# EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [314]. 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: video, 2014-09-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA. 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): States the programme: open, cheap basic infrastructure (shelter, water, power, toilets) as the next frontier.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism (2014): Talk at Electromagnetic Field 2014: the Hexayurt as engineering outside the market, for the three billion...
  - Copyright and the digital economy: a case for reason (2010): Short paper proposing land law, with rights of way and trespass, as a better model for copying than theft:... (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)
  - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (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. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (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: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (20%); Burning Man shelter building (20%); housing / house / quality (20%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: free culture (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); mortgages (3 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); market access (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); hackathon (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Estonia (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); toilets (2 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); composting toilets (1 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Scotland (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Buckminster Fuller (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Fuller (1 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.47 (1.00 is the top), number 120 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md): same career work: Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism
  - [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md); [73] [A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine | The... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/73.md); [315] [Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/315.md)
- On the same works, just after: [384] [test (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md); [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md); [311] [Vinay Gupta - Proof of Work / IAmSatoshi (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/311.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: EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism, video, 2014-09-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [314], https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=0s) [Applause] right folks uh let me just start my Bo [Music] thing right so uh you excuse me I'm running about 3 hours of sleep and uh not I uh right uh can find a way of doing a Twitter wall it be nice to have on I'm really using slides very much uh let us start at the beginning so uh that thing right there which you might be able to see somewhere over here is a hexayurt and the hexayurt is a ridiculously simple object right I mean it's a genuinely stupidly simple thing the bites should have been invented in the 1960s um should become a standard part of human culture decades ago right take six sheetss of plywood put them in a circle hexagon take six little sheets of plywood cut them in half on the diagonal and turn them into roofs right and you can see the pictures here there is nothing to it it is so simple that even drug all the weirdos from burning man manag to build thousands of right why this wasn't figured out by Buckminster Fuller one of his disciples literally 50 years ago I have no idea it kind of start there slumbering until I stumbled on it in the to looked it and went crap there goes my future um so I've been lugging around this awful shed for at this point 12 years uh trying to get the thing into Mass use largely for humanitarian purposes right we've got on the order of 60 million people living in tents and I mean you're living in tents how is it sucks right and that's for a weekend in a relatively nice planet with tons of modern infrastructure around so imagine a 10 city of 10,000 100,000 people where the expectation is you're going to be there for 10 or 15 years which is a typical length of time for people don't live under canvas and refugee camps right so you know it's a country this of the UK scattered around the world stuck under canvas in horrific climates right and we can fix it with plywood and the entire set of instructions is take six boards put them in a hexagon take six for cut them in

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=150s) half put them around for a shallow cor that's your roof done if you want it to be nice and H hot staple up insulation on the inside if you want to keep the sun off wrap the outside in tin foil and wallpaper paste did anybody not get that right if we want to be really technical about this and ask how you hold pieces of FL together you can cut little box out of pieces of 2x4 or you can make little metal brackets in a sheet metal press now if you would be good enough to tell the NGO people how to do this and perhaps persuade that it was worth taking people out of tents and putting them into something better we could solve the problem and I could go home right because that's it that's all there is to the hex right it takes a minute and a half to explain you understand basically everything there is to know about the manian uses I could walk off stage now You' be done except from the hard part about why is it taken 12 years to get anybody use the blood and that's the hard problem it's

[3:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=208s) no longer a problem of Technology it's a problem of adoption and the question is why do we have this enormous blind spot about applying modern technology to housing systems so it's taken years and years and years years and years to thinking you know we should be using this heer it's very intense pretty simple you know this shouldn't be a hard thing and really only in the last couple years has it finally hit me the reason it's hard to get people moving on the hexayurt is because we're all still living in houses which could have been built 200 300 400 years ago and in the UK in some cases were right your mental model of what a really nice house looks like is actually derived from medieval castle it's a cheap R knockoff of what your over Master's Li gber lived in in feudalism right an englishman's home is his castle because we're all going to pretend that we're Mobility even though we're enslaved by crap jobs and mortgages and this psychological mindset that a real house is similar to the castles of the nobility has completely paralyzed our ability to innovate in housing so everything around us is becoming amazing right the cars run on electricity they're becoming self- drivable the computers I mean my laptop would be the top 500 supercomputer in the top half 20 years ago not even an expensive L uh solar panels Dr in price by 7% a year for the past 14 years they're roughly the same price as coal 10 years from now they'll be roughly half the price of coal the economy will decarbonize we won't get an economic crash to bail us out of this terrible political problem we have and then we have to deal with the S power of American Way um uh so inside of this context right gortex anything that you look at that invol technology is becoming amazing every time you turn away from it and you turn back and at it's doubled in quality and half in price it's not just computers it's Material Science knife steel you know un name carbon fiber Tu my God it's so cheap um except housing housing old building Technologies terrible building quality plumbers my God have you seen the

