# The Future We Deserve — Introduction > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [240]. 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), 2012-02-29 (author's dateline), https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/Introduction. 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): Futures anthology introduction; side work. - Career works it belongs to: - The Future We Deserve (2012): Essay collection co-edited with Cat Lupton and Noah Raford, released March 2012; includes the short story... - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine) - 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: - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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: Open government & anti-corruption (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Appropedia (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); The Future We Deserve (1 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); Leashless (1 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.48 (1.00 is the top), number 107 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [210] [The Future We Deserve (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md): same career work: The Future We Deserve - [354] [The Future We Deserve - 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/354.md): same career work: The Future We Deserve - On the same works, just before: [822] [Mother of Hydrogen, a novel (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/822.md); [823] [Plausible Utopias (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/823.md); [354] [The Future We Deserve - 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/354.md) - On the same works, just after: [210] [The Future We Deserve (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md); [330] [Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/330.md); [331] [STAR-TIDES Talk at FAHUM 08 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/331.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 — Introduction, document, 2012-02-29, https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/Introduction; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [240], https://guptaoption.com/texts/240.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/Introduction) If you don't know the story of how the book was written, it's very simple: I asked on twitter. @leashless I'm putting together a book called The Future We Deserve, open brief, 500 words, sign up at https://www.appropedia.org/The_future_we_deserve Actually it started a day before that, when Noah Raford and I stood in a playground in Forest Hill watching his two year old interacting with a large metal duck on a spring, discussing the future. Three days after the tweet, by the magic power of twitter and networks, 70 people had decided to write for the book, and the long, slow process of putting it together had begun. It took about three months to get 90+ pieces in. We did a Kickstarter, because I began to realize how big a job I'd gotten myself into. Many people donated, some of them hundreds of dollars, and this is part of what kept the project alive when I thought "there's no way I can get this right." I'd committed, I'd taken people's money, and I had to see it through. So I'd like to thank everybody who helped make this book a reality, authors, donors and especially those who gave both their work and money, and Kickstarter for existing. When I sat down and did the first reading, what I discovered stopped my mind for most of a year. I went from being confident that I understood the broad narrative outline of the future to being absolutely certain that I did not. Every page or two there was a deep insight, something that once-seen could not be unseen, and gradually my implicit, unacknowledged confidence and boldness about my understanding of the future faded away into a conscious unknowing . There is too much going on for us to hope to control. Cat Lupton got me out of this rut - she provided the editorial input, the time editing and managing, and the enthusiasm that I needed to finally admit that I could not do this alone, and dealing with the implications was not a precondition to publishing it. Solo work at the heart of a community project is not sensible, and I want to thank Cat for caring enough to get this moving and done. Shaun Chamberlin agreed to write the foreword, by which point I knew that somebody else was going to have to try and make sense of things and guide the reader gently to a perspective they could read from. What a task! I'm glad Shaun took it on. Maria Elvorith contributed our cover - an absolutely luminous being, I was glad to know her, however briefly. This book is an interactive process. I'm hoping for reading groups, for annotated versions of the articles, for interviews and interaction with our authors, and for a second book, nominally titled The Present We Have . The hub for these activities is http://web.archive.org/web/20201101055518/http://thefuturewedeserve.com/1/ Our hash tag for twitter (and other media) is #TheFWD / @TheFWD. Part of the fluidity of this project is [passage 2](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Future_We_Deserve/Introduction) an interactive process. I'm hoping for reading groups, for annotated versions of the articles, for interviews and interaction with our authors, and for a second book, nominally titled The Present We Have . The hub for these activities is http://web.archive.org/web/20201101055518/http://thefuturewedeserve.com/1/ Our hash tag for twitter (and other media) is #TheFWD / @TheFWD. Part of the fluidity of this project is the power of the new infrastructure. Ward Cunningham's seed of genius, the Wiki, and the fine chaps at Appropedia who in addition to hosting and managing the world's largest online appropriate technology library, also have a very liberal, inclusionist attitude to side projects like this book. The New Public Thinking book which my collaborator Dougald Hine just released is also on this platform. Finally, there's our printing process. PediaPress is a phenomenal service which exists to turn wikis into books. I'm not sure that they ever realized just how potent the MediaWiki/PediaPress combination is for producing new work, but the streamlining of workflow and the simple "just leave this to our software" mechanism by which the books are produced is truly revolutionary and liberating. It's not just print-on-demand, but the total fluidization of the concept and execution of the book as a mass-collaborative object. And beyond finally, to our authors: this is, literally, your book. When I started this, I had an elitist notion of the future as, in some way, the domain of specialists who thought about the future a lot. What you've taught me is that the future is where every one of us will live our lives, and people know their own business best - you wrote about what you knew, and you wrote about what you cared about, and in the process, you created a work that has broadened my horizons, and deepened my appreciation for just how brilliant and talented people are. You taught me that we know nothing about where we're going, and that the future is a dialogue between nine billion people, striving to find a common voice. To the future! Vinay Gupta London, 29 Feburary 2012 --- End of [240] The Future We Deserve — Introduction. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [210](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md) The Future We Deserve (2012); the most closely related, [210](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md) The Future We Deserve (2012); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.