# Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion Project 2012 August 28 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [321], part 1 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2012-09-14 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA. 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): Applies shelter, sanitation and SCIM to a collapsing economy (Greece), with mass hexayurt production.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of...
  - STAR-TIDES (2007): Helped start STAR-TIDES, a National Defense University project on supporting populations under stress.
  - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris (2011): Talk at c-base, Berlin: Larry Wall's three virtues of a programmer applied to building, by a hackitect.
  - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer... (suggested by machine)
  - Plausible Utopias (2012): Talk deck for the Meaning conference: abundance breaks the financial system, because housing is... (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.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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: Burning Man shelter building (23%); disaster / refugee / food (17%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: too hot (9 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 6 undated); resource control (4 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); Transition Towns (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); too cold (6 here; 40 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 7 undated); composting toilet (3 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); critical infrastructure (6 here; 54 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated); shared plan (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 4 undated); Iraq (5 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Folding hexayurt (2 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); toilets (4 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): shared succession
- Importance: core-text score 0.48 (1.00 is the top), number 109 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [335] [STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES
  - [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
- On the same works, just before: [350] [More Eben Moglen at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/350.md); [351] John Barlow at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference... (2012); [327] [Papa Bill's Stew-Stick Jam - Marmaduke Dando - Second Song (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/327.md)
- On the same works, just after: [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md); [401] [Meaning Conf Livestream 7 @meaningconf (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/401.md); [402] [Meaning Conference hangout 6 @meaningconf (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/402.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: Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion Project 2012 August 28, video, 2012-09-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [321], https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=0s) okay so all you really need to do christopher is make sure it doesn't stop blinking red light stops we have a problem all right so

[0:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=12s) the hexayurt project um whole thing starts in 1995 when i go and visit a place called the farm in tennessee and the farm started in 1971 with 200 school buses that drove out of san francisco because they thought the world was going to end and they made a convoy all the way across america to tennessee just past memphis near nashville and in tennessee they bought 1500 acres of land by putting together a whole bunch of different people's inheritances and ran the most successful the big hippie communes it had a total open door policy so anybody could come and anybody could say as long as they liked if you stayed longer than a couple of months you had to give them everything you owned in the whole world and you were not going to get it back if you left but you could come it's what we do here yeah after was that 30 36 hours um and i i went there in 95 and the place was a wasteland it was just desolate they'd gone bankrupt they had terrible social problems nobody liked each other anymore the entire thing had gone completely ass backwards because they didn't really understand what they were doing and they tried to run the whole thing on faith and optimism rather than engineering and reason which is not to say they didn't do some very good engineering it's a very good reason but it was a mess so i arrived there and i'm about 25 and i'm looking for truth and trying to figure out what's important in the world and they sit me down and they completely destroy my life in about two weeks the first thing they do is they teach me about the environment oh by the way everything is completely screwed within your lifetime the world is going to be [ __ ] terrible things will happen you're going to have to get a grip on this second thing they do is they say by the way every time we build a geodesic dome we waste two-thirds of them we waste a third of the materials because all buckminster fuller's funny triangles don't fit on the dome don't fit on the four by eight sheet right so the panel materials right that's a that's a four by eight panel there right that that bit there four byte panel the panel materials are a poor fit for the triangles of the dome right how is it gonna work and i'm like huh i don't know so i spent about six months working on it because i know the appropriate math don't solve the problem but it stays in the back of my head and

