# Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.) (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [250], part 2 of 2. 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: video, 2010-09-27 (his archive.org deposit filename Through the Looking Glass Greenhouse Ireland 27Sep2010.mp4; confirmed by Vinay 2026-11-10), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - 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): Foundational Ireland / FEASTA talk: coordination (unity of effort without command), SCIM / Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, Gold State in a Box, and city-state survivalism as responses to systemic and VUCA risk. - Career works it belongs to: - SCIM / INAM (2009): Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps: 18 human needs across 7 scales, from the individual to the world. - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (suggested by machine) - 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: - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. - 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). - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Ideas developed here: State in a Box - Topics: Open government & anti-corruption (15%); Climate politics & democracy (15%); disaster / refugee / food (12%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: unity of effort (4 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); interdependencies (4 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 3 undated); Transition Towns (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); city state (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); VUCA (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Ireland (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Marcin Jakubowski (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); function of government (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); agro-industrial (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Hurricane Katrina (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): resource control; international recognition; shared map; shared plan; VUCA; effective organizations; failure to govern; Hurricane Katrina; systemic risk; Transition Towns - Importance: core-text score 0.85 (1.00 is the top), number 8 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [366] ["Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md): Item 250 is the full Ireland, September 2010 Through the Looking Glass talk; item 366 is the workshop announcement video - [849] Through the Looking Glass (slides) (2010): Item 250 is the full talk; item 849 is the Through the Looking Glass slides - On the same works, just before: [74] [“Complex systems behave unpredictably” – Gupta’s law of... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/74.md); [366] ["Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md); [849] Through the Looking Glass (slides) (2010) - On the same works, just after: [365] [social media and local resilience (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/365.md); [11] [RCDS cyber (Tibbs) (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/11.md); [99] [User:Vinay Gupta/Gupta State Failure Management Archive (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/99.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: Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.), video, 2010-09-27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [250], https://guptaoption.com/texts/250.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [39:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2354s) down to the core survivalism is individual and group short-term stockpile oriented see we've gone over these models and now it's possible to look at the projects which are currently ongoing to try and address these risks and slightly cleaner terms green wizards right it's individual group level infrastructure rebuilding from scale banks transition towns group and organization predominantly oriented around supply chain risk management dark money right changing the way that people think that's all the way up there at the organization level but you're talking about shared maps and shared plans so what we have is a large complex whole system and the different groups are trying to manage these risks are approaching different parts of it they're all focused on one area some of them are individual focused some of the group focused some of them organization focused and for example a spa is probably largely organization and state focused and it's largely in the detect and avoid camp so you've an interlocking system many groups approaching the constraint management global risks now you are unfortunately not gonna be able to read this so it very quickly point out what's wrong six needs for individuals for needs for groups three needs for organizations five needs for the nation state and then across the way individual household villager neighborhood town region country world and this grid is a very basic high-level map of what it is that live in a complex society and the things that keep you going in it so so give interdependencies survivalism covers the first six needs at an individual level and very little else green wizards is individual and household level but it's still basically those six needs and not much more transitions is those six needs but largely managed a village and a neighborhood at a town level make sense inter walkin the big differences in philosophy between the individual the household and the group level response between survivals and dreams were certain transitions it's all basically the same technologies it's all basically the same skills it's three different levels of social organization behind open forum pac Marcin Jakubowski project in America where they're attempting to build a set of machine tools which are capable of producing the same set of machine tools [41:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2504s) in the workshop so you have a drill press and a saw and some other stuff that you can use to build a drill faster than a saw and some other stuff and tractors and well diversion all the rest of this kind of stuff a very small autocatalytic set of tools i Arkana box hex europe project this is what marshal best known for it's an emergency housing project all we do is shelter we all need to at the household well River simple is an open source car project so it's a car that's profitable to produce and runs as short of as a thousand units and it's hydrogen based so you can run it from things like wind power very very simple very very powerful right the idea of being able to do short run car production means that you can keep some form of you know electric car even in a situation where you don't have the ability to produce a million in a run and you can't SAP a huge complex factory super simple design Darkman right way up here in the legal infrastructure that allows you to figure out how to manage and share resources is changing the way that people see what resources are how do we manage seasteading very briefly this is a bunch of guys who want to build in new countries on floating concrete oil platforms as research projects for different ways of doing governance run by Milton Friedman's grandson backing with from the founder of very bait so they're not short of money and they're not short of intellectual clout and you know they're doing stuff so um the [43:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2590s) bottom line is that these maps allow you to figure out what groups are in your environment what they're working on and who's covering which basis it's not a very precise tool it's an easy tool and it gets people focused on how they can coop cooperate with unity of effort without unity of command to manage the risks in the environment and very briefly highlight two risks I'm just going to skip through these medical supply chains we covered the insulin example called Katrina is grid failure in cold cities like Minneapolis those are very urgent risks and I'm unaware that those risks are properly handled it'd be really nice of transitions and similar groups to build awareness and medical supply chain because that stuff is really important the question is where are you gonna store the additional medical supplies to provide some buffering so should I take questions though or should we move straight to the panel yes what do you think is the replacement to the nation state that fails I think that the city state is a very real thing so you know the city state is something that's got very very long history and municipal governance is very solid and real and tangible so it's likely to be very important and to continue to exist so I think that if you saw a really severe global shock you might see a lot of municipalities it would become very concerned with running their own affairs and then gradually they would kind of begin to figure out what to do the territory in between that is just a gas but I think it's the most likely outcome of the most severe shocks the different cities have very different risks when it comes to Ag for example I mean Ireland has got something like four times the amount of arable land you need to feed the entire population but if you go to the UK it's just barely enough maybe if we got Iraq together and if you look at say Manhattan you know the population densities are so enormous so you wind up with a catchment area that's hundreds of miles before you've actually got influence efficiency again so I think it's I think it's specific city by city rather than large-scale simple risk --- End of [250] Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.), part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [365](https://guptaoption.com/texts/365.md) social media and local resilience (2010); the most closely related, [366](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md) "Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.