#DappCon22: Day 3 - BIEN - History, Contribution To The Field, Its Future, Decentralisation Process

Transcript

good morning good morning and thank you so much for this invitation Malcolm has already given you the definition and I won't repeat it but still I can you oh yeah yeah what it is and what it is not yeah so I think I don't have to repeat this there are only two things that keep once in a while but that's not part of the Beyond's definition but that it should become a legal right and not just a scheme and uh as Hilda was mentioning a human right to be treated as a human right and known withdrawable that it's not subject

to change by the governments okay what is BN bien basic income Earth network is um a Global Network of Scholars activists and artists and not necessarily in that order uh build synergies between academics and policy makers which means that academics and activists actually try to solve the Practical problems and engage with policy makers and also given the new challenges that we have today we need to you know we do innovation in

the research as well so what kind of new questions we should ask what kind of new Solutions we should try to bring about so we do that and um it's also dissemination we have bi news we have we have a new service uh reliable information on basic income uh as rightly pointed out by Malcolm I think there's a lot of stuff being you know the words are being used by anybody and everybody so it's important to give reliable information and also stick to what the definitions are and what we mean by a basic income and building Partnerships with different kinds of stakeholders

that's what bien is now who is BN uh we have about 400 individual members scattered all over it was established in 1986 and about 40 affiliate organizations which are local organizations in 34 countries and covering all the six continents there are three generations of academic artists and political activists invested in accelerating human emancipation that is the key word actually who are invested in it who are working towards it and both as academics are also as on the streets to fight for a better world and operationally we have an executive

committee to look after everyday Affairs but all of us are basically volunteers we are just beginning this June we hired two people we have because we I'll come to that for the first time in 36 years we hired somebody and we have paid stuff where are we coming from um I mean it was established by a group of academics and artists and activists and I mean just to give a glimpse of where we come from uh in the 80s against the backdrop of what was happening at

that time in particularly in Europe on the one hand there was disillusionment about socialism on the other hand there was the rise of neoliberal policies Reaganomics and that's right kind of policies in a situation in a context like this there was a search for thinking about human emancipation in a very different ways so this is a very interesting article written by two co-founders Robert vanderveen and Philip vampire which is a capitalist road to Communism so they try to uh say make a proposal that basic income could be that so I

mean it's not that we are against capitalism but we want to humanize capitalism we want a new capitalism a capitalism that doesn't begin with zero it doesn't begin at zero so a capitalism where you have something a basic foundation and then you participate in the labor market if you want to and if and have the power not to participate in the labor market that's the whole point about the freedoms we talk about so I mean just that's the I mean the what I call political imaginary I think uh all of us utopians or all of us who want a better world we do create an imaginary and we try to work towards that imaginary so like a socialism was a

political imaginary so a basic income Society is also an imaginary if you have imagined that and we want to implement that and today seems to be right after 36 years even our Founders feel so good that it is being discussed all over the world the time seems to have come for a basic income so what is it that we are doing now we are still struggling the reason why we are here is because we are still struggling to make sense of the current mode of capitalism and trying to understand how and trying to see how people can become equal Partners in this whole system in the so-called the new industrial society 4.0 or some people say 5.0 I mean whatever is it is okay

of okay why are we here we are here because we are invested in future we are very seriously invested in future we would like to understand in which direction we are going in which direction humanity is going and what kind of challenges we are going to face in the next 20 30 40 years I mean it seems to us that uh it seems to me that a different kinds of crises are going to come together we are on the brink on the one hand we have the climate crisis on the other hand you have the employment crisis work crisis the future Society are we going to have the jobs are they

going to disappear what kind of a world is going to be if there are not going to be many jobs if all jobs are going to be gig jobs what are people going to do where will they get their basic income security from who is going to pay them okay so I mean we are here because we want to talk about Mumbai basic income I think that's what Malcolm started and that's what we are continuing now when the corporates try to talk about Universal basic income all the um big icons like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg when they try to or even why combinator people talk about basic

income what exactly do they mean by it do they mean the same as what we are saying do they mean do they mean but what else is there I mean why are corporates interested in it I mean the very interesting author called Tim Wu he wrote a fascinating book in 2010 he's a law professor in Colombia University it's called Uh I'll quickly go there yeah it's called master switch he wrote a very interesting book called master switch which where he says invention breeds history and in invention breeds industry and Industry begets Empire which means every invention starts with

young people utopians dreamy-eyed and then in their garage or somewhere and then slowly slowly slowly all those individuals disappear and then industry takes over and then in Industry results in an Empire the moment I say Empire I mean the monopolies so I think the other day when we were talking about uh when one of the presentations was being made about uh the previously how the Privacy will be uh protected in this new web tree how it will be decentralized the question is that who is interested in decentralizing why are they interested in decentralizing

are we really interested in giving that power back to people is it is that the motive or is it the customer base you're creating a customer base first you decentralized and then you start selling things to them okay so the question is that in the web 3 there are many promises being made in that web3 is going to be XYZ and very optimistic notes are there they're also very Skeptics of web3 that all this is big hype and it's nothing great is going to happen I think at the end of the day so I think it's a very controversial I think that's exactly why we want to be in that space as a voice on behalf talking about see this is how I think it's plenty of claims being made uh

basic income coin and the basic income experiment and blockchain instead of Beggars so on and so forth so I think it's uh it's important that we open conversations on this on many questions related to ethics I'll just read out to you this statement that too many underprivileged people are locked out of opportunities that could take them out of poverty including access to Capital markets and digital work opportunities therefore the good dollar project aims to elevate that by fostering Financial inclusion and empowerment around the world is it a promise to eliminate poverty

is it a real promise are they going to live up to that promise so I'm not trying to portray this as any danger but I'm trying to say that we need to ask these questions uh yeah this uh this is what I mean the master switch I think it's a very fascinating book because it talks about the master switch is with like Facebook or people who are controlling data and uh there is an after a point he talks about a Syndicate of Master switches because all the small small switches have been taken over by them all the inventors all the young utopians and everything is

swallowed by this big machine and then that becomes the master switch and then several Master switches kind of form a syndicate um is it really meant we're talking about poverty is it really I think we will also come to other experiences we've had we need to open these questions now yeah the question is that is it possible to create to build a caring Society at the end of the day that's what matters is can we build a capitalism that will be a caring Society bill I mean provide care to the last person that is the most important thing

yeah decentralized future of BN we are now creating in different continents being hubs so that we try to build again from the bottom up and bring questions from all continents to the center to bien and try to address those questions rather than a priority give questions to others so we are creating that that is the future we see and I think we have great possibilities of collaborating with people who are working uh on blockchain Technologies and the Technologies of future so the question is that is a better world possible and if that is possible what kind of synergies we can build what kind of

Partnerships we can build what kind of collaboration we can have with people working on technology thank you so much [Applause] does anyone have questions and everything that was just discussed yep none okay thank you so much for your time thank you for that introduction