[2:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=162s) in 2002 i have a breakthrough and i design the pecs here right this this thing here that and at the time i'm smart enough to recognize it it's important right this thing is actually easy to build and what i should do is i should figure out how to get lots of them all over the world for all those poor bastards without any place to live maybe i'll start a company i could i could patent it and i could get production and i could i could learn how to be a manufacturing engineer and i could i could actually make them and i could ship and i kind of got into the list of dependencies for doing that and realized it was going to turn me into somebody that i'm just not so it was a choice of either find another way of doing it or become somebody else so i decided to try and do it open source and just give the bloody thing away and hope that other people would figure out that it was good and use it for things preferably proper humanitarian things not just pissing around in the desert and in 2002 there was one hexayurt and in 2003 there was one or two hexayurt so in 2004 there were maybe four or five hex yarns and it doubled every year more or less so 2010 there were about 60 hexayurts at burning man you guys all know what burning man is right huge rave in the desert lasts nine days 50 000 people camping the whole bit so in 2010 there were 60 hectares of burning man and in 2011 they were a bit over 600. right not bad i don't know how many will be this year but we've sold out all of the tape suppliers in america for making hexayurts there's just no tape left anymore all the tape has been sold of the kind that you need to build them for temporary use none left um the actual breakthrough the the you know the magic of the hexayurt is not very complicated is it a stick somewhere i can use for plenty of things yeah pick one so that panel is 2.4 meters by 1.2 meters and that triangle is 1.2 meters by 2.4 meters it's just half a pound so the total instruction for building your hexayurts is take six panels cut them half in the diagonal and assemble them into a shallow cone and you know the weird thing is of all the smart things that i've ever done that's the only thing anybody will ever remember after i'm dead oh yeah he was the guy who worked out you had to cut the paddles in half i i think why was

[5:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=312s) that a big deal i can't even remember

[5:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=316s) so that is the essence of what we're doing right it's making these complicated buildings simple now i have to try and change to the other window box excuse my piracy i'm just trying to find there we are we've built them up there all these ones are speculative we don't know for sure if they work or not but all of them are built on the same principle and all of them produce zero waste so we went out to solve a simple problem how do you build domes without any waste and instead we've got this huge family of architectures there are actually i think seven people who designed these now so i designed that one and that one and that one so these two are edmond that one is the one and that one is dylan and that one is dylan that one is the one that one is a guy you know those two the first two i don't even know those guys very well they just showed up so you know we've actually got a proper design commons that's making a whole series of impossibly interesting things happen largely through this very very very lazy slack patient playful approach you know you invent a new hexayurt with a pair of scissors and some paper and you cut out lots of little shapes and at the end of it maybe you have something that is new and maybe you have something that changes the world the very little one at the beginning not the tiny one that looks like a little tent but the one after that i think is going to be the first production hexayurt because it's just perfect come on that one right four sheets of material for a little two-person shelter beautiful work hardly any cutting muddy computers right

[7:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=449s) so these are the three rules of software right what makes a great programmer laziness and patience hubris so laziness you don't like working too hard you find an easy way to do it in patience you want to do it in a hurry largely because you're lazy and who brings you know your greeks you don't know what that word means what how do you pronounce it yeah well radical ambition of the kind that gets you smacked down by the gods right you want to change the world so you do engineering architects are supposed to be slow and patient and lots of other you know artistic and creative and all the rest of that stuff but the big problems that we have in the world are not that we have boring buildings it's that we have no buildings for people who need buildings and that is a problem that we can solve um christopher is that camera definitely still running yeah good camera paranoia seen those right i don't know yeah what's the hexayurt it's okay this is a bit interesting so same design new material the first ones that you saw the silver ones were made of insulation panels this stuff is plywood so for the plywood one right and you see here we have it lapping the panels are overlapped slightly all the way around that's so you can make it waterproof and to hold it together we use these little blocks so you see these are just cut off a piece of lumber you know the stuff i mean right two by four nice two by four and all your wood is weird european sizes anyway you take a piece of wood even weird european sizes you just cut it to the angle and that's the block that holds the entire structure together so for all wood building that's big enough to sleep five people fairly comfortably 12 sheets of plywood five pieces of two by four and 160 deck screws us prices by 87 so a disaster relief temp which is that size costs about 350 dollars roughly a quarter the price of a tent and that means you can just bang the damn things out if you have a natural disaster and some people with some training you have the disaster you buy the plywood from the industrial supply chain you make as much shelter as you need to really really really quick really easy by the time somebody's built a hexayurt as a helper two or three times they're ready to lead a construction team and start training

