# The Future of Stuff (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [239], part 1 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 1 of 3
[p. 11 to 12](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) SECTION ONE: JUSTICE AND DESIRE Seeing Upstream, Seeing Downstream There’s no such thing as a car. At least, there’s no such stand-alone object called a car. If you think of the car as the ‘figure’ in the gestalt sense, the ‘ground’ on which the car stands is literally a road made just for the car. The car may have a tank of petrol in it, but there better be another tank of petrol right behind that one when it runs dry, or the car becomes a particularly expensive and impractical paperweight. The fact that we think about and price the car as a standalone object, rather than as something embedded in a complex infrastructure, is how cars are able to do so much environmental and social damage, driving up house prices as parking competes with homes, destabilising the climate and threatening future food production with their noxious exhalations. In practice, we simply never price in the externalities of the car with the car: the roads, parking spaces, petrol stations and garages all divert resources from other causes, but car buyers do not pay for these things. The car is like a cell in an invisible body we barely notice. This body can be perceived as Richard Dawkins’s extended phenotype. The physical body of an animal, as defined by its DNA, is its phenotype. Dawkins argues that animals also have an extended phenotype: ants build ant hills, beavers build dams, humans create industrial society. Humans make cars, cars imply roads and petrol stations, but we do not see them as part of the car. For everyday purposes, the perceived stand-alone ‘carness’ of the car is created by a narrowing of our attention away from the whole systems view. Because we usually think about the car and not the road, we lose the ‘systemic embeddedness’ which is actually crucial to the existence of the car. This tendency to see things but lose whole systems is a human perceptual limitation, like our blind spot. It is one aspect of what Gestalt psychologists call the Law of Prägnanz. The law states that the mind will perceive complex things in the simplest functional way: humans automatically cut complexity very early on in the perceptual system of the mind. Gestalt psychology studies how we turn a complex, ever-shifting environment into coherent objects, including

[p. 13 to 14](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) both concrete things like a pair of shoes, and abstract concepts like political parties. A critical part of this process is separating ‘figure’ (the thing) from ‘ground’ (everything else). An artificial narrowing, a near-exclusive focus on the ‘figure’ of consumer goods to the total neglect of the ‘ground’ is at the heart of our problems reasoning about stuff. It affects us in all areas, from global warming to human rights to public health and product safety. At the heart of all of these problems is the magical stuff illusion: that stuff magically comes into existence when we buy it and magically leaves existence when we throw it away, much like the matter of the Star Trek ‘Holodeck’. But real stuff is not like this; it is not conjured directly from the mind. In fact, all real stuff is the output of systems. Seeing systemic embeddedness is central to our ability to reason about the future of stuff. The majority of the most revolutionary changes in the future of stuff will come from changes in the systems that produce the stuff. There is a gestalt between stuff and the systems which produce the stuff and, in this stuff/systems gestalt it is the production systems which shift first. New manufacturing technology or new financial arrangements enable the creation of new kinds of products. In manufacturing, the ground (tools) shifts before the figure (products). The invisible networks of technologies and social practices which give stuff its value, its utility and its very existence are where all the innovation happens. The stuff comes along almost as an afterthought. Given new materials or new manufacturing technologies, designers will make a river of new things showcasing the wonders technology enables now. There are two important classes of stuff we will not dig into very much in this work: infrastructure and appliances. Infrastructure is the pipes, wires, power stations, sewer pipes and aqueducts that connect our buildings to various serviceprovision architectures like power stations and water purification plants. Appliances, sometimes called white goods, are our refrigerators and washing machines, even our kitchen sinks. Although we could think of these things as stuff, and in some absolute sense they are, both infrastructure and appliances have complex interdependencies and dynamics of a kind which would warrant a book of their own to fully, formally explore. I spent a fair few years on these topics, under the banner Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, and it is through that lens that I came to view so much of our world. However, although we must gloss infrastructure and appliances, there is a third kind of special stuff which we will explore in some depth now. The Magic of Tools Tools are stuff that we use to make more, better stuff. The tools we use to run society firmly distinguish one age from