[5:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=358s) quality of Plumbing as an industry the stuff is crap the people rape you every time you look at their freaking you know you look at my phone number that's 9 right the quality of they work with you is terrible we joke about the industry all the time oh my God they're so terrible they're worse than PL and if youve in commer you see roers right everything to do with our built environment architect what a joke 7ye qualification longer than it takes to be a brain surger and have you seen the crap building in London so the point that I'm making is that everything to do with building is fundamentally broken and we've made a special sphere of exception around building in which technological progress is zero quality is terrible there are no review processes where you can figure out whether the thing you're buying is good or not and it absolutely dominates our economic landscape right how many of

[6:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=416s) you feel you're paying too much for housing why haven't you done anything about it yet right why is housing a special exception to the general rule the open source improves quality and reduces cost why we not gotten started on this right I mean do you see the question now right can anybody come up with a compelling reason why we haven't started on working to free ourselves from enormously over overpriced housing as a fundamental economic fact that chains us to systems that we generally speaking disbar right the reason would be something to do with the V people have those and what to keep their yes vested interests from people to own the assets does anybody here feel like they're making a ton of money from owning a house anybody here in the vested interest class two or three people right the rest of you why Haven done something about this right why do we not have active ongoing research to take the worst Engineering in our culture and fix it yes planning regulations planning regulations so planning regulations are an obstacle that we would need to overcome to get a real breakthrough in housing planning regulations are the equivalent of the copyright Lobby when it came to file sharing right and I will come back to talk about the difference between napsterizado2001 really fluid easy work okay one more and and the most obvious uh individual thing one could do is just join the vested interests join the vested interest right so we've got a defection problem that people who have to get up and go to solve this problem usually say I know I'm going to make a ton of money and buy a really nice house in a place where the volumes go up right so the defection problem is basically like being a scab in a labor agion situation right we've got an entire population being oppressed by mortgages and OB seen rent this particular true living in London and rather than doing something about the political problem which Isel in a repression we go you know what I think they have it better over here right and this is how the British class structure is always working the upper class is continuing buy Talent from the middle class in the working class give vior positions in the fudal bureaucracy and the reason we live like this is because the Norman Conquest never ended right when we run out of England

[9:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=566s) the Normans run out of England by the the Normans are Vikings that settled in France for about 150 years then came here once they dealt with Britain they dealt with Wales after Wales they did Scotland then they did Ireland they run out with white people to oppress and they went to Africa South America North America once they've gotten rid of oppressing those and they couldn't really really find any left to oppress then they Ed for India and China right the simple political history if you ever need to explain it to somebody is the Norman Conquest never ended today we um it's Vikings in suits we call lawyers uh actually really do talks on hour SCH more often it's a lot more fun that's great you so um

[10:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=610s) napiza workk none of that prop and we would all have infinite music the artists would get a little bit starred to death but we maybe find some way of supporting them on an infinite Kickstarter or patreon or something like that and not for work with 15year old technology better than anything that we've had since and that really shows the power of centralization to solve problems on no money and no budget centralization works except for the little problem that makes a Target which you can then walk with a needle stick but but the fo Napster is what eventually gave us Spotify and Spotify represents the complete capitulation of the copyright industry to the nerd R which is as so the complete capitulation of the copyright industry is unless you give us an offer which is better than piracy we will take piracy we have a choice we can buy your stuff at enormous prices and wait weeks for delivery of a physical plastic object or we can download it for free now make me an offer uh uh would you like some grm in CDs we find that's really helpful uh uh finally in utter desperation that they're going to get completely annihilated they say right here's offer it's better than piracy how this 10 qu a month for all the music in the world so just please stop stealing it stealing it the hardest feel paying for it and this begins to work the only problem with Spotify you hear the Spotify advertising where it says blah blah blah blah blah blah we make lots of money for the rights holders and the artists wait what do the rights holders do now right what do they do you upload a file to Spotify people listen to the file on Spotify Spotify cols money and gives it to you what are the record companies for post Spotify but because the record companies have Spotify over a barrel which is give us a de that we like will take all our music back Spotify is prevent it from disintermediating Rec companies and becoming the Amazon music right so what you've got is an established entrenched Monopoly which is the record companies co-opting Spotify

[12:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=760s) to block Market access for small artists right and this is how monopolies figure out how to step forward in time in these very coming ways that allow them to stay monopolies long after they should be dis intermediated right you get this as a model right the record industry fought like hell for a bad model until it could find the model that would allow it to survive and take all of the real power out of the hands of the artists for another Generation by wiring themselves into the deal using their pre-existing Monopoly power right building