[9:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=599s) people so you can do theoretically tens of thousands of hexayurts in a couple of days because the spread of the knowledge is viral and the tools are very easy to find container quantities you know if you call the guys who manufacture uh skill saws you know handheld power saws and say we need 50 000 units for an emergency in two weeks they could find it for you out of the global supply chain you don't even need fifty thousand five thousand is enough do you see how this begins to become interesting like you know it's not just that you can scavenge the materials and build one unit out of scrap and it's not just that you could go down and you could buy enough to build two or three units and do them nicely at you know good osb or whatever it's if you have a really huge crisis that involves relocating entire cities or 150 million climate refugees we already make all the materials you need and you can scale it as fast as you have to and it's that ability to scale the solution into a crisis of almost any size that is the core of the work that i'm doing what i'm trying to do is make

[11:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=660s) sure that we have a system to catch the world if it falls right hard collapse is very possible if it happens we're going to have to move a billion people back onto agricultural land or they're going to starve in their cities and you start looking at technologies like this and you say actually if you start thinking of this is where you put them you build one of these every hectare over the entire agricultural area of europe and if you have no oil no gas no national grid and not much money the people will at least probably survive you've got to insulate them you can insulate them in lots of different ways basically improvised we had people live through the winter in london in a wooden hexayurt and they just stapled blankets all over the inside in two or three wares and they said it was the warmest winter they'd ever spent outdoors you weren't really outdoors anymore you were in a hexayurt and it's this ability that makes the hexayurt politically and strategically important because it means that we've got the ability to fan the entire population back out into the fields in the event of a crisis that would require it and there are some crises in which that becomes possible if you see a real war in the middle east around iran and the iranians retaliate by dropping bombs on the oil terminals oil will be 500 barrel nice timing with the car oil will be 500 a barrel before you even blink all right um any questions about hexayurt so shall we move on to other things yeah let's build one okay well we can take a crack tomorrow this by the way is the first hexayurt that was ever built burning man 2003 here's the little solar panel that's driving us an evaporative cooler uh that believe it or not it's my ex-wife right i should have taken that picture and this is the hexayurt with its little squares and it was made of cardboard and tin foil it's a long time um so we've seen all of these this is from europe no not me are you sure definitely not um so

[13:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=798s) the other thing uh is well two things so the other thing uh is well two things about it actually three so the first is you could make folding hexayurts flat package pull on the sides pop the result building waffle second thing is german army right the only people that have ever solidly supported the hexayurt project the people that really helped me every step along the way the people that have always been there when i needed them the people that have actually delivered when i had a problem are the pentagon right all the eight ngos like the red cross all of the you know various kinds of commercialization possibilities and a fair number of the hippie freaks everybody has dropped the ball every time they were handed to it apart from the american military which is always said we think the hexayurt is great vinay we'll do anything we can to get that thing into production so you know part of my loyalty to the american military which is a very unfashionable grouped with any loyalty to at all given the mass murder spree they've been on uh is they genuinely have been very good to this project for reasons that i've never really understood maybe it has a secret fascist application uh that's what hexayurt looks like but it's flat packed if you make it in nice materials another folding hexayurt this time full size see that whole roof cone is a single piece um i don't know if you guys believe in trade and actually doing things for money but a folding hexayurt factory would be not that big it's a light industry and it's potentially quite a nice way of exporting an idea as well as a thing that people would buy just thought now all make sense all right any questions yes okay what do you want to know nothing about the arm yeah what about the army what happened with that project okay so

