Wage labor should be based entirely on free choice, but free choice should be fully free. To realistically achieve this freedom of choice, we must achieve the ability of people to have the voluntary choice of not working. If people can’t say “No”, they are effectively wage slaves with no real choice. As part of enabling this actual choice, we should also all have the freedom to be replaced without fear by cheaper and better technological alternatives. Actually creating these choices will require nothing less than a sufficiently high level of income separate from wage and salary incomes. Without this, we will continue to push against machines, and continue to look for our very survival toward jobs instead of our freedom from them.

MacGyver can use spare change and a can of deodorant to build a nuclear missile, but that's Hollywood (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) taking liberties, right? High technology is not a slapdash matter of stringing together office supplies and Easy Cheese until you have a laser ... or at least that's what they want you to think.

So what exactly would you do, if you were guaranteed $1,000 per month for the rest of your life? And yes, that’s around what the amount would most likely be here in the United States, at least at first. So think about that amount for a moment, and don’t think about what others might do with it, think about what you would do with it.

The purchase of Oculus by Facebook for $2 billion is the new best example of the growing inequality inherent in 21st century capitalism – what Paul Mason describes as the . A few people just got really rich, while the thousands of people who helped build the company from nothing, through $2.5 million of crowdsourced capital and a thriving open-source developer community didn’t.

Since Google Earth hit the Web in 2005, besides instantly turning all office desk globes into decorative accessories, it has opened the world up to global exploration at the click of a mouse. But it's not just a neat toy; some extraordinary things have been discovered with its one-click access to satellite imagery.