[13:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=797s) codes so the pre-existing industries that provide housing spend an enormous amount of time and energy making it impossible to innovate in the housing market and the business end of that is building codes the business end of building codes is called bulldozers that will come through experimental building project and drive over it with a t to make sure that you don't innovate in housing right this is the oppression in herent in the system who peasant n now do you remember that nice little story about this kind Hobbit house that built in Wales Off the Grid very view all the rest of it you know what they're going to do to it they're going to bulldoze it right they took the things to the review the review pel said no the current ruling last time I checked on the situation is they were going to Spade that fin why because it is better for these people to live with a €70,000 mortgage minimum in a crap barck house in some awful corner of nowhere than for them to build their own house and be substantially Off the Grid because you can't talkx people who are free and the place where we are pressed most particularly in the UK particularly in the UK is housing we've got 10 times the population density of America housing is just about the only product that we sell internationally other than fraud sorry finan the fact that people are still willing to do business with us after what we did with the rest of their money is unbelievable but we're really good at it right and we C the Indians into thinking that the English arriving is a great liberation you know remember when we used to be basically the equivalent of the mandolin cartel to the Chinese you know the British Empire continues Norm Conquest never end but the place where we are taxed as peasantry is through our housing so the case I'm going to make is

[15:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=917s) extraordinarily simple Stallman starts to fight for Freedom with Sofer right and we have a tragedy in Stallman in that his ability to write the same amount of code AS 10 ordinary people is counterbalanced by his ability to offend at least 100 times as many people as any ordinary person right and this is a tragedy right if Stallman had been a little easier to get on with I think that Stallman would be recognized as being the closest thing that we have right now for G because he comes up with a concept which will actually liberate poor people because they get as soon as they connect to the network five billion do worth of software for free and that's an individual empowerment for every poor person with a Firefox phone right you know right Kids 2 years 3 years four years from now sitting with a Google cardboard box on their head and a Firefox OS virtual reality to by sitting in the slot looking around in an imaginary Universe At 6 and2 TR per second in a CLE right virtual reality for peasant Farmers is an actual reality within two or 3 years William Gibson our avenge so Stallman basically provides us with the first real political great since Marks and the advantage of stallman's approach is it doesn't seem to evolve into mass murder when you try in real world yes although the mwe wests are a sad yes although the mwe wests are a sad country that's a RIS have so once to get it into your head that solman is responsible for Wikipedia he's the first person to propose it right he's responsible for the free software movement which gives us open source this kind of you know bastardly politicized step he's responsible for the very vision of software of speech in a human right if Stallman was not so incredibly good at offending people he would be enormously higher profile than he is right but nonetheless storman is storman we have to live with him please be nice to him just keep passing him from nerve to nerve to nerve to nerve to nerve read the hand it actually turns out to be important don't laugh it you know that 70 page wrer it really is what he needs to function um and he still gets all of this done right so firstly storman no joke right not to say that the cor balls and all the rest of these

[17:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=1067s) guys are super important but St LS the ground we're actually winning in software I think we all know that open source 70% phone market it's actually going pretty well operating the systems auntu and the rest of the modern lines are fine you know Macintosh it's still BSD underneath we want in software we are now rapidly going on the Crusade for gadgets right phones uh badges you know little solar powered things all the rest of this little bits of pieces all of that stuff is getting built super quickly we're beginning to operate and freeing the supply chain you know Fair phone right Fair phone very nice idea next step Fair laptop somebody will eventually get around to Fair consumer goods you know all of this stuff is good progress there is no reason that we can't RN on gadgetry in the same that we won on software right but we got to take

[18:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=1120s) the next step which is going after basic physical infrastructure which is housing water solar panels wind turbines uh toilets and all the rest of this kind of stuff right because you can have perfect gadgets perfect software total intellectual freedom and rent that is 65% of your income and you will still be a slave and at the point where you decide that you can't pay the rent anymore and you get kicked out of your house they will criminalize the fact that you illegally homeless right you still have a c around your neck and software will not fix it and neither will [Music] Bitcoin right and if we are in this for the free right free freas in Freedom not freeas in software right you have to think of software is the thing that we could do because we had devop in skills it was not the end of the process it was the thing that we could reach first now does this make sense or have we completely left contact with the ground right okay this is know in a hacker context this is a fairly bold perspective it involves an off nail guns and H not our typical tool set so once you take that step to saying the the goal of the free culture thing the free culture movement was to produce Freedom given that we've done so well on round one and round two we're now in round three what we have to make sure of in round three is that if we are going to get this kind of Spotify isation uh offer we do not take it on Mass let me explain why right uh I think it is pretty clear to just about anybody that if you hard to build a house and You' had 20,000 hackers on the internet helping you you and your friends could do it how complex can it really be right if you look at the people that make their livings in construction they are very big they are very strong and they are generally speaking not software Engineers phds right so it's ordinary Joe's with s0 levels can manage to build houses without breaking their brains I think we could figure out how to do this and if we could do this for ourselves we would have taken another

