# The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [144]. 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 (PDF), 2011-06-02 (from the career record), https://files.howtolivewiki.com/facebook_for_the_five_billion/Facebook%20for%20the%20five%20billion.pdf. 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): Identity and mobile-money accounts for the poor: a design step toward Harappa's accounts and identity. - Career works it belongs to: - Small is Profitable (2002): Co-edited Rocky Mountain Institute book on the hidden benefits of right-sized, distributed power; The... - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (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: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... - 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) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Rural poverty & development infrastructure (67%); Gold, stablecoins & asset backing (33%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: M-PESA (7 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); e-gold (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Facebook for the Five Billion (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Small Is Profitable (2 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); The Future We Deserve (2 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); unity of effort (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Open Source Ecology (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Sulabh (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); digital identity (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Tell Me Who You Are (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 2 undated) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): M-PESA; Facebook for the Five Billion - Importance: core-text score 0.45 (1.00 is the top), number 137 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [52] [When? | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/52.md): same career work: Small is Profitable - [266] ["Blockchain: IoT's trust broker?" talk on the fly by... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/266.md): same career work: Small is Profitable - On the same works, just before: [47] [The Beautiful World | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/47.md); [49] [The Summary – an introduction to #TheBigDeal | The... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/49.md); [361] [Reading Hipster Hitler at the Führerbunker (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/361.md) - On the same works, just after: [359] [ZOOM0004 (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/359.md); [360] [ZOOM0003 (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/360.md); [89] [The Gupta State Failure Management Archive – a public... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/89.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: "Facebook for the Five Billion?", document, 2011-06-02, https://files.howtolivewiki.com/facebook_for_the_five_billion/Facebook%20for%20the%20five%20billion.pdf; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [144], https://guptaoption.com/texts/144.md. ## Passages [p. 1 to 10](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/facebook_for_the_five_billion/Facebook%20for%20the%20five%20billion.pdf#page=1) The Future We Deserve: “Facebook for the Five Billion?” Digital Identity Tell me who you are ● I am Vinay Gupta • Http://hexayurt.com Free hardware housing • Http://twitter.com/leashless Microblog • Http://hexayurt.com/plan Bio, picture, resume ● Now, prove it? • Could show you a picture ID (government) • We could ask my friends (group, social network) • You could recognize my face (individual) • How do you know I'm really Vinay? Advances in all three modes ● You could show me a picture ID (government) – Biometric passports, huge databases ● We could ask your friends (social network) • Facebook, LinkedIn etc. are public profiles ● I could recognize your face – We stay in far, far better contact with our pasts than in former times, maintaining much larger webs of personal relationships. – Even your least-liked classmates from Primary School will still be able to find you! In rich areas, government owns ID ● In the UK, the definitive ID is goverment-issued numbers like National Insurance, Passport and similar identity numbers. ● In poorer countries it is quite possible to be born and not registered with the State, leaving people without a national ID number. • For such people, the primary identity which defines them is a social identity not a state identity. • Banking: who owns the account? ● Grameen Bank lent to people with weak State Identity credentials by using their Social Identity credentials – they lend to groups of villagers and use your social standing as debt colateral ● Infrastructure like roads can be private or government property ● So too with identity: if you are a Nigerian who went to school in the US, your Facebook profile (private property, not yours!) is likely to engender more trust than your State Identity Digital Currency Once upon a time ● In the 1990s I was paid in a digital currency called e-gold • A privately-issued 100% gold-backed account- based digital currency (I pay you 5 grams of gold) ● E-gold was sandbagged by the US Federal Government in 2005 leaving two tons of reserve ● E-gold was efficient for micropayments, secure, independent of government money supply decisions, kept honest books, and in every way represented an honest, fair independent money Bitcoin ● Instead of using gold to provide natural scarcity, bitcoin uses hard-to-find mathematical facts ● Gold has common value, bitcoins are only valuable as currency (no inherent value) ● Anybody with a computer can search for scarce mathematical facts. ● Right now, bitcoin is struggling to find a stable exchange rate against other currencies and is gaining value relative to the dollar very quickly