In the spirit of starting a new year, the conversation at dinner last night revolved around small utopias: little changes that really wouldn’t be that hard to achieve and yet would never actually be implemented, mostly thanks to the idiocy inherent in power. I, for example, would like the biggest, most yellow newspapers (in Germany, that’s the BILD) to write about what a scandal the surveillance state is – EVERY day and on their FRONT PAGE – until every last moron who is still babbling about how he has ‘nothing to hide’ has finally understood it. Other suggestions included: abolishing all traffic signs and seeing if people can manage without them; getting rid of crewed space flight (“So that we can stop watching these fools stumble around space”) and counting votes that were rendered invalid on purpose as such.
Of course, the conversation moved onto the unconditional basic income, something most people I know can agree would actually be a pretty great thing (you see, I don’t know a lot of cultural pessimists). This conversation always makes me sad, because it invariably ends up being about the reasons why it’s impossible. Interestingly, paying for it wouldn’t even be the problem. The global economy is. No country could launch the basic income on their own without having to fear an even more unjust two-class-system between immigrants and people with a passport. We debated some options: Switzerland (there has been some movement on the subject lately, plus, they’re RICH, right?), Sweden (small and progressive), Norway (oil money!), Iceland (politically adventurous and an island, though unfortunately broke). We did end up where I always end up when talking about this, pretty much nowhere. I guess we’ll stick with the small utopias, for now.