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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13637 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I don't understand this. If we're talking about ~universal welfare in the age of AGI-granted post-scarcity, it becomes ridiculous to try to police the "social contribution" of citizens: nobody's "contributions" will be worth a damn anymore, that's exactly why everyone will be on the dole in the first place. Tiered welfare of the kind you propose might be a useful framework in a society for whose long-term survival the existence of a growing chronically-unemployed underclass is an existential risk, but it loses all meaning in a world where everyone is unemployed and human labor has become permanently irrelevant to the survival of human society.

Why? Even in such a society, the behavior of fellow people is important to us. We don’t want violent addicts on the subway, we don’t want ugly people covered in tattoos, we don’t want people who are antisocial, rude, vulgar, loud etc to the point of damaging their community or the broader social fabric. We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

Putting everyone on UBI doesn’t solve any of these problems alone.

If it's truly post-scarcity, you just make a tiered society. The only difference between them is access to other humans. The violent addicts get all the drugs, food, and medical care (provided by robots and/or masochists, presumably) they desire, and the normal people don't ever have to see them or their effects. The beautiful people live in their own mirror-covered world away from the depredations of the glance of uggles, etc.

Of course, we'll never actually GET post-scarcity, but if we did the problem would be solved.

you just make a tiered society

This is, of course, what economic stratification already does. The question is how you do that when people are no longer differentiated by economic contribution.

In practice the only way to do this is with block grants through a rum millet system; you know that the fat violent addicts have to be given access to the hall of mirrors.

We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

I think that can more straightforwardly and more humanely achieved by, you know, making laws against those things and enforcing them. You don't need to start gatekeeping access to food like a Charles Dickens villain.

And also, reducing welfare to disincentivize actively harmful behavior is one thing; setting the bar at positive "social contributions" is still another. In a post-scarcity world where there's no need to incentivize human beings to pump their time and energy into the economy rather than spending it on more pleasant pursuits, there is no ethical justification for placing any artificial barriers in the way of someone who just wants to collect their share and then go off to live as a reclusive hermit, keeping to himself and never affecting other people's lives one way or the other. In the real world, we rightfully discourage people from becoming unproductive hermits living on welfare, because they're unfairly leeching off other people's sweat and toil, and if too many people defected in that way, the economy would collapse. But if the economy starts literally running itself then preventing hermits from being hermits is just senseless tyranny.

Perhaps senseless tyranny is the end goal.

Well - social contributions will be worth something, that's the point. We (at the risk of manufacturing consensus) want a UBI society to look like the glass utopia from that one meme where everyone is fit, pleasant and driven, not cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk dystopias are defined by the social order itself being oppressive in one way or another, not by the behavior of the citizens - but regardless, if citizens' good behavior isn't producing anything I object to calling it "social contribution". If what we are talking about is some kind of social conformity tax, its advocates should own up to what they are proposing, without hiding behind language associated with the fair allocation of scarce resources between productive and non-productive members of an economy.

Many cyberpunk-adjacent works nowadays put focus not just on the oppression, but also on the ignoble state of the people.

That may be, but "evil state-sized megacorps make you pay through the nose for the very air you breathe" is still a core enough part of the aesthetic that "in order to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia, we should establish a regimented system where people get less food to eat depending on a social credit score" scans to me as almost comically backwards.

Hey, if we're talking megacorps, then presumably the people can pick which megacorp's social credit score they want to maxx. We could have a plausible explanation for the origins of different factions within one city, that way!

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