Scott Santens is creating support for unconditional basic income
336

patrons

$1,468
per month
Scott Santens here. You may also know me as "2noame", or as "that basic income guy from the Atlantic article talking about fish", or "that guy on Huffington Post warning about the effects of self-driving trucks in an America without a basic income already in place", or that speaker who presented about the need for basic income at the first World Summit on Technological Unemployment, or that guy who talked about basic income with Nick Hanauer at Brookings. Basically, if you're spent any amount of time looking into the idea of an unconditional basic income, there's a good chance you've read something I've written.

I'm a writer and now increasingly an activist spending as much time and resources I have working to spread awareness for the idea of a unconditional basic income (UBI) - one whose time has come here in the 21st century where technology is now forcing our hand. Without an income platform set just above the poverty level as a bare minimum, I believe poverty and inequality will continue to grow, the middle classes will continue to shrink, and the livelihoods of all but the top fifth of society will continue to slip away. But it doesn't have to be that way. We're better than that. We can turn all of this on its head, and instead of things continuing to get worse, we can make things better than they've ever been. We can reduce risk and so propel innovation and creativity to new heights. We can reduce fears of unemployment and purposely eliminate low-skill jobs better performed by machines, freeing us to intrinsically do all the work that drives us. We can stop wasting so many resources on fighting the fires of our lives, and instead prevent them from ever lighting in the first place. We need only make the choice. The path is ours to take.

Starting in 2013, my most popular article I'd written about basic income became was "Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?" It made Medium's Top 100 in June 2014, but it was surpassed by my article, "Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck," in 2015 which was republished across multiple media outlets and has likely altogether garnered over 1 million views. In 2016, my article, "Deep Learning is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs are for Machines," garnered over half a million views on Medium and was published in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In 2017, my most read article was "The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart." When not writing articles related to basic income, I am further researching the idea, and reading and writing comments as a moderator of the basic income community on Reddit - (/r/BasicIncome), where I've helped grow the community from the less than 2,000 subscribers it had when I joined, to over 50,000 today. I do what I can there to help make it a central place for discussion and learning in hopes of gradually gaining momentum for the social movement it will require to eventually be realized. I also run multiple social media accounts in support of basic income: @BasicIncome, Basic Income on Facebook, @rBasicIncome, rBasicIncome on Facebook, and help with the social media outreach of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG), and now Manna. One of my larger projects in 2014 was helping to organize a week-long series of Q&As; on Reddit (there known as AMAs) for International Basic Income Week with prominent proponents of basic income from all over the world. I repeated this in 2015 with another series of AMAs.

Since joining Patreon, I have started my own blog focused on answering frequently asked basic income questions, and my own Facebook page to better spread basic income awareness, and am a contributor to Futurism, the World Economic Forum, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).

At this point I am looking to reach over 1,000 supporters here on Patreon, with a focus on small dollar amount patrons. As I explained in a blog post about security, it is a key emergent component of basic income, and therefore a basic income of $1,000 per month funded by 1,000 people is far more secure and stable than the same amount funded by 100 people. So please, if you support the work I'm doing thanks to the passion I have for helping make this idea happen in the world, please don't worry that $1 per month is too little. To the contrary, that and over 999 others doing the same, is extremely close to the security of a government provided basic income. And the support of 1,000 people here on Patreon will also show that much more support for the idea of basic income itself.

If you would like to support my travel to various basic income-related events, I've also setup a separate crowdfund specifically for my travel expenses. For example, making it to each year's Basic Income Earth Network Congress and North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is beyond the funding abilities of this Patreon focused on basic needs. Those kinds of travel expenses are above and beyond a basic income.

