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 most recently that speaker who presented about the need for basic income at the first World Summit on Technological Unemployment, or even more recently that guy who talked about basic income with Nick Hanauer at Brookings.

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 basic income guarantee (BIG) - 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.

Until 2015, my most popular article I'd written about basic income was "Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?" It made Medium's Top 100 in June 2014, but this was surpassed by my article, "Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck," which was republished across multiple media outlets and has likely altogether garnered over 1 million views. More recently, my article, "Deep Learning is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs are for Machines," has garnered over half a million views on Medium and was published in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. When not writing articles concerning 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 30,000 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 Basic Income Action. 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 now a contributor to The Huffington Post and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). I have also become part of a new group of activists who have decided to together begin organizing a movement for basic income in the US. (If you wish to be a part of this group, contact me, or head on over to basicincomeaction.org to volunteer to help.)

At this point I am looking to reach 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 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 this year's Basic Income Earth Network Congress in Seoul, South Korea would have cost $2,000. Those kinds of 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:

Traveled to NYC to take part in and report on the 2015 North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress
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
Transcribed this Alan Watts video involving basic income into text (also available on Pastebin and Scribd)
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 campaigns for basic income:

The Big Ideas Project (83rd most voted idea of almost 2,000 progressive ideas to be presented to progressive lawmakers)
The Basic Income for All Twibbon campaign (easily add the hashtag #BASICINCOME to your Twitter and FB profile photos)
The 2014, 2015, and 2016 successful Thunderclaps for basic income awareness on Basic Income Day (over 1 million people were reached in 2016)

Some of my media appearances about basic income:

The Keiser Report with Max Keiser
Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp on RT America
KNPR's State of Nevada
The Takeaway with John Hockenberry on WNYC
(Full list of appearances now available here)

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 $1,000 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 2016 Federal Poverty Guidelines defining the poverty line for an individual without kids as $11,880), 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 $1,000 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 $1,000/mo (plus $300/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.

For anyone interested in supporting my work monthly with Bitcoin, you can use this link here until Patreon hopefully starts accepting it at some point.