ANSWER #3
The Human Lobby
Your tax dollars, redirected.

The Human Lobby is the organized civic voice of American citizens who have decided that the economy, the political system, elected leaders, and entrenched institutions should actually work for them. It emerges from the Commiissary network and the communities it serves. It is powered by Good Standing and operates as a structural counterweight to the systems that are no longer serving the people — not by seeking power within those systems, but by building undeniable power outside them.

We have been asking a question since we started Radiical Systems: what happens when the systems we are supposed to rely upon stop working for us?

In our first case study, focused on the city of Baltimore, we learned there are ~26,000 nonprofits competing for the same shrinking pool of resources. We also observed that most of these grant-funded initiatives were designed to be dependent on grant funding cycles, rather than to eventually become self-sustaining operations. In our next two case studies in Brooklyn, New York and Lansing, Michigan, we discovered the difficulties in funding and sustaining community spaces that hold neighborhoods together. Everywhere we looked, the pattern was consistent: communities under strain, a social sector structured around managing need rather than resolving it, and no honest, updated plan and evolving infrastructure designed to close the gap for good.

Now we are watching it happen at a scale the majority of Americans have not anticipated. A phrase is quietly reverberating around the country: “what are people going to do?” Artificial intelligence is not coming for jobs at some distant time in the future. It is already here, and it is moving faster than any institution, any policy, or any safety net was designed to absorb. The people most affected are not abstract statistics. They are the same people our case studies led us to: overworked, under-resourced, chronically under-employed, under-paid, and looking for a path forward that no one has clearly forged yet, credibly outlined, let alone implemented in good faith. If AI will introduce a new paradigm replete with a wealth of jobs, where are they? What will these look like and when will they arrive? AI seems to be built on one foundational impetus: human obsolescence.

The only real alternative solution that’s been proposed so far — from governments, from economists, from the technologists building the systems causing the disruption — is Universal Basic Income (UBI). An acknowledgment that the economy no longer needs you in the form of a check, cushioned by a monthly deposit. Sam Altman’s Unconditional Income Study (2020-23), a UBI pilot program, returned mixed, lukewarm results at best, and more likely served as a mechanism to deflect responsibility for having to answer to the enormous amounts of jobs being erased by AI. Do we really expect the architects and overlords of AI, especially Altman, to usher in new corporate taxes on himself and the organization he continues to spearhead, now closing in on a trillion-dollar evaluation, perhaps more? He already abandoned the nonprofit distinction in place of a for-profit model. Can these uber-AI capitalists be trusted? Loyalty to a human workforce and humans generally, is evaporating in real time, daily. So again: What are people-most human beings-going to do? 

We also believe UBI is the wrong answer. Not just because it misunderstands what humans need, but because of something more fundamental. It subsidizes a broken system, plunges us deeper into inescapable debt, and fosters inevitable collapse, while robbing human beings of community, purpose, and dignity.

UBI subsidizes a broken system.

Much of the food we eat is making us sick. The healthcare system is built around managing illness rather than resolving it. The entire complex is financially incentivized to keep people in treatment rather than help them achieve and sustain genuine health. Look at the rise of so-called weight loss drugs. People are voluntarily forfeiting their enjoyment of food; courting nausea. Local businesses, neighborhood newspapers, community spaces, and the churches that once held neighborhoods together have been quietly disappearing for decades, leaving behind a landscape of managed decline. These are the true outcomes of the systems we are being asked to prop up with a monthly check — the same systems that have been increasingly extracting from communities, degrading health, and dissolving the increasingly tenuous social fabric that humans need to survive. We are now deep in the all-pervasive kill-curve paradigm - a zeitgeist of job loss, career erasure and mission elimination. Do we want Altman as our feudal lord? Critics have speculated that UBI will likely come in the form of subsidies or even ‘giftcards’ that re-concentrate value back within the exact corporations who are responsible for the most extractive practices.  We do not need more investment in systems that are failing us. We need investment in a system that actually works. We at Radiical Systems call the return on that investment the Human Dividend.

Investments in Commiissaries Yield a Human Dividend

Our first answer at Radiical Systems centered around The Commiissary. It is a cooperative community hub; a physical space where members come together to collaboratively produce and procure the basic necessities that have become unaffordable, inaccessible, or invisible in our current economy. It will provide food, childcare, wellness, education, and the simple experience of being cared for by other humans. They are also places where people support each other in developing creative projects, furthering their education, upskilling, and starting new ventures. They provide containers for local communities that comprise a larger global network, where “what comes next” gets built collaboratively.

The food is good and healthy, sourced from local farms through real cooperative contracts, cooked by chefs with support from workforce development programs, and shared at communal tables. Members can work in a kitchen part of the year and on a farm for another part, rotating between hubs. The farm, the kitchen, and the community are not separate. They are all part of the same system.