[15:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=915s) the hexayurt became part of the inspiration for thing called star types uh started runs out of us national defense i still don't trust it i i just don't i'm almost paranoid about the camera because i have the rule of never speak except on video because otherwise you tend to repeat yourself and you forget that you know you should always be innovative so if you lose the recording at that point it's as if you never spoke and then you have to repeat yourself you have to record and you have to document document document document so started runs at u.s national defense university it's run by a former very senior pentagon thinker uh he used to manage a budget 30 billion dollars which is like three percent u.s tax revenue crazy uh and they do well i can show you what they do pictures worth a thousand words right um this is a universe yeah so this is a document i did for those guys uh for uh the first tide's demonstration isn't that great picture look at that i picked that picture myself a certain amount of propaganda was required no no so we were talking about you know these large-scale risks right here's joe's survivor he's trying not to die in a crisis look at this dodgy looking defense contractor standing outside of a free tent all the things they put inside the tent to help you uh hexayurt oh we love that um look at that fort mcnair right on the bank of the potomac big military installation dome shelter systems you guys have probably looked at these no yeah right uh uniform very clever technology too expensive so they did this thing right you know here's all the solar cookers they brought to the demonstration this thing over here lovely pieces of technology it's a little piece of metal wax and it melts once your water reaches the critical temperature for solar disinfection so you put the indicator in in one condition when the water gets hot enough the thing melts and drops out the bottom so you always know whether your water is safe very very clever a whole bunch of different stove technologies that they had uh solar power all kinds of bits and pieces right this is a dead clever thing it's called

[17:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1065s) a SleepBreeze so it's a little box of electronics a fan and a sock with holes in it and it's held open by a spa a plastic spiral so it blows a continuous belt of air over your body for about 15 minutes to let you get to sleep and then it turns off again so with eight double a batteries you could get about a month of cooling and it's actually about as effective as air conditioning for getting to sleep and once you're asleep you don't really care if you're too hot very simple very effective um so they took all of this technology composting toilets and alternative sanitation and they took this stuff and they built it in a field in the middle of america right in the heart of the defense industrial complex and they showed its people and they got such a good reception they did it the next year and the next year and the next year and the next year i think this will be about the sixth year they've done it doesn't make any sense to me either but that is actually what's happening

[18:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1122s) um they're also very interested in infrastructure decentralization right so you know this was this was before i invented the critical infrastructure map so this is the old rocky mountain institute infrastructure model electrical gasoline natural gas water supply sewage telecom and you can see you've built some parts of these systems for yourself right yeah composting toilet says your sewage you don't have a natural gas supply but it might turn into a biogas gasoline supply you're not substituting for electrical power solar and wind sewage process we talked about telecom could be mesh networks so you know the notion that the core of these systems are extremely fragile that that stuff could just get wiped out is exactly the experience that the us militaries had in iraq all the critical infrastructure got wiped out the country completely collapsed and then they just looked at each other and said what the hell do we do now so um what else to say i mean it's a tiny project inside a huge institution the huge institution has killed maybe a million people in the past 10 years uh they reopened prison camps of account that we haven't really seen since the nazis what can you say right a small piece of uncorrupted uh content inside of a very bad big machine any questions about that should we move on to something more fun yeah what happened in iraq well i mean the truth right is seriously since you asked so george bush the first invades kuwait to drive saddam hussein back into iraq that's the first gulf war and george bush the first writes a very nice piece of analysis where he says look if we go into iraq it's going to be an absolute disaster it's going to turn into a quagmire we've got no way of holding iraq together as a single country after an invasion it's going to turn into a civil war we're going to be stuck there for two generations sorting it out we've no way of maintaining the peace if we do this so we're not going to go to baghdad and everybody said ah you're a coward what an idiot you know we should do it and george bush the first who was a really evil man in a lot of ways knew that they couldn't win and didn't start bush ii being in every way a better man than his father honest governor uh started the war everything that george bush the first had predicted happened and the result is that a million people are dead for absolutely no gain for the

[21:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1272s) us at all so it's not just that it was an immoral war it's not just that it was an evil war it was a stupid war and they've got nothing to show for having blown three trillion dollars and a hundred thousand of their own people never mind the civilian casualties on the other side um the original you know deeply evil but very competent people that used to run america knew not to start wars like that and it's the later generation muppets that have actually [ __ ] the entire game um if you're going to have empires they should at least be competent best empire is no empire but if you're going to have an empire they ought to at least be smart uh i'll show you one more hexayurt

