Universal Basic Income and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness by Oshan Jarow
Read the essay here: https://www.perell.com/fellowship/universal-basic-income-and-the-capitalist-production-of-consciousness/
You can read the other essays here: https://www.perell.com/fellowship/overview-write-of-passage-fellowship

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This essay explores how universal basic income intervenes in the hyper-capitalist distortion of human development.

Perhaps the most neglected product of modern economies is the human being. When digital technologies enabled the conversion of attention into capital, the commodification of consciousness became the next frontier of economic development.

Universal basic income intervenes in this process by affording everyone a basis of decommodified time that makes behaviors, relations, and projects - ways of living - viable even if they don’t generate income. By remaking the logic of the everyday, basic income incites new developmental trajectories to arise from the bottom up.

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About Oshan: I’m interested in how we might redesign economies to enrich their most neglected product: human consciousness. I received a degree in economics and spent a year studying meditation in India. To make sense of things, I write essays and produce a podcast, both bringing contemplative philosophy into dialogue with economic theory.

I’m fascinated by the dynamism of consciousness, the untold ways it can feel like to be alive. But to explore these possibilities as a collective, we require a sturdy, sane economic base. Economies of the 21st century should minimize avoidable human suffering while maximizing vitality. Musingmind.org is my digital home base, the splayed trail of my becoming as an astonished bag of flesh in an expanding (perhaps infinite!) cosmos.

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The Write of Passage Fellowship is designed to help a small group of intellectually curious minds to create world class essays on a topic of their choice.

With the rise of the internet and tools for mass communication, we’re witnessing a new generation of writers and content creators. It has helped me build my own audience, a process that I then systematized to create the Write of Passage course as we know it today.

The news doesn’t dive deep enough. The problems of the modern world are too complex for short articles with clickbait headlines. We plan to nudge the conversation in a more thoughtful direction. Each essay will analyze events with the context required to communicate nuance and help the reader understand them.

For the inaugural cohort, we brought together 8 people to create a world-class essay on a topic of their choice. Each fellow received mentorship and professional editing.