# The Future of Stuff (part 3 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [239], part 3 of 3. 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Book), 2020 (book imprint), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Moral and economic case for the contracting layer: honest information about goods, which Mattereum supplies.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Cyberpunk (1984): The 1980s cyberpunk culture that came first; first computer a ZX81 in 1982.
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things.
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (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:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: contracts / companies / value (29%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (21%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: The Future of Stuff (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Future of Stuff (5 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); right to know (3 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); consumerism (4 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Gandhi (7 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); agro-industrial (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); coronavirus (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); automated morality (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); recycling (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); ecocide (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): coronavirus
- Importance: core-text score 0.71 (1.00 is the top), number 29 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md): same career work: The Future of Stuff
  - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): same career work: Cyberpunk
- On the same works, just before: [253] [Goldsmiths talk on life extension and fluid language (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/253.md); [777] [CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/777.md); [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019)
- On the same works, just after: [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md); [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md); [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.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 of Stuff, document, 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [239], https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md.

## Passages, part 3 of 3
[p. 60 to 61](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) Countries create agencies to control the agency of the people who say they are here to help us, but mostly help themselves. In America, that’s the Food and Drug Administration, or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Here in the UK it’s the Food Standards Agency and the Department of Agriculture. But those agencies are only very weakly steered by the democratic mandate, because a vote at the ballot box turns into a change of direction at the FDA through a chain so long and so complex that a million votes together hardly steer it at all, while the employees of the agency spend every day talking to drug company spineless vipers who were hired specifically for their remarkable ability to hypnotise government officials back to sleep whenever they are woken up by some atrocity, and delay action on problematic situations as long as legally possible, and often much longer. The system is broken, and voting can’t fix it, because the tie between the ballot box and the regulator is just too weak to get effective action. Representative democracy is the wrong level for fixing this problem, in the same way that you need both socialist governments and labour unions to get wages and working conditions fixed. The machinery has to be aligned. As things stand today, past the food labelling and other statutory disclosures, you don’t have a legal right to know what is in most of your products or how they were manufactured. The privacy and commercial secrecy rights of the people who make your stuff are treated as more important than your right to know precisely what you are wearing on your skin or putting into your body. Even though I own it, even though I eat it, I still do not have the right to know precisely where this was grown, what (if any) pesticides were sprayed on it, or how it was processed and who processed it. Nobody who keeps secrets like that from you is doing it for your welfare. They are exploiting you. This pervasive exploitation and secrecy has become even more poisonous in the age of smart stuff. Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Siri, Facebook and all the rest ship physical devices into your home (on request... they aren’t built into new apartments as appliances... yet), which simply gather data, try to make you happy and build a more detailed profile about your mind than you, your mother, your therapist, your priest, or the government have. We certainly did not appoint these entities as Father Confessor over us, and yet, because it offers us useful services, we largely ignore the privacy downsides of smart stuff. It’s there, it’s pervasive, and increasingly it will be built into everything. And who watches these particular watchmen? Maybe the Federal Communications Commission, but consider our old friend tobacco again. Openly sold, and kills maybe half a million people each year in America alone. And that’s fully regulated and heavily taxed. These systems are out of

[p. 61](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) downsides of smart stuff. It’s there, it’s pervasive, and increasingly it will be built into everything. And who watches these particular watchmen? Maybe the Federal Communications Commission, but consider our old friend tobacco again. Openly sold, and kills maybe half a million people each year in America alone. And that’s fully regulated and heavily taxed. These systems are out of control. What we have is a systemic problem: the means, the

