But still, there is just something naggy about the idea that humans don’t have to work to be free, that wage slavery is not somehow ennobling, that it is not heroic to waste a human life in a crippling cubicle in order to save it. The idea of a Basic Income, that there would be a transfer of cash from one vast, self-serving part of the economy sufficient to ensure no human is without food, clothing, or shelter (for no reason other than that humans absolutely require food, clothing, and shelter), just seems a little wonky still. Why is that? I don’t know.

But I do know that this is the 21st century, and that here in the most advanced age since yesterday we still cling to all our ideas of the last (and the one before, and the one before that). We are still using past centuries thinking to deal with this centuries problems. And those problems are getting bigger, faster, and harder. This was the lesson of 2008, that we really have no idea at all as a species what the hell is going on. Climate change, resource depletion, rampant inequality, dysfunctional institutions, and captured governments with no one really in charge but the bad guys. We need to think differently. We need to think like it’s the 21st century. Because it is the 21st century.

It’s to be expected of course that on the stroke of midnight at the turn of the millennium we would not instantly change everything about ourselves and our world. These things take time and we shall labor under a host of last century’s systems, beliefs, and institutions until they slowly change or die. We still have full state postal services in a land of electronic mail and expensive lumbering armies that languish in “exercises” until they are beaten by newer, 21st century asymmetric forces in sandals. It takes time and punishment to change some things it seems. But change they do. Eventually. One of those ideas from the past which has stubbornly held on now for over three hundred years, an idea that is holding us back in the most insidious of ways, is the idea that we should have to “work for pay” in the service of honor, esteem, self-worth, and God. That to do any other is madness. But this idea itself is madness, a concept that arose as the “Protestant Work Ethic”, a convenient marriage of religious duty wedded to the profit making needs of a burgeoning world of steam driven machines and textile mills. That by sacrificing our souls on the altar of modernity work would set us free. It didn’t. It just enslaved us to work.

But if we could just surmount that protestant work ethic nagginess, we in the 21st century would be free to understand that in our advanced digital age there is less and less reason to hew to the old quixotic saw and instead allow our technology to do the work for us. After all, it’s not like it isn’t doing the work for people already, it’s just that those people comprise a scant 1% or less of the population and it seems pretty clear they have had no trouble shaking off their work guilt — and getting paid large for their freedom and prescience. They are the yacht encrusted few who know full well it can be done — because they are doing it.

There used to be an old lottery commercial that asked “What would you do with a million?” The folks in marketing who crafted that line knew full well what the answer would be, uttered as a tired sigh from the throngs of beaten down cubicle serfs collapsed in exhaustion in front of their TV’s, survivors of another brutal day at the office or retail hell. Why, they would quit their jobs of course! Because their jobs suck, and their lives suck, and each and every one knew absolutely they had better things to do with their one single life on earth. And they desperately wanted to do those things. So they bought a ticket. Because cashing in that magic ticket meant finally the promise of true freedom would be complete.