[p. 15 to 16](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) another: this is, without a doubt, the laptop age giving over to the phone age. The laptop has been my tool of choice since 2001 when I bought the first ‘square’ iBook to hit the market: a white slab of productivity which was my workstation and which stayed that way, over several nearly identical machines, as the CD drive came and went and various ports appeared and disappeared, plastic gave way to metal, and ports finally vanished altogether, and that’s what I’m writing on right now. I have some nostalgia for my old laptops: I will evoke a memory for certain readers by mentioning the X220 keyboard. Did that make you smile? In any case, tools: a pen, and if it’s special, your pen. Your computer, iPad, phone, tablet. Maybe your VR gear or gaming PC. Maybe your printer – do you still own a printer? Used to be essential – computers used to produce paper as their primary output (not email). In a kitchen, it’s pans and the stove and the sink. Chefs, and their knives. Entire professions are identified mostly by their tools: anvils mean blacksmiths, as surely as stethoscopes signify doctors. All these tools form a sort of landscape, a map. I start with a knife, a potato, a pan and some oil. There is a sequence of directions I can follow with these tools to make chips. The potatoes are food, a consumable, not really stuff in the sense we are interested in. The gas and cooker are infrastructure and an appliance, again not quite stuff. But everything else in that story is tools – the stuff we use to make things. The tools you have expand the things you can cook or the things you can make. Western civilisation – and, really, for the last hundred years, global civilisation – exists inside a framework that I christened AIAC, an acronym for agro-industrial auto-catalysis. Agro-industrial, because it is farms and factories which define our physical culture, and auto-catalysis because the more diverse our tools, the more sophisticated stuff-makingstuff we are using, the more we can accomplish when we combine and compose those capabilities. This is the great mother system to which all other systems interconnect. It’s the system which ensures you can buy steel bolts, a dollar a dozen, rather than having to take a tool and die set and carve the screw threads onto a piece of steel rod with a tap and die set yourself as you need it. AIAC means cheap food, cheap energy and cheap tools which in turn make more cheap food, cheap energy and cheap tools. Modern industrial civilisation is an ode to standardisation and the enormous profusion of complexity. It’s like a jungle at the peak of its fertility, with an impossible number of plants and insects and other species all crammed in together passing nutrients back and forth. And, every year, that technical profusion grows and grows and grows, while (at the time of writing) that natural profusion

[p. 16](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) an ode to standardisation and the enormous profusion of complexity. It’s like a jungle at the peak of its fertility, with an impossible number of plants and insects and other species all crammed in together passing nutrients back and forth. And, every year, that technical profusion grows and grows and grows, while (at the time of writing) that natural profusion dries, withers and burns away. The irony is savage.

[p. 17 to 18](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) Pretty much the only way to appreciate industrial civilisation as an observer is to order a copy of the Grainger catalogue. I commend this exercise to the reader, particularly the younger reader: for a small fee, Grainger (the Amazon of industrial supplies) will ship you a catalogue where you could, with a sufficiently enthusiastic line of credit, order the basics of what you would need to equip a factory to build cars. It’s a burly, multi-thousand-page paper brick which carefully curates most of the functional capacity of our culture into a series of agonisingly narrow categories. You can just sit with it, hold it in your hands, randomly open a page and try and figure out what these things are for, who buys them, and, most important of all, who makes them. This, then, is the magic of tools. The tools that we have shape our ability to make things – a decent drill press makes holes in most steel a casually attainable goal. A 3D printer makes a wide range of mathematical surfaces easy to render as long as you only want them a few inches across and don’t mind the rough wavy lines on the surface, the aliasing. What you can do depends on what you have. There is a lyrical mysticism to our relationship with tools. My grandparents, on the Scottish side, were hand-and-eye people: a weaver and a carpenter. An inherited box of tools that my mother lugged around was a sacred object; it was capital because she knew that, with it, a man could make a living. Little did she realise when she bought me a toy computer in the late 1980s what kind of a tool she was bringing into the house. This is the essential experience I have of change: the older generation was hand tools for men, the younger generation was mind tools for everybody, and the generation in between was confused, the awkward stage between the two. In our heads, we carry with us an invisible map, a functional landscape which surrounds our body like a third or fourth skin, our map of Dawkins’s extended phenotype. If we are surrounded by trees and stones, and we have some knowhow, we are also surrounded by axes, then log cabins. This invisible landscape of things which can be made into other things is often rendered in video games as a ‘tech tree’ – a landscape which players move over, in parallel with their similar movements over a physical map. The map tells you where you could go, and the tech tree tells you what your capabilities could be. Our tools are an expression of the code in our DNA, exactly like our hair, fingernails, minds and internal organs. Perhaps humans really do make factories in the same way that beavers make dams. As we range over continents, we range over the technological landscape with these various bodies. Feet to walk, and hands to make, and minds to dream, each traversing its own kind