[p. 62 to 63](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) motive and the opportunity exist to sell the general public stuff which is bad for them on nearly every imaginable axis, and only the most egregious assaults on the public weal run even the smallest risk of being brought to account. How on earth did we wind up here? The answer is very simple: we bought ourselves into this mess, by accepting a profound lack of transparency and care from the companies we bring into existence by giving them our custom, and it’s been this way for centuries, over a wide range of cultures. This is a pervasive problem. Because we do not care to distinguish what is benign from what is malevolent in the marketplace with sufficient discrimination, and do not force the issue by boycott when the truth is not forthcoming, corporate bad actors repeatedly abuse the public trust and face no consequences of note. We lack the social machinery to detect this kind of pervasive abuse and put a stop to it, in much the same way that until the invention of the labour union and universal suffrage we lacked the machinery to rein in abusive employers and our feudal overlords. We have left the job of watching the chicken coop to a variety of foxes, some corporate, some state, and all entirely too comfortable with the status quo around product safety and your right to make decisions about your life based on accurate information. This is not an equilibrium which will stand much longer. Let me explain why. Firstly, the systems which could effectively protect us from fraud and exploitation are the same systems that could build new classes of economic efficiency. Simply by knowing what things are in a very detailed way, we can make efficient use of them, perhaps in ways their creators did not even intend. And what’s more, these systems based on deep transparency will help companies to sell their products. If there is a machine-readable exact specification of what something is, I can send software out to search for the things I need. In an industrial context, this model is potentially all-powerful: fully automated procurement, supply chain and logistics. As ordinary shoppers, we would get clothes that always fit, because of a perfect match between our bodies and the clothes, and both can be measured with a tape measure. It’s not hard to gather the data, we just lack the machinery to do it. It is absurd that the fashion industry does not already work this way. When things reach the end of their usefulness, if machines know what a thing is, it can be efficiently resold or recycled without further human inconvenience. All these economic benefits will only accrue to companies that are transparent about what they are offering the world, and that economic pressure is one of our best allies in the fight for control of our lives through control of our stuff. Product safety and automated product discoverability are aspects of the same process: product transparency. That transparency

[p. 63](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) human inconvenience. All these economic benefits will only accrue to companies that are transparent about what they are offering the world, and that economic pressure is one of our best allies in the fight for control of our lives through control of our stuff. Product safety and automated product discoverability are aspects of the same process: product transparency. That transparency also gives us the necessary keys for automated

[p. 64 to 65](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) morality: our software can act on our ethical instructions, not just our commercial ones. But this kind of deep transparency about products will also reveal to us the actual living and working conditions of the people who make our stuff. If, for your own safety, you want to know where your stuff comes from, you are going to be stuck with a lot of disturbing knowledge about sweatshops and primary resource extraction like mining. You are not going to want to know a lot of these additional answers in many cases. The price of prosperity is all too often ecocide and oppression. The fun consumer product in front of you was, all too often, manufactured from toxic plastics in dangerous ways by people who lacked workplace safety or labour protections. But the process that will let you know just how dangerous those plastics are will necessarily involve transparency about the rest of the process. You may say, ‘How could anybody do business in such a world?’ to which my reply is simply, ‘How could anybody expect to survive in this one?’ Because the mother of all pollutants is carbon dioxide. And you do not know, when you buy something, how much harm you are doing yourself, the planet and the future of life on earth. This is simply unacceptable. We have to know how much carbon was emitted to make things. We can’t get the change necessary to fix global warming (and all the rest) unless we can assess who is doing the damage and stop them. As of 2020, this is a matter of some urgency. Global warming not only threatens our way of life, it threatens life’s way of life. Sudden change rips species’ ecological niches right out from under them and leaves them hurtling into freefall towards an unforgiving ground. In objective terms, it is vastly more important to the future of the world that governments and individuals can track their carbon emissions than that everybody can track their money, and yet none of the machinery exists to build pervasive control of our carbon economy, and stop carbon overspending before it destroys our ecological balance. Yet corporations still track their money down to the cent. Something is wrong. The same situation repeats and overlaps in areas like deforestation and emission of hormone-mimicking chemicals into the environment and into our bodies. All the way through, we have lost control of these processes because the industrial revolution and globalisation massively ramped up the complexity of the world in ways that made it very difficult for us to actually know what was really happening to us. Weird chemicals, defective industrial processes, hugely complex systemic problems like CO2 all skip neatly around our biological and cultural systems about how to identify and deal with threats, and we are taking an absolute pounding from bad actors who live in our blind spots. Regulators can’t regulate, customers can’t get the information they need to make decisions and the disaster