[21:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1316s) related bit there we are so hector it's a burning man from the uh yeah that you've mostly seen that picture the big hexayurts hector it's a burning man from the aerial pictures all over the bloody place so you know open source turns out to work you could get a lot of change by spreading ideas so uh do you want to do this in english or greek you probably can't read the slides in any case do you have a crack at focusing that a little more see if it helps yeah might be maybe we could get a little tight focus that's good yeah lovely not going to help very much so this is i would put it up in greek you're in greek no most people here greek not greek leave it like that okay no greek right so this is a thing that came out the back of this hexayurt project which is called simple critical infrastructure maps or the dart board of death so what you have here is six ways that people could die and the reason you want to know how people die is so that you can keep them alive in a crisis if you cover every single way that people die and they don't let it happen the people stay alive until they die of old age six ways people die too hot too cold hunger thirst illness injury that's all there is alien invasion alien invasion death by injury death rays are still an injury we do countless lack of fear lack of air in most cases i would call that an injury could you could call it an illness it depends what causes the lack of air alien invasion they suck all the air out if your planet you die it's definitely injury so when you break it down to only six things that you need to cover it opens up a lot of creative space because we've made the simple the problem simple enough to actually think about rather than just to rely on patterns okay how am i going to stop myself dying from being too hot there must be 50 different ways i could cool myself down and it becomes kind of a design challenge and it becomes something with a certain kind of creative edge and once you enable people to think about these things in a creative way they stop being stuck

[24:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1466s) so normally in a survival situation or a crisis what happens is that people's minds turn to look at the situation discover it's too confusing and fill up with just nonsense over and over and over again you hear stories of people who get lost in the wilderness and do completely impossibly stupid things because they didn't know what to do they weren't able to think clearly because they were afraid and as a result they made absolutely fantastic cock-ups so when you make something simple enough that people understand it here rather than here it becomes something that they show mastery over um does anybody remember when google only did search and there was just a white page and you typed in what you wanted to know and it told you and how much it was nice right and then it got more and more complicated to the point where nobody really feels like they understand google anymore it's got something like 70 different services and the search thing you could type in all kinds of weird options and make it to all kinds of doggy tricks and sadly it doesn't feel so comfortable because we don't really understand it and we know that it's kind of watching us and you know it just feels too big and too complicated and too intrusive for us to really feel comfortable and that is a very important thing about mental models about tool kits about teaching you have to make it so simple that the people that you're talking to understand it completely and once they understand it completely they treat it as a building block and then they go off and do something on top of it they build with it they build on top of it until they understand it completely they're always nervous and they keep coming back to you and saying but are we sure about this and they keep seeking reassurance rather than having confidence to go and do things does that kind of make sense yeah yeah so it's very important right given all the technologies that you're building and giving all the things you're hoping to document it's very important to get people to the point of total confidence because then they go off they teach and they show and they demonstrate and so on when they still have a little understanding and a little doubt generally speaking they just won't move at all

[26:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1591s) so second part seven tiers of government so we've got six ways to die and they divide into three pairs too hot and too cold is shelter hunger and thirst is supply illness and injury is safety and too hot and too cold is normally building hunger and thirst is normally supply chains so it's it's literally things are brought to you to stop these things happening and illness and injury are generally speaking protective services like hospitals police and so on it's also basic industrial safety you don't cut yourself so these seven fears of governance uh are a very simplified way of thinking about how the world works so the seven tiers individual household village town region country world so the un is part of the world system the greek government or the greek police are part of the national system uh if there's some kind of island assembly that helps do some things for the island like run tourism that would be a regional thing the local town what's the next what's the big town just across the bridge from the mainland yeah right so that's got a municipal government the city level inside of a city you've got neighborhoods or for you guys you're building your own village kind of a village village it's more like a kind of monastery almost a monastery for very unusual people stand-up career yes i used to have a fella that i would occasionally play who was a very very naughty indian swami who told bad jokes that was quite fun oh no it is not going to work that way your karma is very very very naughty apart but you're very good in standing up look i need a stick to help you could be the new bill hicks only i don't have quite as much uh cynicism so