If you would like to read a selection of BIG pieces of I have written so far, here are a few:

Some additional BIG projects of mine I've done:

Some of my campaigns for basic income:
  • The Basic Income for All Twibbon campaign (easily add the hashtag #BASICINCOME to your Twitter and FB profile photos)
  • The 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 successful Thunderclaps for basic income awareness on Basic Income Day (over 1.3 million people were reached in 2017)

Some of my media appearances about basic income:

I would also like to work on more videos (like this one) and images (like this one) aside from articles, to help create media with the potential to go viral and reach a much larger audience, as well as begin to write a book about basic income.

Every patron dollar pledged will help towards my goal of $1,012 per month. If I can reach that goal, I will have attained the level of basic income I personally believe we can and should start at here in the US as a poverty floor just above the poverty line (based on 2018 Federal Poverty Guidelines defining the poverty line for an individual without kids as $12,140), and at that point will be walking miles in the shoes of those whose feet I hope to similarly relieve. Through effectively attaining my own basic income through my writing and advocacy, I will be free to begin more fully engaging in the grassroots organizing required to better help achieve it for everyone.

"The BIG Patreon Creator Pledge"

Taking a page from the Creative Commons concept of Share Alike, any and every patron dollar pledged above $1,012 per month I will consider to be greater than a basic income and will pledge away to other Creators here on Patreon also creating content in support of their own basic incomes by making the same pledge to limit their own final goals to $1,012/mo (plus ~$360/mo per kid for Creator parents) and pledging to give the rest to others making the same pledge. My goal here is to create a community of content creators all working toward their own basic incomes with the same shared goal of achieving basic incomes for others.

Others who have taken The BIG Patreon Creator Pledge:
Contact me to take the BIG Pledge and have a link to your Patreon page added here. If you have not created a Patreon Creator account yet, please use this link.
Rewards
Pledge $1 or more per month
135 of 1000 patrons
[1,000 Patrons]
One thousand $1 patrons would provide maximum basic income security here on Patreon. Your pledge at this level would function to stabilize my basic income through a widely distributed pledge floor.

Get $1 Reward
Pledge $2 or more per month
90 patrons
[Private Access]
My non-public posts require this level of access to see. Thank you for freeing me from riding around on a bike in an 80s movie begging for this from John Cusack.
Get $2 Reward
Pledge $5 or more per month
45 patrons
[Behind the Scenes Access]
Get behind the scenes with my writing. Gain access to a list of what I want to write, and have input into which stories I choose next. Read articles I've written one day before they are published publicly. You are amazing and I want to hug you.
Get $5 Reward
Pledge $7 or more per month
39 of 100 patrons
[BIG Sponsor]
Be personally thanked by name at the bottom of every BIG article I self-publish on Medium and in the YouTube description of every BIG video I upload to YouTube. Thousands (and eventually hopefully millions) will know you personally support basic income and are actively helping fund its adoption.
Get $7 Reward
Pledge $10 or more per month
28 patrons
[Editor Access]
You can read my unpublished articles and works in progress. Leave editing notes to help make them better and more ready for public consumption. Be an active part of my writing. You are super amazing and with this kind of support, we can really make a difference!
Get $10 Reward
Pledge $20 or more per month
15 patrons
[BIG Conference Enabler]
Traveling around the world to advocate for basic income costs money above and beyond a basic income. For everyone who selects this reward level, $10 of your monthly pledge will not count toward my basic income and will instead be added to my savings account set aside specifically for traveling to and taking part in important conferences.
Get $20 Reward
Pledge $50 or more per month
5 patrons
[BIG Wardrobe Builder - ACTIVE]
You get your choice of t-shirts I've created to wear your support for basic income. In addition to the above rewards, once activated, I will supply one basic income t-shirt per month to another patron randomly selected each month from the rest of my patrons so that we can all express our support for a basic income guarantee with our amazing sense of fashion.