[p. 18](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) of the code in our DNA, exactly like our hair, fingernails, minds and internal organs. Perhaps humans really do make factories in the same way that beavers make dams. As we range over continents, we range over the technological landscape with these various bodies. Feet to walk, and hands to make, and minds to dream, each traversing its own kind of space: the capability tensor of our species, a multi-dimensional space which defines where we are and what we can become.

[p. 19 to 20](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) Here we have to consider the degree to which our DNA is software, and, as the program runs, it changes the world around us – an orchestrated dance of molecules selforganising into first bodies then tribes then nations, fire, farms, forges and factories as our major developmental stages. These systems are so deeply bound inside the human condition that nearly every culture has produced them, in one form or another. The human social structures which did not attend to this curve we tend to think of as being tribes: ‘the hunter-gatherers’. The other cultures all followed a strange, interwoven trajectory – part biology, part trade, part culture – with much independent reinvention and repetition, towards the global technological society we enjoy today. To the limited extent that they survive and remain free, those hunter-gatherers are doing their own thing: they did not join us all out here on this burning branch we call civilisation. If global technological society crashes, their culture may comfortably outlast us by tens of thousands of years. It’s Not the Clothes that Fit You, It’s You that Fits the Clothes Does anything you are currently wearing really fit you? In most cases, the answer will be ‘no’. If there does happen to be a fit, it is not because the clothes fit you, but rather that you fit the clothes. They were made for an abstract model, a dummy, and then you tried clothes on until you fit something. We like to think that we are the agents in this story, the protagonists, but actually (unlike craft tailoring) industrial mass production is not really about us. For a tailor, the first duty of the clothes is that they must fit, but in industrial capitalism the first duty of each mass-produced item is that it must sell. We exist as end points in a manufacturing process: as soon as the goods are sold, they are the buyer’s property, and everything after that point is the buyer’s problem. Here, let’s think about property rights. In most instances, a tailor will have a few rolls of cloth around. On the roll, if there’s a decent amount of it, the cloth is worth a good chunk of what was paid for it: the cloth is a commodity which holds value. Once a customer is measured, and a fabric is selected, and the scissors come out, to all intents and purposes that cut cloth now belongs to the customer, because it has practically no value to anyone else. The cloth is now worth more to the customer as the makings of their suit than it was as yards upon a roll. Then assembly and a fitting: if all goes well, the physical custody of the clothes is passed to the customer, a payment is made and the job is done. But there’s a complex little dance in the middle, where an agreement is made, the cloth is cut, but the clothing not yet paid for. There is a little fuzzy blob

[p. 20](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) Then assembly and a fitting: if all goes well, the physical custody of the clothes is passed to the customer, a payment is made and the job is done. But there’s a complex little dance in the middle, where an agreement is made, the cloth is cut, but the clothing not yet paid for. There is a little fuzzy blob of risk in there, carried by