[p. 66 to 67](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) continues. During the COVID crisis in early 2020 fake masks were aggressively injected into the medical supply chain by unscrupulous fraudsters, possibly costing many lives, particularly among medical staff. We have not built an immune system to deal with the future, with the fallout from industrialisation, and we are not going forwards without building one. We must be able to separate the benign from the malevolent in everything we touch. This has to happen in an automated, reliable way which allows us to live our lives, and not get constantly exposed to other people’s poisons or the general consequences of industrial carelessness or deliberate exploitation. Is it bad for me? For society? For biology? For the future? For the world? I need to know. We must know, so that we can be free. We have no idea what technology will bring us in future. Fifty years from now, most stuff will probably be made of materials we could not identify in a lab if we were handed them today, built using manufacturing techniques we cannot even guess at. I make that claim based on a simple fact: change is accelerating. Every year since the start of the Second World War things have changed imperceptibly faster than they changed before, until the change is so fast it becomes a blur. I tell people these days – and mostly believe – that my expected lifespan is 400 years because at forty-eight in 2020 there’s every chance of really significant breakthroughs in life-extension technology before I die, and once you get on the lifeextension train, every year that passes extends your life by more than one more year because of scientific progress. I make an arbitrary limit at 400 because that’s what they do in the Culture, Iain M. Banks’s anarchist sci-fi utopia. They sort of fade out as they get older, and at a certain point I expect to do much the same. But not yet. Not for centuries. Centuries. The stuff, against that lifespan, is as ephemeral as a breeze. Books rot, electronics become first obsolete and then get reclassified as toxic waste because of all the lead and cadmium in them. Buildings get replaced because they are so energy inefficient, replaced with spun glass or genetically engineered timber which grows straight and square and obeys the architect, right from the seed. Is this unrealistic? Not at all. My first computer was a ZX81 bought in 1982. I’ve watched its cousins turn into gigantic, almost cosmic, world-spanning machines, reaching out into space, and here and there, deep space, a single, interconnected digital substrate for consciousness filled with people trading cat GIFs and insulting each other’s mothers over their political beliefs. Forty years seems like a long time, but against a 400-year

[p. 68 to 69](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) lifespan it’s the blink of an eye. And if I’m not around to see all of this, somebody much like me will be! The stuff goes by in the blink of an eye. Even if my natural 400-year span is foreshortened to only another twenty years, in those twenty years I expect to see humanoid robots doing most cleaning and many service industry jobs, and artificial intelligence perfected to the point where real-time machine translation of speech and video is possible, so it looks as if all TV shows and movies were made in all languages. I expect to be able to say, ‘Okay, play me “Waterloo” by ABBA as if it had been sung by Björk around the time of Debut and have a barely perceptible pause as computers figure out the details for me and play me an impossible song. It’s quite good, but not as good as Nick Cave and Trent Reznor’s version of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. But even in this world to come I expect nearly all the existing nation states still to exist, and most of today’s tech giants to still be significant forces for quite some decades. Some will implode, new ones will be created and computers will be yesterday’s ‘new hotness’ as the genetic engineers seriously get to work producing the stuff we have always wanted but never knew we could have: houseplants that clean the air and just won’t die; buildings made by growing trees; new organs – not just replacements for what we have already but new organs that do new things; and maybe, even, possibly, finally, cats with the friendly temperament of dogs. But the enormous innovation capacity of the big computer technology companies will not stay digital: they’ll go biotech as soon as it is profitable, so many of these biotech wonders will come from players we recognise today, by acquisition and transformation. These companies are the new nations, right beside the existing ones. Nations whose borders are defined by patents not landmarks, and who tax by price rises, rather than by income, but mighty nations nonetheless. Time is going to whizz by us in an almost imperceptible, incomprehensible blur. Just think about phones: handcranked devices where operators dialled the numbers for you, then rotary dial slabs of plastic and metal tethered to the wall by a wire, then mobiles the size of remote controls, then the first early linking of phones and the Internet over WAP, then generation after generation of smartphones. What wonder will be called ‘a phone’ in twenty years? And yet... ‘phone’ will likely remain, as primitive a concept as ‘hammer’. Whatever else it does, the thing I used to talk to my friends about is the phone regardless of what else it does. What is enduring about stuff is not stuff, it’s people. In describing the social architecture that produces our stuff and describing the great cultural, political and social struggles that define our manufacturing economy, I want to frame a single concept