[21:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=1270s) industry and we would have opened it here's a plan for a very nice set three bedrooms uh I've downloaded it from the internet I've made some changes this looks fantastic I've run it through the structural engineering code that looks great let's go and build it great what are we going to do we're going to have a two we hackathon at my house called build me a house and this is how this is how housing used to be done Barn raising you threw an enormous party you fed all your friends they help you put up a house you lived in it there was no mortgage amazing right no really that's what we used to do in England before all this building code stuff we built our own houses and we lived in them and our friends helped us and there were no ludicrously expensive professions that would block us at every ROM turn using uh regular recapture with things like do GRS no mortgages where are you being screwed mostly the mortgage right yeah yeah crazy what do you mean buiz right uh if you could save £60,000 over the course of your lifetime for the sake of a few weeks of hard work with a colle of of friends you'd be making three grand a day how does that compare to your Consulting RS [Music] right oh right housing is the world's last truly inefficient [Music] industry the mortgage it's 150,000 200,000 250,000 at least half of that in most places is paying for people to use close imitations of 18th century building techniques it's like having somebody come around your house with a wom they took out of a museum from the back of a uh you know in the back of a truck to weave you a suit with a shutle that's what you're paying for in the Housing Industry right so let us

[23:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=1388s) consider the possibility that we could use a free Hardware approach to housing the hexayurt is basically an alternative T it's by no means the beond and all the housing thing um there's a guy in the states whose Name Escapes timer ago it's fun it's great so there's a guy in the states who Name Escapes me who's working on a thing called House lits and house lits is grid Beam for housing very simple potentially you can do multi story it's funny looking R CB great idea no problem with it at all go out take a look at it it might simp needs better than a hex right but we've only got two or three credible teams that are working on housing as a f and this doesn't even begin to approach the other problem which is land rights so we talk very briefly about land rights and then I'll will try and TI this to nor um in the UK we have 10 times the number of people that is possible uh to house say an American population we are jammed in here like sardines by American St um that makes everything to do with lamb very difficult particularly given that the inheritors of the Norman Conquest still own most of lamb know this guy called du Westminster right one of his ancestors was given most of Westminster made their all that area of London by the king or the queen of Japan and they've lived up it ever since which is gain from the land the crown said here have a p of land um it's very unlikely we're going to be able to make a breakthrough on land in the UK because we've got a feudal society with walks land as a m Tex cting the population to concentrate wealth in the hands of the Normans peasant mag right but we have European Union passport so imagine if you will uh a radical proposal imagine that there was a nomadic hacker Festival Right comes a bunch of sea containers or very large Tru you unpack it it's a bunch of really nice dos it's got a couple of big pents it's got excellent Wi-Fi offgrade composting toilets using an open source design solar panels wind tur bins water Fu fires the entire Shang and it houses about 500 people maybe 200 in the summer it's in Norway or maybe Finland Sweden you know somewhere nice up North Sea the world may Estonia uh as it gets towards

[25:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSD6DhuqFzA&t=1538s) kind of uh late uh sorry as it gets a little colder late summer you might move it somewhere nice up Devon When Devon becomes a little frigid you go to say Portugal move within four five six times a year how many people do you think in Europe might take that as an offer so they could work from room B who live in a Hocker Festival year around yeah we don't want me too so if there are 10 or 15 in this room I think that the kind of European agriculture footprint could have a nomadic yearround hacker Village without even trying right and that nomatic year round hacker Village could be the development ground for an enormous amount of R&D in open source housing and open source infrastructure and if people were to go and find you know little corners of what don't know empty villages in Portugal or H you know chunks of say Tunisia where you could take one of these Villages clone the infrastructure and then set it up permanently I am not sure that those places would mind because you suddenly got a whole bunch of extremely Advanced technological thinkers living in your Society helping your folks get oriented to 21st century helping them learn how to make real money sounds kind of crazy might be worth a try hex y it's very posable technology is part of that it's not about heare it's about simply taking the next step we got freedom in software we're getting it in gadget we get it in houses and infrastructure and we walk off the map how does that sound as a right thank you

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End of [314] EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [384](https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md) test (2014); the most closely related, [711](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md) Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.