[28:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1722s) what you have is a matrix right various ways to die and various tears govern so you come out to injury and the official story is that the police are basically municipal in most places they're run by the town and the army is the national and these things are there to protect you from injury right you go out here yeah there it goes start again so this uh this notion is very very very important and it's already started so uh you know gaza in palestine so the israelis cut off all kinds of different material supplies and all kinds of different services which keeps them in a very very weak condition the chinese government cut off the water supply to a town that was an insurrection and i've got a couple other examples of these on my blog i'm just trying to remember what they are egypt they cut off the water supply to an area that was an insurrection and there's a couple other examples recently so that approach of choking off the supply chains is the modern equivalent of a siege but in the old days because people stored food and they stored water and they stored weapons siege didn't work very well it took months to have a siege now if you were going to have a siege of a major city it would take about i don't know two or three days you block the port you turn off the water you turn off the electricity and you wait for them to fry and choke each other doesn't sound very much fun does it um so it's very very very important for our political autonomy that we are able to stand on our own feet as far as the critical infrastructure goes and this is a very very very heavy responsibility because the point of a critical infrastructure is when you screw it up people die that's what makes it critical making sense yeah right i mean toilets right we all know that when you get your composting toilet right it is perfect when you get it wrong it's a bit dodgy but if you get it really wrong it contaminates your ground water and then everybody gets color right we've got to get these designs really really finished and we have to get them to give us clear evidence of when they're not working properly right bacterial testing of water to make sure that it's clean and make sure that the toilets have not contaminated it is

[31:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=1872s) a really critical thing to learn and you guys are unusually technically capable for a group doing this kind of back to the land stuff so figure out material testing of water quality uh you know about appropriate technology right so there's quite a few appropriate technology water testing systems out there right now nobody has taken that technology and turned it into something that people in the alternative world can use and that's a really important bit of science that needs to be done and it's a very powerful thing because everybody wants to think their water is clean but nobody ever tests the bloody stuff you can't send it to a lab but it'd be nice to be able to do it at home um water give it to the dog first and you wait yeah yeah but you know i've seen dogs i've seen what dogs eat and all i gotta say is i cannot eat what a dog can eat and i definitely can't drink what a dog can drink um the reason it matters is if lots of people follow the example that we're setting some of them will be muppets right and when the muppets start copying you the muppets start making muppet-style mistakes and at that point you wind up with a problem which is you were smart enough to tell when you had a problem and they're not smart enough to tell and then they keep doing the thing which is causing the problem until they've got people who've got real problems and then they come back and they blame you right i was very careful with the hexayurt project to never tell people that it was ready for them to build really ready i always said look it's a research project if you want to try building one make sure you document any problems you find out we don't have structural engineering we don't have really good instructional materials we're still working on this it's in alpha because eventually somebody will build a wooden hexayurt they'll do it wrong and it will fall in their heads and i don't carry professional insurance to cover that kind of risk because i'm not doing this thing as a business so if you're going to get lots of people following you you have to take the critical nature of this infrastructure seriously because as they begin to follow they're less capable than you are which is why they're following and not leading and if they make mistakes they'll blame you for the mistakes so it's very important to get the critical infrastructure stuff right because it really is life-saving right if they'd had the composting toilet in europe a thousand years ago they would have made it to the mood by 1380. and at the end of the day it's a brick wind pit or it's a hole in the ground that you made waterproof with wine they

[33:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=2022s) could have built these things hundreds of years ago if they had the scientific knowledge so you know it's very very very important that we finish these processes to the point where they're genuinely safe they're properly documented we've got some ability to tell by examination whether one is correct or not and we can test for problems like water quality issues you know i can't stress how important it is that we cover this terrain because if we wind up with a really big problem uh we could see 200 million new composting toilets within 10 years wow that'd be a lot fun but we'd have to make sure they weren't