[p. 21 to 22](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) the tailor, that he’ll do such a bad job the clothes won’t be accepted by the customer – or the customer will suddenly become unable to pay for their clothes, or some other contingency. Once the cloth is cut it’s useless to anybody except the intended wearer, but the tailor still bears the risk until a final payment is made. This little fuzzy ragged edge at the seam of the deal is where the risk in the deal concentrates. This may seem an odd example, but it’s important to focus on the simplest and easiest questions about risk before we can see risk as the great next horizon in the future of stuff. All manufacturing involves risk. The risk the stuff won’t sell. The risk that the factory will burn down. The risk somebody will get hurt using the product, and you’ll get sued. Viewed through a risk lens, business exists in two basic forms: businesses that are tiny, and if something goes wrong, they die – small businesses, family businesses, startups – and behemoths so big and heavy that they can absorb a bunch of risk and just keep right on going. There are a lot of reasons that companies get big, but the simplest one is the question of reserves and amortisation of risks: a very big company can keep enough cash in hand that it can steamroller right over small mishaps by taking money out of the reserve, where a smaller company would go bankrupt. The large company knows how often things go wrong, and can calculate an optimal amount of reserve to cover the contingencies at hand. A small company can’t afford the reserve: they just take their chances. This efficient management of contingencies is the simplest way of thinking about why big things are big, and it has broad consequences. It’s not always a specific manufacturing economy of scale which makes the big more profitable than the small: it’s the very nature of risk. In an ever-faster changing world, we see a profusion of tiny little companies exploiting micro-niches and trying to find the ever-elusive product–market fit, but also the creation of enormous platforms which dominate entire sectors of life like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Walmart, Airbnb, Microsoft and Uber. Those behemoths do things in ways that suit them, not that necessarily us, their customers. It’s not the clothes that fit you, it’s you that fits the clothes. A Brand Is a Thing SEARED into the Side of a Cow Things reflect the organisations which make them. Brands sell this to us: the Apple temple is intended to produce things which bring technology into the domain of the secular sacred. There are certainly Apple devices which have changed human history: the original iPod is, I think, a good candidate for the ‘Gutenberg press’ of music going digital, a trend with massive long-term cultural impacts. The reality that Apple

[p. 23 to 24](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) wishes to create is that of a sort of Techno-Zen shrine, with ascended master Steve Jobs inspiring customers to greater creativity and self-actualisation. This story, however, is no more real than the dream-world stuff that advertisements speak of, which winks into existence at desire and vanishes at disgust. The sacred object is a thin veil that may exist in a few design departments and at the board level of Apple. But behind the scenes Apple is still all heavy truck fleets and Chinese factory workers in surgical masks spending their entire work lives polishing bits of glass before the products are packed into the sea containers. All brands are like this: a numinous veil drawn over a basically standard, efficient manufacturing operation with different degrees of ugliness and decrepitude forced into the corners. This structure does not exist by chance. Factories are horrible. Even nice factories are kind of horrible, but bad factories are really horrible. All factories were bad factories in the early days of industrialisation. Belts drove spindles on machines, and a careless hem could get caught in the spindle or the belt, wind you up in the works and kill you in the blink of an eye. It wasn’t like shearing sheep or swinging a scythe: people could get killed or maimed doing it, and frequently did. Industrial accidents, pollution, exposure to toxic chemicals. Those ‘dark satanic mills’ of the early industrial revolution were indeed hells. Factories in countries without strong labour unions and health and safety regulations tend towards the hellish to this day. This pattern – where along the supply chain, gross matter is transmuted into the wonder of consumer products – is older than the factory. It goes back at least as far as feudalism. Here, in Britain, I like to think of it as the class divide embodied in our very language: ‘beef’ on the plate from the French boeuf, but ‘cow’ in the field, from the Anglo-Saxon cū. The cooked dish is identified using the language of the masters, but the animal on the hoof is named in the language of the farmers. Unconsciously a person asks: do I have enough money, enough status in this situation, to have somebody draw the veil over how this was made to create the beautiful illusion of consumer products which appear as if by magic and disappear in exactly the same way when I am done with them, or do I have to deal with this all myself? Do I hire somebody, or is this DIY? Are we closer to the manufacturers who witness stuff being made as underpaid, downtrodden workers, maybe even children, make the product on a factory line, or are we the consumers for whom a web of enchantment is woven by advertising, temporarily patching the hole in our soul with cheap credit? From which vantage point do we see the stuff? On which side of the retail counter do we stand? Stuff exists on a timeline: its manufacturing and its sale,

