Scott Santens

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 warning about the effects of self-driving trucks before U.S. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang was, or that guy talking about basic income on that podcast (especially Ed Miliband's or Peter Joseph's), or that speaker who presented somewhere at some point about the need for basic income. My latest projects are Basic Income Today, a new UBI News Hub I'm editing, and also The Scott Santens UBI Enterprise which is my podcast that's available now on most podcast platforms. Basically, if you've spent any amount of time looking into the idea of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI), there's a good chance you've read something I've written, heard something I've said, or seen me talk about it on video or in person.


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 60,000 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 back 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've started my own blog focused on answering frequently asked basic income questions, my own Facebook page to better spread basic income awareness, my own podcast to reach podcast listeners, my own YouTube channel to help educate people about UBI with videos, and am a contributor to Futurism, the World Economic Forum, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, The Good Men Project, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). I've also joined the board of directors of both USBIG and the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity.

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 $1,050 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 annual 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 pieces I have written about UBI:

• (Check out the Basic Income Collection on Medium, and on my blog)

Some additional UBI projects of mine I've done:

• Traveled to DC to be a panelist in a Brookings Institute discussion with Nick Hanaeur about tech and basic income
• Traveled to NYC to speak about basic income at the first World Summit on Technological Unemployment
• Traveled to Switzerland to be a part of their June 5th, 2016 vote on basic income
• Created this visualization using Census data and my own calculations to show the per quintile effects of a basic income flat tax
• Compiled this ongoing list of books about or involving a basic income guarantee

Some of my media appearances about basic income:

• (Full list of appearances now available here)

Every patron dollar pledged will help towards my goal of $1,050 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 2019 Federal Poverty Guidelines defining the poverty line for an individual without kids as $12,490), 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"