[p. 69](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) does, the thing I used to talk to my friends about is the phone regardless of what else it does. What is enduring about stuff is not stuff, it’s people. In describing the social architecture that produces our stuff and describing the great cultural, political and social struggles that define our manufacturing economy, I want to frame a single concept clearly in your minds: patterns are produced by

[p. 70 to 71](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) processes. Stuff is made by processes, and not just chemical or industrial processes; cultural, financial, political and social processes all combine to produce this stuff we see before us. It has patterns because it comes from processes. When you can see the enduring, durable social structures which go into producing your stuff, you will no longer be distracted and amazed by the glossy, glitzy wonderland of the stuff in the malls and the web stores. You’ll be able to stop and ask the hard questions: what is in this stuff? Who made this stuff? Is this stuff wrecking the world? What does this stuff really do for me? What does this stuff really do to me? And you’ll be sensitised to the fresh green shoots as we start, as a culture, to turn against malevolent stuff that poisons us and our world, strips us of our rights and crushes people in its production. Together, we can build the social and cultural immune systems which will expand the rights of consumers, year by year, generation by generation, to know exactly what decision they are making when they decide to buy a product, because they know exactly what the product is and where the product came from. Consumers, empowered in this way, can completely transform how the economy works. No more accidentally buying the wrong things and having to return them. No more nasty surprises when you plug A into B and it just doesn’t work. No more buying things just as they become obsolete. It can all go away, and inevitably it will. Getting right to the heart of the matter, this is about power. Right now, the people who sell us our stuff wield the power of secrecy over us, and we let them. Stripping back that veil will often be a painful process, but the leaders in that transformation will be both heroes and the most successful entrepreneurs of the future. Because, unlike voters, consumers do not have to interface with centuries of codified law to change the rules of the game they live inside of: they can just buy different, better stuff and effect transformation immediately. I want to know what is in the products I buy every day. Are you with me? Quality and Qualia ‘What’s wrong with technology is that it is not connected to any real way with matters of the spirit and the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been for food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these’ – Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I am an engineer, and I am unsentimental about stuff. My emotional attachments to art, other than music, are shallow. I own perhaps one sculpture, and no paintings. No photos,

[p. 72](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) no memorabilia. I could perhaps equip a small expeditionary party from my garage, but you won’t find a loom or a display case in my home. As a man interested in function, I view stuff through a specific lens: I can identify which kind of USB cable you hold in your hand from across a room, and I probably have a matching one in my bag. So this story that I have told you about stuff is an engineer’s journey into the heart of why the things we buy are often of such low quality, and a direct product of my work on trying to make better things over decades. My biggest contribution to the world of stuff is my refugee shelter design, the hexayurt, which has been open source for most of twenty years and is built by the thousand by ordinary festival-goers, and one or two disaster relief companies. A cruder and more functional building you could not hope to see. I have proofs! But occasionally I visit my friend Robert Brewer Young, a luthier, who is often to be found with a Stradivarius violin in his intelligent hands. The violin is, by any reasonable metric, a sacred object if only because of the centuries of worship that have surrounded it. And, yes, at one point in its history, right back at the start, it came from a sort of factory and was sold as a tool. Now it is surrounded by a halo, and then bow is put to string, and something happens. Do not forget there is stuff in this world that is a vehicle for the expression of the human soul.

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End of [239] The Future of Stuff, part 3 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [251](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md) ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020); the most closely related, [793](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md) COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.