The wellness is real — not managed illness, not pharmaceutical dependency, but actual care. The hubs offer classes that feature movement, restoration, healing, and the kind of whole-person attention that the healthcare system was never designed to provide. Practitioners who believe in getting well, not staying sick, support people who are ready to take their health back into their own hands.

The community is genuine — not algorithmic, not parasocial, not a follower count mistaken for belonging. The culture centers around knowing each other’s names, showing up for each other, and witnessing each other’s gifts, struggles, and next chapters in real time.

When basic needs are met — when people are fed, well, and held by a community that sees them — human potential is unlocked. The creative and entrepreneurial capacity that was always there begins to emerge. Members start projects. They find collaborators. They build ventures. They discover that their gifts they thought had no place in the economy are exactly what the people around them need. This is what American Capitalism is clearly missing, perhaps intentionally.

The Commiissary is also an incubator. Mentorship networks help people figure out what they are building, now that the old economy no longer needs them the way it used to. There are more than enough existing resources, programs, and partner organizations to provide these incubator services. Once more, what has been missing is the dedicated mission and infrastructure to organize us to deliver them at scale, and the spiritual commitment to learn, grow, and evolve in a mutually beneficial direction with our communities and our environment.

The network nature of the Commiissary makes it sustainable. Every node strengthens every other node — the farms feed the kitchens, the kitchens feed the communities, the communities generate new ventures and new operators, and the operators open new nodes. The network grows. The extraction stops.

This is what the Human Dividend actually means. Not a monthly check that pays us to sit at home and consume a bare minimum of terrible, even harmful products. An investment in a system worth investing in- a valiant denominator.

These Spaces Don’t Just Run on Money.

The Commiissary operates on a blended economy. Dollars are welcome as well as anything else you have to offer. You can host one community kitchen shift and you can cover the majority of your meals for the rest of that week. You watch kids one morning and your kids are covered the other mornings. You teach what you know and you access what others know. You help build the space and the space belongs to you. This is not charity, and it is not barter in the transactional sense — it is a cooperative economy where your time, your skills, your presence, and your care have real measurable value, vetted and tracked through Good Standing, recognized by the community, and returned to you in-kind.

The person who just lost their job has something to offer. The parent who can’t afford childcare has something to offer. The artist who can’t pay market rate rent has something to offer. The retiree, the furloughed, the freelance; everyone arrives with needs and gifts, and the Commiissary is designed to field both.

Membership in the Commiissary goes beyond access to programming and space. Every member has the option to become a cooperative owner, whether of their local Commiissary, of the broader network, or both. Ownership is earned through participation and formalized through membership shares, which entitle members to annual patronage dividends proportional to their contribution and engagement, tracked transparently through Good Standing. Founding Members receive the earliest and most favorable terms, but the door to ownership remains open as the network grows. This is not a loyalty program or a subscription. It is a cooperative economy where the people who show up, contribute, and build, have a real stake in what they are forging and nurturing, and thus collectively share in what it produces.

This Model Is Economically Sound: Regenerative, not Extractive.

The current model of subsidies and social services tends to produce dependency rather than capacity. Money flows in, circulates once, and leaves, with no compounding effect and no lasting return. It is a recurring cost that grows as communities weaken — more needs leads to more required funding and an increased difficulty to break the cycle. Rather, it often enforces it. 

The Commiissary redirects those same dollars into a system designed to produce returns. A subsidy that seeds a community kitchen doesn’t just feed someone — it trains a cook, strengthens a local farm contract, builds a community relationship, reduces a healthcare cost, and activates a potential entrepreneur. The same dollar works five times, and each of those five instances generates more value over time.

The work/trade model makes this investment sustainable over the long term. Because contribution is currency, the system generates its own economic circulation. Subsidies provide the initial seed capital, the infrastructure sustains it, and over time the need for outside subsidies decreases as the network strengthens and produces more of its own value intrinsically.

The Human Dividend is the return on that investment, not as metaphor but as tangible, measurable economic reality. Healthier people generate lower public health costs. Stronger communities sustain local economies. New businesses expand the tax base. (Job elimination due to AI is dramatically shrinking the tax base while simultaneously diminishing the already precarious funds paying into Social Security and the like.) Reduced dependence on public services frees capital for reinvestment. These are not aspirational outcomes. They are quantifiable returns on the decision to invest in human infrastructure. 

The Commiissary is the infrastructure that manages the reappropriation of tax dollars into a regenerative, human-centric economy.

Right now there is a fight happening over public funding for social services. One side wants to preserve those dollars and the other wants to cut them, and both are missing the more important question: not whether to fund communities, but what should we fund? Programs that produce dependency, or infrastructure that produces capacity? Recurring costs that extract, or investments that compound?

The Commiissary and Good Standing want to partner with every government, foundation, and institution that is fighting to preserve community funding and collaborate to produce new models with the same money that produce transparent, measurable returns and a clear path to sustainability.