Get $50 Reward
Goals
$1,468 of $2,000 per month
The more patrons who choose to support me here on Patreon, the more security my basic income will provide and the more support the idea will show. Right now, it's possible for one person to drop their support for whatever reason, or for pledges to be declined, and as a result reduce my basic income to below the poverty level. However, that would not be the case if I had as many as 1,000 patrons each pledging $1 per month. In that case the greatest loss to my basic income by one patron would be $1. So that is my next goal, to spread out my basic income among a thousand patrons, while continuing to pledge everything over $1,012 to fellow creators who have taken the BIG Patreon Creator Pledge for their own basic incomes.
4 of 4
Scott Santens here. You may also know me as "2noame", or as "that basic income guy from the Atlantic article talking about fish", or "that guy on Huffington Post warning about the effects of self-driving trucks in an America without a basic income already in place", or that speaker who presented about the need for basic income at the first World Summit on Technological Unemployment, or that guy who talked about basic income with Nick Hanauer at Brookings. Basically, if you're spent any amount of time looking into the idea of an unconditional basic income, there's a good chance you've read something I've written.

I'm a writer and now increasingly an activist spending as much time and resources I have working to spread awareness for the idea of a unconditional basic income (UBI) - one whose time has come here in the 21st century where technology is now forcing our hand. Without an income platform set just above the poverty level as a bare minimum, I believe poverty and inequality will continue to grow, the middle classes will continue to shrink, and the livelihoods of all but the top fifth of society will continue to slip away. But it doesn't have to be that way. We're better than that. We can turn all of this on its head, and instead of things continuing to get worse, we can make things better than they've ever been. We can reduce risk and so propel innovation and creativity to new heights. We can reduce fears of unemployment and purposely eliminate low-skill jobs better performed by machines, freeing us to intrinsically do all the work that drives us. We can stop wasting so many resources on fighting the fires of our lives, and instead prevent them from ever lighting in the first place. We need only make the choice. The path is ours to take.

Starting in 2013, my most popular article I'd written about basic income became was "Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?" It made Medium's Top 100 in June 2014, but it was surpassed by my article, "Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck," in 2015 which was republished across multiple media outlets and has likely altogether garnered over 1 million views. In 2016, my article, "Deep Learning is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs are for Machines," garnered over half a million views on Medium and was published in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In 2017, my most read article was "The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart." When not writing articles related to basic income, I am further researching the idea, and reading and writing comments as a moderator of the basic income community on Reddit - (/r/BasicIncome), where I've helped grow the community from the less than 2,000 subscribers it had when I joined, to over 50,000 today. I do what I can there to help make it a central place for discussion and learning in hopes of gradually gaining momentum for the social movement it will require to eventually be realized. I also run multiple social media accounts in support of basic income: @BasicIncome, Basic Income on Facebook, @rBasicIncome, rBasicIncome on Facebook, and help with the social media outreach of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG), and now Manna. One of my larger projects in 2014 was helping to organize a week-long series of Q&As; on Reddit (there known as AMAs) for International Basic Income Week with prominent proponents of basic income from all over the world. I repeated this in 2015 with another series of AMAs.

Since joining Patreon, I have started my own blog focused on answering frequently asked basic income questions, and my own Facebook page to better spread basic income awareness, and am a contributor to Futurism, the World Economic Forum, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET).

At this point I am looking to reach over 1,000 supporters here on Patreon, with a focus on small dollar amount patrons. As I explained in a blog post about security, it is a key emergent component of basic income, and therefore a basic income of $1,000 per month funded by 1,000 people is far more secure and stable than the same amount funded by 100 people. So please, if you support the work I'm doing thanks to the passion I have for helping make this idea happen in the world, please don't worry that $1 per month is too little. To the contrary, that and over 999 others doing the same, is extremely close to the security of a government provided basic income. And the support of 1,000 people here on Patreon will also show that much more support for the idea of basic income itself.

If you would like to support my travel to various basic income-related events, I've also setup a separate crowdfund specifically for my travel expenses. For example, making it to each year's Basic Income Earth Network Congress and North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is beyond the funding abilities of this Patreon focused on basic needs. Those kinds of travel expenses are above and beyond a basic income.

