It’s been quite a year. Whether you started 2016 on the Trump train, heavily invested in the rising British pound, or confident that Pantone’s color of the year was an accurate forecast of the twelve months to come, you’ve probably been surprised.

Don’t worry -- so were we.

But it’s not too late to learn something useful from a very surreal year -- and Innovation Hub’s got you covered.

First up, we hear about a tiny town that tried something radical. In the 1970s, Dauphin, Manitoba decided to give its poorest residents some more money, no strings attached. Though the initiative was (literally) abandoned, guaranteed basic income is growing new legs. Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, tells us about our northern neighbor’s “mincome” experiment. And Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at University of San Diego and founder of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, explains why basic income might be coming back into style.

Next, Sarah Jeong -- a contributing editor at Vice Motherboard -- tells us about a rising trend in rent-to-own devices, and what that might say about larger trends in surveillance. Among those trends? A lawsuit-magnet software called “Detective Mode.”

Finally, fake news might be all the rage right now, but that’s only one of Facebook’s authenticity problems. Filmmaker Garrett Bradley takes us from the online world of paid “likes” into the lives of people who use those likes to earn a living. One surprise? Most of them live in Bangladesh, a country responsible for around 40% of paid likes.