The Human Lobby exists to organize humanity collectively towards a liveable, creative, and joyous future. We do not consider ourselves a new alternative to the existing political parties. Instead, we are an infrastructure platform, and we believe that politics will follow the proof of solving systemic problems within communities. Good Standing is the platform that documents and rewards every contribution across this network. The Human Lobby is how we make it powerful enough to demand the structural change this moment requires.

We are organizing around four demands.

First: that AI companies whose profits are built on the displacement of human labor invest in the cooperative infrastructure that helps humans adapt and thrive.

Second: that institutional investors — mutual funds, pension funds, endowments — redirect capital away from companies whose short-term extraction is destroying the communities they operate in, toward investments that compound in communities rather than extract from them.

Third: that brands who want the loyalty of this growing, engaged, values-aligned community show up for it in real, measurable ways — not as sponsors of spectacle (see: free grocery stores as fleeting corporate memes), but as partners in the work.

Fourth: that elected officials and political institutions govern in the demonstrated interest of the people they represent — not the corporations that fund their campaigns, the party structures that control their careers, or the shadow networks that have learned to operate outside public accountability entirely. The Human Lobby is not a partisan force. It is a civic coalition interested in getting to the root of problems and holding power structures accountable to their duty to actually solve them.  

Joining the Human Lobby Constituency 

Every person who reads this, earns their badge, and posts it into the world is joining a documented, verifiable constituency of people who have decided that the economy of the future should serve human flourishing — not just the owners of the compute (the overlords of the algorithms) that are replacing us.

This movement is not a protest and it is not anti-technology. It is a cooperative, and it is pro-human. The Human Lobby does not ask anyone to stop innovating. It asks everyone who is innovating to reckon honestly with what they are displacing, and to invest proportionally in what comes next.

When the Human Lobby has 10,000 documented badge holders across 20 cities, it is no longer a campaign — it is a constituency. Good Standing is the platform that makes that constituency visible, verifiable, and impossible to ignore, creating the basis for real negotiations with AI companies, institutional investors, and policymakers about what solutions actually look like.

In a world where every political force claims to speak for the people without being able to prove it, that distinction is paramount. The Human Lobby does not claim to represent people in the abstract. It demonstrates what people value by documenting their participation. Good Standing creates a public record of civic engagement that cannot be manufactured, purchased, or borrowed. The legitimacy of this movement is earned, provable, and intrinsic to how it scales.

These demands are not requests. They are the opening position of a negotiation made on behalf of a documented, verified constituency with the capacity to act in concert. Coordinated civic action holds politicians accountable in ways isolated voices cannot. Collective consumer behavior directed at brands that contradict their stated values carries real consequence for corporate bottom lines. The willingness to come to the table — or to publicly refuse — is a reputational signal that neither institutions nor markets can afford to ignore.

Good Standing's rewards infrastructure means civic participation carries direct economic weight. Brands that show up as genuine partners gain access to a constituency that is engaged, values-aligned, and growing. Our values are not simply a moral argument — they are a market signal.

The Human Lobby is designed to resist capture. Capture requires opacity and concentration; the Human Lobby is transparent and distributed by design. It does not run candidates or seek power within existing political structures. It operates between elections and across them, applying sustained pressure from the outside. No donor can quietly purchase influence because the constituency is visible. No party can absorb the Human Lobby because its legitimacy flows from participation, not endorsements or money. Leadership cannot claim a mandate it does not have because the record is public.

We started Radiical Systems on the conviction that the answers to the most complex problems facing humanity were already present in the communities experiencing them — they simply lacked the infrastructure to emerge. The Human Lobby is what happens when those solutions are aggregated and applied to the largest economic disruption of our lifetimes.

At scale, the Human Lobby becomes something that has not existed before: a permanent civilian negotiating force with no headquarters to capture, no single leader to corrupt, and no constituency to manufacture. It is an ever-evolving network of people united by a foundational demand:  that the world we live in actually works for us, and that we remain accountable to our shared social contracts.

Ready to go further? — Campaign Coming Soon

Join the Human Lobby on Good Standing. Good Standing is developing the custom badge and coupon for this campaign, expected to launch in Spring 2026. Once it’s live you can complete the first task — which is reading this Answer and sharing it on social media — and earn your badge and your coupon, a digital art collectible commissioned from a New York-based artist, redeemable at any Commiissary, anywhere, when one opens near you.

This is not a donation. It is not a subscription. It is membership in a cooperative being built for you, by people who believe in you, a living, breathing human.

The first Commiissary will open in New York City in 2026. If you want to be part of building it — as a partner, a space, a founding member, or a supporter of any kind — we want to hear from you. Get in touch at ventures@radiical.systems.

Have a space and want to bring the Commiissary model to your community? We help you set up programming and manage it through Good Standing — you bring the space, we bring the operating system. Get in touch at ventures@radiical.systems.
The Human Lobby grows one human at a time.Until it doesn’t have to anymore.earn your badge → goodstanding.applearn more → radiical.systems