If you would like to read a selection of BIG pieces of I have written so far, here are a few:

Some additional BIG projects of mine I've done:

Some of my campaigns for basic income:
  • The Basic Income for All Twibbon campaign (easily add the hashtag #BASICINCOME to your Twitter and FB profile photos)
  • The 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 successful Thunderclaps for basic income awareness on Basic Income Day (over 1.3 million people were reached in 2017)

Some of my media appearances about basic income:

I would also like to work on more videos (like this one) and images (like this one) aside from articles, to help create media with the potential to go viral and reach a much larger audience, as well as begin to write a book about basic income.

Every patron dollar pledged will help towards my goal of $1,012 per month. If I can reach that goal, I will have attained the level of basic income I personally believe we can and should start at here in the US as a poverty floor just above the poverty line (based on 2018 Federal Poverty Guidelines defining the poverty line for an individual without kids as $12,140), and at that point will be walking miles in the shoes of those whose feet I hope to similarly relieve. Through effectively attaining my own basic income through my writing and advocacy, I will be free to begin more fully engaging in the grassroots organizing required to better help achieve it for everyone.

"The BIG Patreon Creator Pledge"

Taking a page from the Creative Commons concept of Share Alike, any and every patron dollar pledged above $1,012 per month I will consider to be greater than a basic income and will pledge away to other Creators here on Patreon also creating content in support of their own basic incomes by making the same pledge to limit their own final goals to $1,012/mo (plus ~$360/mo per kid for Creator parents) and pledging to give the rest to others making the same pledge. My goal here is to create a community of content creators all working toward their own basic incomes with the same shared goal of achieving basic incomes for others.

Others who have taken The BIG Patreon Creator Pledge:
Contact me to take the BIG Pledge and have a link to your Patreon page added here. If you have not created a Patreon Creator account yet, please use this link.

Recent posts by Scott Santens

Rewards
Pledge $1 or more per month
135 of 1000 patrons
[1,000 Patrons]
One thousand $1 patrons would provide maximum basic income security here on Patreon. Your pledge at this level would function to stabilize my basic income through a widely distributed pledge floor.

Get $1 Reward
Pledge $2 or more per month
90 patrons
[Private Access]
My non-public posts require this level of access to see. Thank you for freeing me from riding around on a bike in an 80s movie begging for this from John Cusack.
Get $2 Reward
Pledge $5 or more per month
45 patrons
[Behind the Scenes Access]
Get behind the scenes with my writing. Gain access to a list of what I want to write, and have input into which stories I choose next. Read articles I've written one day before they are published publicly. You are amazing and I want to hug you.
Get $5 Reward
Pledge $7 or more per month
39 of 100 patrons
[BIG Sponsor]
Be personally thanked by name at the bottom of every BIG article I self-publish on Medium and in the YouTube description of every BIG video I upload to YouTube. Thousands (and eventually hopefully millions) will know you personally support basic income and are actively helping fund its adoption.
Get $7 Reward
Pledge $10 or more per month
28 patrons
[Editor Access]
You can read my unpublished articles and works in progress. Leave editing notes to help make them better and more ready for public consumption. Be an active part of my writing. You are super amazing and with this kind of support, we can really make a difference!
Get $10 Reward
Pledge $20 or more per month
15 patrons
[BIG Conference Enabler]
Traveling around the world to advocate for basic income costs money above and beyond a basic income. For everyone who selects this reward level, $10 of your monthly pledge will not count toward my basic income and will instead be added to my savings account set aside specifically for traveling to and taking part in important conferences.
Get $20 Reward
Pledge $50 or more per month
5 patrons
[BIG Wardrobe Builder - ACTIVE]
You get your choice of t-shirts I've created to wear your support for basic income. In addition to the above rewards, once activated, I will supply one basic income t-shirt per month to another patron randomly selected each month from the rest of my patrons so that we can all express our support for a basic income guarantee with our amazing sense of fashion.


Get $50 Reward