M-PESA M-PESA is “just” a way of moving money • Like Western Union ● An M-PESA trade turns cash into a number. You send the number by SMS, and the recipient turns it back into cash at the local gas station ● M-PESA is used in many countries ● They could start to issue currency, not just exchange currency, without major new tech [p. 10 to 20](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/facebook_for_the_five_billion/Facebook%20for%20the%20five%20billion.pdf#page=10) “just” a way of moving money • Like Western Union ● An M-PESA trade turns cash into a number. You send the number by SMS, and the recipient turns it back into cash at the local gas station ● M-PESA is used in many countries ● They could start to issue currency, not just exchange currency, without major new tech ● Would M-PESA currency beat weak local cash? Digital Culture Two Videos MIA, Jimmy • Daughter of a Tamil Tiger leader • Grew up in exile in London • “when you go to Rwanda and Congo, take me on your genocide tour...” ● Die Antwoort, Enter the Ninja • South African art pranksters embark on a project to embody South Africa • If you think this is scaryweird, see Evil Boy (nsfw) What is going on here? Some musicians sell female sexuality • Kate Bush, Madonna, Britney Spears, Ke$ha ● Some sell male sexuality • Elvis, Cliff Richards, George Michael, Barry White ● Fringe culture sells “dangerousness” • Robert Johnston, Sex Pistols, Psychick TV, Niggers With Attitude (NWA), Jay-Z • “Terrorist Chic/k” from MIA • South African ghetto culture commodified: they win Prospects: rollover Reversal of aspiration The rich nations are about to get a ton poorer • I just moved to Ireland ● The toughest, scariest, edgiest people in world culture are not from American inner cities ● Sophisticated tools for culture creation are now everywhere (see recent Bollywood CGI films) ● You want to be “tough” but are you tough enough to “hang” with Tamil Tigers in the slums of Johannesburg? Didn't think so, and me either Rollover We suppress radical innovation just as much as we encourage it ● Can the next Google come from Bangalore rather than the Bay Area? ● Will the first developing world tech giant be as wary of asserting its political power as Google? ● Put together digital identity and digital money, and use them to pay for digital culture? • Die Antwoord on Diaspora with Bitcoin... We approach an edge event We have seen multiple stepfunction changes in technology without any substantial change in governance of government ● Unchecked environmental insult continues ● Poverty continues ● ● Why would you think that tomorrow will look like today? ● How can we get to The Future We Deserve? Breakthrough Ok, ok, so there's radical change... The dual problems: poverty and environment • (you can add a third, resource scarcity, but mostly that is imposed by under-investment and ecology) ● We've seen fundamental transformation in identity, currency and culture, but not yet in politics, government or governance. ● What about all the tricky stuff in the middle, infrastructure and supply chains? Radical decentralization pays well Small is Profitable is The Economist's Book of the Year, 2003 (I was on the editorial team.) ● 207 advantages of making energy resources the “right size,” mainly • Demand is close to supply • 30 small projects have less risk than one big one, particularly if they [p. 19 to 25](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/facebook_for_the_five_billion/Facebook%20for%20the%20five%20billion.pdf#page=19) stuff in the middle, infrastructure and supply chains? Radical decentralization pays well Small is Profitable is The Economist's Book of the Year, 2003 (I was on the editorial team.) ● 207 advantages of making energy resources the “right size,” mainly • Demand is close to supply • 30 small projects have less risk than one big one, particularly if they are sequential rather than parallel • There's no fuel price volatility baked in (i.e. A coal power station is a “coal future” not just energy) • Works all the way down to the household level Household level decentralization brings degovernancing The three bureaucracies of sharing are ● The Owner Bureaucracy • The legal entity which owns resources, a board etc ● The Manager Bureaucracy • Who gets services, at what cost, with what terms? ● The Protection Bureaucracy • Who protects the resource from theft and wear? ● Scale a resource to the household level and you can decide all of these things for yourselves What can be degovernanced? Electricity supply by rooftop wind and solar ● Water supply by wells and biosand filters ● Sanitation using composting toilets ● Cooking by using efficient wood stoves ● Telecommunications using mesh networks ● Transportation using bicycles and locally maintained roads ● In short, you could run a poor country this way Sharing through Freedom, not Sharing through Control The Free Hardware movement is moving from gadgets to tools and infrastructure • Open Source Ecology has a tractor and bricks • Biosand filters • Rocket stoves • Sulabh toilet • Hexayurt house ● Sharing technical know-how leaves the other person free to decide how they will use it Cooperation Without Control unity of effort without unity of command A bit of a Holy Grail Free hardware does not preclude sale ● It does enable sharing and cooperation in ideas ● It has the possibility to provide for many, and in time perhaps most or all basic human needs ● It is politically sound, being free of coercion ● It works for the poor and rich alike, but perhaps not for everything ● I know of no other realistic way forwards --- End of [144] The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?". Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [359](https://guptaoption.com/texts/359.md) ZOOM0004 (2011); the most closely related, [52](https://guptaoption.com/texts/52.md) When? | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2011); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.