinkers in their rolodexes for more surface-level opinions and knee jerk reactions rather than seeking out interviews with people well-versed in the subject. It can be quite frustrating to be referred to yet another Paul Krugman hot take in the New York Times, regurgitating irrelevant common wisdoms of contemporary economic thought without much demonstrated depth of understanding of what UBI advocates actually propose. Or maybe they will interview someone like Stephanie Kelton, Bernie Sanders’ economic advisor and a professed opponent of UBI, who seems to willfully misrepresent the UBI movement and concept to favor her own preferred policy idea, the Federal Jobs Guarantee. When she describes UBI in interviews, I do not recognize the policy she describes. She often claims matter-of-factly that UBI must be on the order of $30,000 per year per person, paid for with deficit spending only, intended to be a catch-all to replace everything including healthcare and retirement, not taxed back from the wealthy, and ultimately designed to simply allow people not to work. I don’t know any UBI academics or advocates who would support or even take seriously anything like that type of vision or implementation, and yet Mrs. Kelton is the type of so-called expert with whom The News is more likely to discuss the subject.

Why The News would interview someone who either has not studied UBI in depth (or is actively aligned against UBI) and present them as the experts on the subject is hard for me to say definitively. Perhaps celebrity is a factor. After all, Krugman and Kelton are more famous at this time than, say, wonky UBI expert Karl Widerquist, who would give a much more informed presentation or analysis of the subject.

As of early 2019, however, another major shift has begun in the world of UBI. Andrew Yang has catapulted into political relevance as a Democratic presidential candidate centering his platform around UBI. And yet, even though he polls higher than half the crowded field of candidates and he had qualified for the debates long before many others, you would be hard-pressed as of mid-2019 to find many interviews or even mentions of him on The News. MSNBC has demonstrated a regular habit of leaving his name and picture out of the lists of candidates, and they even faced backlash after granting him by far the least time to speak of all 20 candidates in the first debate. To be fair, Yang has made a couple of FOX News appearances and was eventually granted a CNN town hall, but only after months of lobbying by a large and devoted base of supporters. I’ll go into more detail below on how Yang began breaking into the mainstream.

Perhaps one can be generous in assuming that the prevalence of misreporting and underreporting of UBI by The News is more due to lack of bandwidth, to incompetence, or to genuine ignorance than due to a politically motivated agenda. Regardless of the root cause, however, it remains a serious obstacle for the UBI movement, much like it does for many other grassroots and activist movements. From Selma to Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock, it generally takes a lot of inconvenient noise and spectacle in some form to force the top dogs in the fourth estate to take note and take a break from their regularly scheduled sensationalism and agenda to join the conversation in a substantial way.

This is what a dog looks like after it chomps on a human being.

In many cases, it takes startling imagery of violence suffered by some heroic individuals putting their bodies on the line. Standing Rock had been going on for months before independent journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! went there in person to deliver her viral report on the self-titled water protectors being mauled by the dogs of mercenary “security” forces. Understandably, many in the public were outraged to see indigenous Americans being abused this horrendously, and suddenly, there was too much demand for this story for The News to continue ignoring it.

And only once the major outlets were forced to participate in this story did major change begin to occur. Aid flooded in the form of helping hands and donations. The president of the United States himself was seemingly spurred to awareness and action when the story hit The News, but this only happened thanks to the efforts of the many protesters, social media influencers, and independent journalists like Amy Goodman on the ground, fighting relentlessly and at their own risk to force the truth into public view and eventually into the mainstream. President Obama finally took note and took action, his administration canceling the easement required for completing the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the object of protest. In one of his moving speeches to a wide audience, Obama was quoted to have said to the protesters:

I know that many of you have come together, across tribes and across the country, to support the community at Standing Rock, and together you’re making your voices heard.

I experienced a similar power struggle at that exact same time when my then fiancée (now wife) Deia Schlosberg, an independent filmmaker and journalist, was legally filming another pipeline protest in North Dakota. This protest was an action of direct civil disobedience, a bold stunt done in solidarity with Standing Rock and in coordination with three other teams along the Canadian border, and it managed to shut down all oil sands flowing in from Canada for one day. The North Dakota justice department swept Deia up along with the activists, kept her in jail for a three days, and proceeded to charge her with 45 years worth of felonies, ostensibly for complicity in the protest action itself. It was a viral social media campaign (#FreeDeia) that brought significant public attention to her unjust imprisonment and to that of the other filmmakers who had been jailed and charged in relation to the protest in other states. Without that social media campaign and public attention, I shudder to think of the difficulty we might have faced in battling those charges. Our lives and careers could have been ruined. Instead, the campaign brought the attention of tens of thousands of supporters, a powerful pro bono legal team, and eventually news outlets all over the country. What could have been the story of a career ended, a reputation tarnished, and decades in prison became a launching pad for greater influence thanks to the power of social media.

Clearly, there is great weight in specifically how the messaging of grassroots movements is delivered to The People. If left unpiloted, the messaging that most people encounter about UBI will be hijacked by The News.