Universal Basic Income and Slay the Spire Mods

When talking with people about Universal Basic Income (UBI) a common refrain is: “This is a bad idea, because nobody will work at a grocery store if they just get free money every month!”

To that my answer is: “Have you seen all the crazy stuff fans make online?”

For the last year or so I’ve been big into playing modded Slay the Spire characters.

Slay the Spire is a roguelike deckbuilding videogame, where you play as one of four characters trying to fight their way to the top of a tower. Each character has a unique pool of cards to play with, with different mechanics and abilities.

The game came out in 2017 and fans have been coding new characters, cards, quality of life improvements, and other so-called mods since practically day one. Two months after relase, modders started work on a collection code called ModTheSpire, which would then enable the thousands of mods that would follow.

One of the most impressive mods is Downfall. Downfall is a fan-made sequel in all but name, with eight new characters based on the game’s villains. Multiple people worked together on it for years, doing all their own coding, artwork, music, writing, player outreach – everything a real game studio would be doing.

And they did it without getting paid, as a volunteer project, and then released it for free to anybody that wants to play it.

But it’s not just programmers that are doing this. People have made all sorts of fun, creative fan art in their spare time, in all sorts of mediums.

There’s been countless words of fanfiction out there written about pretty much any media you can think of. 50 Shades of Grey was originally a Twilight fanfiction, and has spawned multiple best selling novels and box office hits.

Back in the early 2010’s there was a popular “abridged series” movement, where small teams of people re-dubbed and re-edited TV shows to create new paraodies of the original content. Dragon Ball Z Abridged and Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series are maybe the most famous of these, both with an over fifteen year run and tens of millions of views on Youtube.

Relatedly, people make all sorts of fan visual content, including:

• animations: Augbert - Very Important People Animated
• music videos: Ain’t Nothin’ Like A Funky Beat [ONE PIECE AMV]
• digital art: Gabriel Picolo’s Teen Titans fanart

and so much more!

While some fan projects do get a little bit of revenue in the form of ads or Patreon subscriptions, most are completely unpaid.

I absolutely believe that in this world without UBI, people should get paid a living wage for their art. But even in late-stage capitalism, there’s plenty of people out there making cool stuff just because it’s cool.

And it’s not just entertainment! People make and share all kinds of things with each other.

People have been modding their insulin pumps for years now, in an attempt to survive under the predatory American privatised health system.

Political parties like the DSA are almost entirely volunteer run, with donations going towards organizing and the small amount of salaried members.

Food Not Bombs chapters around the world have been feeding people out of their own pocket for decades, often standing up to state-sponsored violence and arrests to do so.

So how does this all come back to UBI?

Well, I think we have ample evidence that people, when given the chance, will spend their time doing fulfilling work to help and entertain the people around them.

We’ve been painting on walls for countless millenia with no financial incentive, people won’t just stop doing work if they don’t need to for rent or food anymore.

Now there is, in my opinion, a real argument to be made around essential work.

The COVID lockdowns showed us that while the vast amount of work done in the global North are so called “bullshit jobs”, ¹ there’s still plenty of work that’s critically essential.

Many of the people doing those jobs aren’t paid very well if at all, are treated without diginity² on the job, and live in poverty conditions or under incarceration³.

So with UBI, without the threat of homelessness, why would people do the unpleasant jobs? We’d all starve to death, because everyone is making fan games, right?

I don’t think so. There’s tons of examples of people stepping up to do the work that needs to be done.

For example, even in the highly-privileged tech world, it’s expected for an entire team of engineers to sign-up for oncall duty – to be on standby after hours to triage any problems that might come up. Because everybody on the team is on the rotation, nobody has to do it all that often.

We can also look to what people do in natural disasters. For example, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans a group of people (now a non-profit called the Common Ground Collective) came together to make sure people had food, water, and medical care.

Or we can look at the medical world, where a group of under-paid, un-recognized, Black men and women formed the first EMT service, Freedom House.

There’s countless examples of groups of people around the world organizing themselves in ways that promote diginity, happiness, and care for one another.

Now, it’s worth noting that getting UBI in, say, the United States, would only be a first step. If the Global North has UBI, but still relies on the sweatshop labor of people in the Global South, our job isn’t complete.

But I truly believe that we can build a world where something like UBI would be a good thing.

There’s so many people out there that resist the idea that “if you’re good at something you shouldn’t do it for free”. If you take a look around you’ll see them everywhere, all those fans, those volunteer firefighters, those mutual aid workers.

And once you do, I think you’ll be able to believe in UBI too.