[p. 24](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) the product on a factory line, or are we the consumers for whom a web of enchantment is woven by advertising, temporarily patching the hole in our soul with cheap credit? From which vantage point do we see the stuff? On which side of the retail counter do we stand? Stuff exists on a timeline: its manufacturing and its sale, its use by the consumer and its disposal. At every stage, the paying customer is separated from the inconvenient truth – be it blood diamonds, factory workers being ground down, or

[p. 25 to 26](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) vast seas of rotting landfill. Consumerism has learned that it is more profitable to lie to us about our stuff, and about the consequences of buying our stuff. We are so well served by these lies that we have come to cherish and sacralise them – the Mall and Luxury are now as archetypal as the watering hole and gold itself these days – an entire fantasy world wrapped around the rich, much as theme parks enfold children. But everything is temporary, even structural lies that outlast empires are eventually killed by the truth. Ours is a little bubble in history, a moment in time when the distance goods travel is further than the distance news about how those goods are made travels: a mismatch between the power of advertising and the power of auditing, if you will. The gaps in history where lies overpower truth will close in time, just as prices being arbitraged between markets will eventually equalise. Buyers and sellers will meet, not only on the price that the goods are to be sold at, but with an agreed narrative about where the goods came from, how they were made and where they are going at the end of their utility. Because consumers do not only want stuff these days, they are starting to want the truth about their stuff. The climate crisis puts immense moral pressure on all of us to clean up our lifestyles. That trend towards transparent capitalism is only fully visible among status-driven luxury consumers today, but it will inevitably spread as a new horizon for social competition, as people want to separate themselves from the evils of the world by building enclaves of sustainable, fair trade commerce. Nobody wants to be the only kid in class wearing slavelabour jeans. Social pressure will move standards far faster than legislation, in many arenas. The Age of Wilful Ignorance Is at an End Things have been really bad for a really long time. You can look in almost any direction in the past, or things left over from the past, and see something so horrible the modern mind recoils just from looking at it. Roman laws on child prostitution, or the reports on the UN personnel abusing their immunity to prosecution. How foie gras is made. The feet of ballet dancers. So many of our cultural institutions come from a barbaric age when doctors did not wash their hands, women died all the time in childbirth and princes did what they damn well liked and nobody was allowed to say ‘boo’ (never mind ‘lawsuit’). The ages before us were lawless, ignorant, dangerous and violent, often all at the same time. During those times, just to get through the day meant doing things very few of us would be physically ready, psychologically able or morally willing to do today. It takes a

[p. 27 to 28](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) special mindset to raise animals, see them every day, give them names, pat them on the head, and then, at the end of the year, slaughter and eat them. We still have plenty of people who do it, but far fewer as a percentage of our population than was once the case. Feudal lords may have got enough to eat most of the time, but they sat in the middle of a sea of envy and hatred, and could be forced to fight in wars on the words of one guy who inherited the right to tell them what to do, just as they inherited the land they rented out to the local vassals. The past was basically terrible. It had its points, but it was basically terrible. Colonialism is essentially the export of feudalism around the world, as well as reviving or inventing several new cruelties along the way. None of us were alive when that horrible process began, yet nearly all of us indirectly benefit from it today: Indian gold built the Victorian sewers and the other public infrastructure that hauled London out of squalor. This often seems like it is in the past but just as with ballet, the barbaric practices of the past continue to break toes now, because we keep the barbaric past alive – even though we would simply never countenance these practices if they were invented today. We got used to the pretty bits and that familiarity prevented us from seeing things clearly: come for the ballet, stay for the broken toes. The real problem with our stuff is how much of it is produced by slaves, by child labour, by clear-cutting rainforests, shooting elephants, skinning mink alive and 400 other activities we would completely recoil at doing ourselves, and frankly are a bit sick of people doing on our behalf. Nobody is suggesting we actually ban ballet, but there sort of comes a point where people look at the damage done from standing on your toes all day, or smashing your head into the helmet of some other college student to the point of getting brain damage, and we basically say enough! This is exactly where we are with trade: we have collectively had enough of the barbarity, and now we need a way for it to end. As I used to say when discussing the 2008 financial collapse, ‘Collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’ The barbaric past dies only when we get uncomfortable enough with the evil being done by the customs of the past that we decide that, actually, we are not sending our kids to ballet school unless they will not be doing pointe, and our sons are doing basketball not football until something is done about the traumatic brain injuries. We cannot help that our lives are deeply, deeply embedded in the barbaric practices of the past, any more than we can help that once in a blue moon somebody

