# The Future We Deserve/The Tiny Army - Vinay Gupta > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [107]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Text), 2010 (from the career record), https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/The_Tiny_Army_-_Vinay_Gupta. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Short fiction on small-group power; side work. - Career works it belongs to: - The Tiny Army (2010): Short story about a seven-person army. - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - The Future We Deserve (2012): Essay collection co-edited with Cat Lupton and Noah Raford, released March 2012; includes the short story... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Rural poverty & development infrastructure (33%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (33%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — war, combat, robots (33%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: The Tiny Army (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Tiny Army (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); The Future We Deserve (6 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); Berlin (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); regulatory capture (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); wicked problems (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); panflu (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Leashless (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Appropedia (1 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Berlin; wicked problems; regulatory capture; The Tiny Army; Tiny Army - Importance: core-text score 0.31 (1.00 is the top), number 235 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [229] [The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md): close in content (cosine 0.91) - [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md): close in content (cosine 0.89) - On the same works, just before: [61] [Ending Poverty With Open Hardware | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/61.md); [65] [Leashless – a manifesto about freedom | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/65.md); [187] [Six Ways To Die workshops (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/187.md) - On the same works, just after: [128] [Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md); [91] [The imperialists of the future are imperialists of the... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/91.md); [854] [UNCIVILISATION, The Dark Mountain Festival 2010: Vinay... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/854.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: The Future We Deserve/The Tiny Army - Vinay Gupta, document, 2010, https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/The_Tiny_Army_-_Vinay_Gupta; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [107], https://guptaoption.com/texts/107.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/The_Tiny_Army_-_Vinay_Gupta) Introduction Foreword Without Divine Justice, Human Rights Gods or Goats A 'Playbour' of Love for the Next Twenty Years Untitled, 2010 We Deserve A Future Of Good Governance The World Needs Wives The Food We Deserve Rediscovering the Stuff We Forgot to Remember Reclaiming Awesome Panarchy On the Future We Deserve... There is No Future This is Mental Monastech The Futures We Deserve or, Even Bankers Might Have Uses Memes that Kill The Tiny Army A Four-Bladed Scissors One in Six, a Strategy for Reduction Of Arms and the Man A Knowing World A Picture, a Person, a Time and a Location Decline and Fall We Deserve to Evolve The Knowledge and Action Platform The Joy of Open 6 Ways to Live Solar Photovoltaic Energy Replication The Future We Desire Zombies and Vampires, Oh My! The Future of Information Freedom My Vision of the Future The Matter of Place The Locavores' War: A History of America's Future A World in Common The Story Our Children Will Tell The Abolition of Scarcity Cities of Freedom Chariots or Four-wheeled Demons? A Healthy and Smiling Planet The Earth Charter Sex and Singularity in the 21st Century The Feet We Deserve ...middle... If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together. And If You Want to Transform..? Just 4, A Macroscale Social Model Open Source Appropriate Technology Who Will Save Our Souls? Art Monasticism Personal Futures and Futures Therapy Deep Lessons Semantic Organization and Connectivity The Education We Deserve Moving Towards a Post Penal Society A Future Without Childhood Online Open Distance Learning The Future of Television Citizen Centred Participation The Future We Got–Earth Date Zero Plus Twenty The Onion and the Satellite Ode to the Tech Fix Deserving The Future We Want Re-envisioning Our Relationship With Micro-Organisms The Spaces We Deserve The Age of Warlords Cookbook Using Science Locally Seed Saving for Local Food Security Challenging Education and the "Harry Potter Letter" Credibility and Calories, A Perspective on Information The Future of Programming Higher Education for the Future We Deserve A Systemic Revolution, or, the Need for a Post-Scientific Approach An Ideal World My Ideal Panflu Report on the Planet Earth from the Intergalactic Study Group on Worlds in Transition A Hypothetical Vision of What the Property Sector in the Future Might Look Like The Future is Here Hacking Society and a Proposal for Beta Towns The Age of Phlight Designing the Future Collaboration for Introverts Hundreds of Sovereign Singapores Working Together: Unleashing Collective Intelligence Clash for Civilization Seawater into Food Collapsarithmetic Our Future and the Sun Bootleg Oil Time For Resilient Tribes to Step Up and Show the Way The Music We Deserve All the World's a Stage Success in the Twenty First Century