After asking this question, he steps to the side. The image of Greg and his mom at the basketball court is replaced by another, the same one I saw on a billboard in midtown on the car ride here: a photograph of a construction site populated by male models, while a blond woman wearing a white negligee and an expression of cartoonish lust looks on from the side.
“Now, as you can see, this man is at work. And this woman, well, for all we know she may be at work too,” Greg says, having fluidly dropped the tearful tone and returned to his previous swagger. His comment is followed by sparse chuckles from male members of the crowd, which are instantly silenced by reproachful stares from their female companions, who suspect any joke at a sex worker’s expense, and any image that so closely adheres to the clichés of male fantasy, even coming from a speaker who, like his mother with the wealthy families whose houses she cleaned, has done so much, already, to earn their trust.
“I’m going to ask you to do something,” says Greg. “I want you to reach down under your seat and find the AR helmet that was placed there before you arrived. I want you all to put your helmets on. I promise they don’t bite.”
More chuckles and murmurs, but people put on the helmets, eager for the part of this talk that they came to hear, the part where the promised product will be unveiled. I’m eager too, and a little bit scared, so I put on the helmet and watch the work site come to life before my eyes in a seamless 3-D that surrounds me on all sides. Worker-models spread mortar and lay bricks, and the negligeed woman bends to lift a wrench that has fallen to the ground. This causes some groans from the women in the crowd, though most remain silent, awaiting Greg’s explanation, still anticipating whatever comes next.
We watch this play out for a moment, and then there’s a rupture, and the room goes dark. When things come back into focus, us helmeted onlookers have been transported to an entirely different scene. The same cast of model-workers is here, but instead of laying bricks, they—and we—watch kids play basketball. Our formerly negligeed woman is wearing a sundress, and her face, we now see, resembles Greg’s mom’s, though in her current incarnation she looks fit and robust. Through the magic of augmented reality, one of the kids playing ball is Young Greg, and his model/mom cheers as her son sinks a jumper.
“These people,” Greg says, through a speaker in my ear. “These people are also at work.”
At his words, Greg’s model/mom stands. She steps out of the bleachers, and steps out of the image, and steps down onto the dais where she poses beside her now-grown son. It’s unclear if this woman is here in the flesh, or if the optics on my helmet have created this illusion. Either way, she looks real. In unison, Adult Greg and his model/mom begin to undress. There’s a gasp from the audience, and another, smaller gasp, when it becomes clear that beneath their clothes they are not nude, but are, instead, wearing skin-tight nude bodysuits, conspicuous only for their few tiny zippers and the absence of genitals, nipples, and hair.
“We’re living in something very close to a utopia,” Greg says. “Food is in abundance. So is medical care. Cars run on sunlight. Meat grows on trees. If you cut off your finger you can print a new one at home and fly in Drone MD to inject you with anesthetic and sew it back on. All of us in this room are better off than we’d have been even fifty years ago.”
Behind them plays a montage of half a century’s progress. Depression-era amputees in wood and wicker wheelchairs are replaced by laughing kids who pop and lock on titanium prosthetics in a dance class being taught by Rihanna. We see various firsts: first mobile phone, first home computer, first AR helmet. The camera pans a grove of stem-cell steak trees where slabs of meat hang like heavy fruit.
“But not everything’s perfect,” Greg says. “We, in this room, are better off, but not everyone is. The jobs that people like my mom needed in order to make ends meet, well, a lot of those jobs no longer exist.”
A new montage plays. We watch bots build bots; we watch bots wait tables, run tills in bodegas and clothing stores. We see a room full of bots wearing headsets, taking customer service calls. And where this leads: faces of the homeless, tents in Tompkins Square Park, scenes from an #Occupy rally.
Greg explains that one solution to this problem is to pass this bill, the UBI. But when he considers this solution, he thinks of his mother and her pride. He wonders whether she would have wanted a handout, whether that would have made her feel good about her position in life, about her larger contributions to the world. He says that when he thinks long and hard, he knows that this solution is highly problematic. That when people get free money, they don’t value it in the same way that they would if the money was earned. That their shame in receiving these handouts makes them spend money in inappropriate ways. They don’t save. They buy drugs. Instead of solving our problems, these handouts create a need for further handouts, for more expensive programs subsidized by the government. He cites a study of dubious origin. He tells the crowd that this country was founded on the idea of work, that it’s a place where every woman deserves the chance to feel pride in her labor. Where every man deserves the opportunity not to take, but to earn. He says that, when it comes down to it, the problem is not about resources, but about their distribution model. And that’s what he’s