[p. 28](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) sending our kids to ballet school unless they will not be doing pointe, and our sons are doing basketball not football until something is done about the traumatic brain injuries. We cannot help that our lives are deeply, deeply embedded in the barbaric practices of the past, any more than we can help that once in a blue moon somebody winds up ordering the foie gras and we guiltily pinch a bite. Nobody’s morality is absolute; we are all fish in water arguing who is the wetter. But, right now, we are at a staggeringly high peak in the history of humans communicating with each other, at the same time as nearly everything we buy (except maybe the occasional

[p. 29 to 30](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) fair trade organic raisin) contains a history of brutal oppression at some level, somewhere in its history. Even if your car runs on oil from Norway, that oil is cheap because of the oil coming out of the Middle East and fracking. It’s all an enormous moral tangle and if only a single consumer changes their mind, it is too expensive and complex to live the entirely moral life. No lesser a light than Mahatma Gandhi encountered this problem. Gandhi wore his iconic uniform consisting of a shawl and shorts made of khadi to make it clear to his followers that it was better to wear a small amount of the ethically manufactured (but expensive) hand-woven Indian fabric than to wear a full suit of clothes made by the oppressive machinery of the British Empire – that is to say, the looms that were being operated in Scotland by my grandmother at the time of Gandhi’s campaigns. Gandhi was making the point that nobody is too poor to wear ethically produced things: if you have to make do with less, because your morality insists on fair trade, you are not without honour. This Gandhian principle alone is half the answer to the world’s problems, if only people would act en masse as they did in Gandhi’s time. The destructive ignorance of the past is being replaced with a witheringly harsh, scouring transparency. The same new integrated cross-organisation technology platforms that we need for maximum industrial and financial efficiency also lay the foundation for transparency up and down the supply chain, revealing unfair labour practices and environmental crimes at the same time as they identify waste and inefficiency. In the future there will be no place to hide the oppression. Take food safety as an example. If there is a recall of, say, a contaminated salad product, the most efficient recall is one which figures out exactly where the contagion originated. Perhaps all the salads contained lettuce from the same farm in Sonoma. So now only those packages are recalled. The next step is to identify and correct what went wrong in Sonoma and guarantee that it will never cause an expensive recall again. To get the efficient outcome requires transparency. That transparency extends right down to ‘our migrant workers did not have proper sanitation facilities, and that is how this salad became contaminated’. Getting to root causes and fixing expensive problems requires transparency. The alternative is a constant stream of produce recalls and lawsuits. These liabilities spread up the supply chain, and so there is constant pressure for transparency from both retailers and customers. This is not a new approach: transparency is profitable. In fact, transparency is the only path to quality in manufacturing. This has been well known in industrial manufacturing since the post-Second World War period. A US quality control expert called W. Edwards Deming laid the foundation for modern electronics manufacturing in Japan when he transformed organisational culture around values like transparency and cooperation to get the

[p. 30](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) transparency is profitable. In fact, transparency is the only path to quality in manufacturing. This has been well known in industrial manufacturing since the post-Second World War period. A US quality control expert called W. Edwards Deming laid the foundation for modern electronics manufacturing in Japan when he transformed organisational culture around values like transparency and cooperation to get the incredible clarity required to perfect complex manufacturing processes.