[34:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=2066s) now let's come forward to this you guys more or less see that okay yeah i'm gonna read it and and uh explain something so we've talked about the seven tiers of organization across the top apparently individual household villager neighborhood municipality region city world so individuals are individuals mostly householders and village households and villages are groups and a group is any kind of social organization that shares some resources we'll cover what kind in a second then you get to organizations and towns and regions or organizations so an organization is a group that has a shared map of reality a shared plan relative to that map and a shared succession model so if you have to change the leadership for some reason there's a procedure to do it and those three things are what produce the fire service the ambulance service the church all of these organizations which have some kind of continuity beyond any given individual figure shared that shared plan shared way of replacing the leadership and that agreement has to be making made before you have to change the leadership otherwise what you have is a power struggle which is typical of a tribal group or a war wardism um you know villages the leadership might be male or female it's usually an old person it's usually a smart old person that's got lots of friends if that person dies replacing them is a kind of struggle within the society there's no procedure to follow you become an organization when you make a procedure and you say when this one dies the deputy is promoted that's how you do it then we get to the country and the world and these are states they have state-like power what makes a state is a topic of very heavy political discourse have you guys heard of a guy by the name of max weber so weber says that the state is the single entity which is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a geographical area basically the state's the only person that's allowed to beat you with a stick inside of a boundary um in practice in most of the areas where you've got political violence in the world there is not too little state but there's too much you've got two three four entities all competing for the right to be called the state

[36:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=2216s) and you've got violence between them this is true in refugee camps it's true in civil wars it's true in places like gaza so weber's definition doesn't give you any help in the place you most need it which is where there's trouble um is that still recording christopher yeah good just being paranoid so um my definition of the state is very different from faber's definition my definition is the state is the end is any entity that can issue a pardon for a crime after you've been caught right the status what can get you off so this definition of the state accepts that if you're in a place like naples and you've got an enormously corrupt police force and a very strong mafia and you've got the italian government either the mafia or the police can turn out to be the state in any given situation because you know joe has a word with fred and says luke you know this guy you need to lose the file or we're going to have a real problem and you know he loses the file because he's more afraid of you than he is of the prime minister right at that point state authority has gone to the mafia uh in somewhere like gaza you've got probably five state-like actors you've got the israelis you've got the israeli military you've got hamas you've got hezbollah and you've got the palestinian authority i know i'm not too up to date on that situation but i think the count is about five um lots and lots and lots of times you wind up with complicated situations with lots of state like actors if you see really serious political trouble in europe in probably two to four years probably what you're going to see is syndicalist movements or communist movements assuming state responsibility in either the cities or the countryside and then there'll be all kinds of struggles about whether what these people are doing is legal or not if they win they're going to call their fighting legal if they lose they're all going to be tried as criminals what they're fighting for is the ability to pardon their own crimes which were committed in the course of gaining the ability to pardon their own crimes you see how that all seems a bit circular yeah that's why i don't believe in violent revolution that um so we talked about organizations we talked a little bit about the state should i talk any more about the state or is that enough about the state yeah all right good lovely so

[39:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhzX8AtGRA&t=2358s) the last thing i'll talk about here is groups so what turns a group of individuals into a group that actually functions as a group has three preconditions and most of the time when people think about groups and preconditions they're talking about uh the social and the psychological mechanisms necessary to make a group i don't have any opinion on that stuff it's too complicated and i'm a computer programmer and we're not very good at people um but what i can't talk about is the technology required to support a group's actual function you need three things right we're all sitting here in a space that we're sharing that's the first thing you need as a group you need a shared space the second thing you need is a way to get to the shared space and the third thing you need is communications to arrange when to be there right so without communications transportation and shared space it's very difficult for a group to function so think about the infrastructure that you guys have right you've got some access to vehicles and you've got some transport provided by the local companies in the state you've got cell phones and you've got internet up the road and you've got three or four facilities and all of those systems work together to give you a place to have a community in but it's important not to neglect the communications and the transport as parts of that picture because in practice they're incredibly important a lot of communities are very focused on getting space but actually getting transport and getting communications is just as important so does all that kind of make sense in the abstract okay now this is the good part so right now all the legitimacy of government all the rest of that stuff is down here state level national and international and this is the part which has completely blown its credibility by bankrupting most of our societies what the hell were they thinking i don't know stupid right so as this begins to crumble all this section undoes itself land registration social cohesion rule of law jurisdiction uh the legal definition of truth all of that stuff collapses right and you can imagine that if we didn't have a state if the drug companies were still able to release new drugs they'd stop having rigorous tests and they'd just chuck any old crap at a bottle and tell

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/321-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [321] Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion Project 2012 August 28, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.