I still don’t agree that men can’t stop thinking about Rome, but I’m definitely thinking about it today.
When Roman emperors distributed grain for free to the urban poor, they weren't being charitable, and it certainly wasn’t an egalitarian desire to spread the fruits of empire or slave-worked estates.
The corn was a political instrument, a way of managing a population that had already been stripped of its economic independence. The latifundia, large estates worked by slaves, had largely swallowed the smallholdings that once sustained free Roman citizens. The dole wasn't intended to reverse that dispossession. It administered its consequences, at a price: dependency, and the political quietude that tends to follow.
It is worth keeping that history in mind when reading Elon Musk's recent post on X, in which he called for a “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government” as the remedy for AI-driven unemployment. Look how generous Musk is being! How egalitarian! How equitable! But of course, the political logic is something else entirely.
There are serious questions about who would fund such a programme, and how, and whether Musk's inflation argument holds. Those deserve their own treatment. But the more important question isn't economic. It's structural. What kind of political settlement does tech UBI actually propose?
Universal basic income has a history on the left which comes from a different set of concerns. One argument is that decoupling survival from employment shifts the balance of power between workers and employers. If you can meet your basic needs without selling your labour, you can afford to refuse bad terms. UBI, in this framing, is a tool for reducing structural dependence — on employers, on the labour market, on the contingency of finding someone willing to pay for what you can do.
Silicon Valley UBI starts from the opposite perspective. It leaves the ownership of AI infrastructure — the models, the compute, the data, the platforms — entirely untouched. It doesn't ask who owns the robots, or who captures the productivity gains from automation, or what democratic accountability looks like for systems that are reshaping the economy at scale. It simply proposes that the state write cheques to people the technology has displaced, substituting one form of dependence for another. Employer dependency becomes state-transfer dependency. The ownership question gets quietly closed before it is properly opened.
It is worth being precise here about what kind of state Musk and his cohort have in mind, too. The assumption embedded in any UBI argument is that the state which distributes the gains of automation on behalf of its citizens is, in some meaningful sense, accountable to them. It's democratic, rather than acting on behalf of a single group. That assumption is one this political class has spent years working to undermine.
In 2009, Peter Thiel, architect of much of the ideological infrastructure of Silicon Valley's current political turn, wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. He has not recanted this view. The network of investors and operators around him, several of whom now hold or directly influence positions of state power, has acted accordingly. The kind of UBI our tech overlords want, then, is not just administered dependency. It is dependency administered by people who do not believe you should have a meaningful say in how it works.
All this matters because the political question of who owns the means of production in an AI economy is unsettled. What Musk and his ilk want is for it to be settled — by default, in favour of those who already hold the capital — while the public conversation focuses on the generosity of the proposed dole.
The timing makes the point. Musk floated his proposal the same week Reuters reported that Meta is laying off 10% of its global workforce, explicitly citing AI efficiencies. Dispossession and its managed remedy, arriving together, almost pre-packaged. The technology that displaces the worker and the proposal that makes that displacement politically tolerable are products of the same class of actors, emerging in the same news cycle. That is not a coincidence of timing. It is the shape of the new economy that they want to see emerge.
The Roman grain dole didn't give the plebs more power. It made them manageable. What is being proposed now by the tech bros carries the same structural logic: not the reversal of dispossession, but baking it into the structure of society. The question of who owns the machines — and who should — still goes unasked.
Your regular Ten Blue Links will follow tomorrow. Hopefully, you enjoy this sojourn into history and economics.