[p. 31 to 32](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) In the age of the Internet, however, this kind of transparency takes on an entirely different aspect. Labour struggles continue and organise online. The people making the goods can see on Instagram the lifestyles of the people using the things they made. Slowly it becomes harder and harder to maintain the structural inequalities left behind by colonialism, particularly as former colonies rise to their feet as global powers. The push and pull here is a direct continuation of the struggles of labour unions during the industrial period, but now rendered as global politics. But let us not forget that we are all the beneficiaries of victories in previous rounds of this fight. Our forty-hour work weeks and two-day weekends all came from the struggle of factory workers and miners and farmers, all over the world, every day, as they fought and still fight, right now, for better wages and workplace protections. As we forced those above us to make room at the table in the past, so we must make room at the table now, until for everyone, there is bread. Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of Looking at the struggle of workers locates our story squarely inside the logic of industrial mass production inside of market capitalism. Pretty much any discussion of the future of ‘stuff’ is going to start inside that conceptual frame, because that’s where the stuff is made, but it is too limited on its own. Now we have to break that frame. We need a god’s eye perspective. One more illusion must be peeled away before we can construct a durable watchtower from which to view the future. Mass production, or even craft production, is not where the stuff actually came from. In an absolute sense the atoms came from the Big Bang, and stellar nucleosynthesis making heavy atoms like gold inside supernovae, and the cosmic processes which brought Earth into being, with all its metals, ores and stone, and the various waves of geology and biology that made our raw materials like coal and oil, and contemporary biological processes that give us wood, cotton, all of our food except maybe salt, and so on. Apart from a few things made in nuclear reactors, like the sources inside X-ray machines, every atom was made by impossibly ancient processes which are completely outside our control, processes that we even now do not fully understand. It used to be that we had religious or spiritual myths to explain where the stuff came from. Gods of rivers, gods of the earth, myths about fornicating titans and what have you. Now we have reasonably accurate models – as far as they go. For every kind of atom, we can track back to roughly what kind of nuclear reactions happened in roughly what kinds of stars back more or less to the Big Bang. At the big physics

[p. 33 to 34](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) labs we can tear the atoms apart into quarks and gluons, and point at neutrinos by watching them make flashes of light as they interact with atoms in enormous dark underground lakes of dry-cleaning fluid surrounded by impossibly sensitive detectors. But why these fundamental particles and not others; why these fundamental forces? There is very little in the way of coherent science when we take a step past there: we have neither the experimental equipment nor the theoretical frameworks to take us further. These are the rules of the game, and we play inside them as we will. Future generations will expand that understanding, but we may never solve it. In a very real sense, nobody ever made anything. People rearrange pieces which already exist, in much the same way that kids make things from Lego, but do not themselves manufacture the Lego bricks. That’s our entire economy, and all of our manufacturing processes: rearranging things that literally just fell from the sky. And most of our art, except perhaps stories. And life itself is made of this stuff in forms which draw more energy from the environment than they need to survive, for a while, and then this life duplicates itself, sometimes in partnership with mates, into forms ever so slightly different from the forms which went before. Iterated over a billion years, a mysterious first replicator – a thing without a face, without a name, one tiny event away from being inanimate matter – this thing lit a fire which still burns today, one billion years later. We are that fire, and that fire is us. But, outside of a few nuclear reactors making isotopes for industrial reasons, the atoms and the fundamental forces are exactly where the clockwork machinery of physics put them. There is a little island of life here on earth where things work a little differently, but where matter self-organises into self-replicating things which become people who write books like this, and people who read them, but for the most part stuff just is. So what we are really tracking here, as we think about the future of stuff, is the future of material culture: what you would see in future museums in glass cases, eternal and unchanging. The way people make patterns in the stuff is what changes. Our stuff is patterns plus atoms for the most part. And the patterns we make are 100% embodied material culture, from clothes to nuclear reactors. Everything is embedded. In fact, what is happening when we make stuff is that we are binding cultural information – science, engineering, craft, technology and art – to rearrange these fixed atoms in front of us into forms which are more pleasing to our hand, our eye and even our deepest psychological needs. This mixing of matter and information is as old as life itself: in fact, it is life itself. DNA is the first physical manifestation of information, and, if you want to be absolutist about it, information is

[p. 34](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) fixed atoms in front of us into forms which are more pleasing to our hand, our eye and even our deepest psychological needs. This mixing of matter and information is as old as life itself: in fact, it is life itself. DNA is the first physical manifestation of information, and, if you want to be absolutist about it, information is life. A persistent pattern in the entropic heat and noise of the universe is literally the difference between being alive and dead.

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/239-2.md (part 2 of 3).
End of [239] The Future of Stuff, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.