On Lying to Children We Deserve the Time and Space to Be Human Opening the Floodgates The Future of Art The Human Rite of Living No Island is an Island Getting The Future We Deserve Berlin, Berlin We Deserve a Future [passage 2](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/The_Tiny_Army_-_Vinay_Gupta) and Show the Way The Music We Deserve All the World's a Stage Success in the Twenty First Century On Lying to Children We Deserve the Time and Space to Be Human Opening the Floodgates The Future of Art The Human Rite of Living No Island is an Island Getting The Future We Deserve Berlin, Berlin We Deserve a Future Aftermath - Thinking the Unthinkable. Asking What is Not Asked PDF Download these pages as a PDF so you can print them or read them offline. Booklet Download these pages as a PDF that you can print, fold and staple into a booklet. In the end, there were only seven of us in the army. Harald built the lab, Frieda and Alok manufactured or bought the reagents, Ali designed the distribution systems and Micky selected the targets. Sweet, brilliant Chen built the humanitarian pandemic organism. I did logistics and communications, so that the others never had to meet. I don't run the errands myself, of course. There's a rather good underground syndicate that trades routine favors on deliveries and such, like using smurfs, and generally if you generate a bit of noise on the network, they're reliable. Of course, it would be easier in a corporate lab if we were engineering sterile mosquitos or enslaving cotton farmers, but we're not. We're working on a final solution to the ills of humanity. We're going to kill all the alpha males. The rising destructive power of small groups is one of the biggest worries of national security types. The "force multiplier" effect of weapons has increased to the point where ten men can paralyze a city, and fifty can execute terrorist attacks that cost a trillion dollars to repair. As technology delivers longer and longer levers, the ability of a small group to render immense harm has increased. A single person, if they were a skilled virus author, could paralyze large parts of the internet. When you add biotechnology to this equation, things darken dramatically. Rumors have circulated for years about nations, such as Israel, researching gene-specific bioweapons — because to defend against a genetic final solution, one would have to know if one was possible. What to do? What to do? Are we to have Science Police who intrude into every aspect of life looking for the technical capability to kill? Perhaps compulsory mental screening, but then what to do with the numerous people who might, but never do? At fifteen, how do you tell Lex Luthor from Luther Burbank? Like all wicked problems, it is going to take many approaches combined to get a lid on small group power. Some loss of civil liberties for those working in dangerous areas is inevitable - those with advanced knowledge of how to do dangerous things are going to have to become socialized to heightened personal surveillance and occasional mental health screening. A licensing approach to these technologies is not the whole answer, but an acceptance that working with them makes you a [passage 3](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/The_Tiny_Army_-_Vinay_Gupta) loss of civil liberties for those working in dangerous areas is inevitable - those with advanced knowledge of how to do dangerous things are going to have to become socialized to heightened personal surveillance and occasional mental health screening. A licensing approach to these technologies is not the whole answer, but an acceptance that working with them makes you a risk to the world and gives the world the right to scrutinize seems necessary. It is one of the few areas where enhanced transparency solves many problems. The most dangerous actors will still be profit-seeking corporations. The people who are crazy enough to want to kill the world are usually too ineffective to do it. But the corporate psychopath, seeking profit above all other goals, is sleek and well-organized, and willing to run this year's risks for next year's profits. We must open the labs to inspections, as we do for weapons testing, but to free us from the risk of regulatory capture those inspections must have tight public oversight. The final guard is that the violent reformers, generally speaking, are trying to kill their way to a better world. In a twisted way, they value life and quality of life. Few of the most dangerous people operate out of hatred. Rather, it is the vision of the better future that guides them. As a result, there may be a certain self-correcting aspect to small group destructive power. People who are resorting to violence to change the world do not want it destroyed. Perhaps we will find that even the most violent of extremists shy away from deploying self-replicating weaponry, be it bio or nano in nature, because of the risk it will destroy what they only wished to improve. This is scant hope, but it is all I have for you. Vinay Gupta CC-BY-SA-3.0 English (en) 0 subpages, 117 pages link here TheFWD leashless The Tiny Army 14 page views (analytics) October 7, 2010 by Vinay Gupta December 17, 2025 by Felipe Schenone Vinay Gupta (2010–2025). "The Future We Deserve/The Tiny Army - Vinay Gupta". Appropedia. Retrieved October 31, 2026. basic, semantic, html, files, more The Future We Deserve --- End of [107] The Future We Deserve/The Tiny Army - Vinay Gupta. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [128](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md) Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010); the most closely related, [229](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md) The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.