# Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [322], 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/<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=7PwmbIFDIR4. 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): Decomposes the state tier into buildable parts, the logic behind a legal status for refugee zones.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - SCIM / INAM (2009): Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps: 18 human needs across 7 scales, from the individual to the world.
  - Quaddome (2011): Community-designed dome in which every triangle is half a 4x8 sheet.
  - On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia (2012): Blog essay taking apart the cypherpunk dream of a code-made society, and sketching the few cryptographic...
  - 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:
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - 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.
  - 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)
- Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (13%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Open Source Ecology (4 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); international recognition (4 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 4 undated); global democracy (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); clean water (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); life support (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); resource control (2 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); citizens (5 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); supply chain (7 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); hexayurt roof (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); shared succession (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2012, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Estonia
- Importance: core-text score 0.64 (1.00 is the top), number 35 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [689] [Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/689.md): same career work: SCIM / INAM
  - [250] [Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/250.md): same career work: SCIM / INAM
- On the same works, just before: [351] John Barlow at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference... (2012); [353] [Eben Moglen clip - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/353.md); [323] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace (highlights) (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/323.md)
- On the same works, just after: [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md); [407] [H4D2.eu Final presentations (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/407.md); [401] [Meaning Conf Livestream 7 @meaningconf (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/401.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 at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2, video, 2012-09-14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [322], https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[45:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2730s) works it's going to spread absolutely Wildfire but if it turns out to be a bit of a pain in the ass it might be very difficult to get the first instanciation and these kind of political strategic decisions have been right at the heart of the open source software movement and free software movement from the beginning right stallman's absolute insistence on fully pure code from the very beginning and his hatred of every proprietary entry point has turned out to be more or less completely accurate the open source perspective has allowed all kinds of evil and manipulation into the system because of the areas where people made compromise and all of stallman's worst fears about uh the inability to access books because the company you bought them from wiped them from your device turned out to be dead accurate so when you start doing the analysis when you start looking at these kind of Hardware plays the system interdependent on feed stocks are going to turn out to be very very hot political issues the 3D printers for example um all of the big Hardware companies like HP and so on have two basic concerns the first is if we start making 3D printers and people print illegal things on them will we get into trouble maybe we could have government have a pool of approved designs which you could print like an app store and then we would would have to worry about somebody printing the components to make an F16 sorry not an F16 an M16 I think printing an f60 would be kind of ambitious a few days ago there was a project about building 3D printed weapons yeah that's right that's right yeah but this is this isn't the main purpose of all these things um it's not but you can do it but you can okay you can print the you can print whatever you want this is PR if you use it through PR to build to print a gun or something like that then it's up to you well right now it's up to you but it's very easy to imagine legislation that put DRM on the 3D printer so you couldn't print those kind yeah but the truth is that already we have the technology to build weapons without using fter you can use uh a cc a simple CC yeah build weap if I

[48:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=2880s) want difficult I can use a knife I don't have to use a 3D printer to print uh a gun to play It's the use that makes it a weapon action but you know all of this kind of terrain these are the kinds of arguments that we see about child pornography on the internet they take a kind of ridiculous case and use it as a hammer to bash the technology uh very hard okay the problem isn't the technology problem is ethics Freedom yeah and uh in your first slide uh I thought would see a BX about Freedom or public uh rights or ethics or stuff like that but I did yes um I generally focus on what is possible rather than what is moral okay just the way I do things so let me point out the other angle on this 3D printer business by and large throughout the 2000 decade from 2000 to 2010 and actually a little earlier the only profitable part of most of the major computer companies was printer yeah because the car are prepared the car are practor they were charging something like $44,000 a gallon for ink that actually cost about $80 there a new uhuh uhuh proi ah you see insane so 3D printers are going to go through exactly the same struggle that we saw with software and with DRM and with uh inkjet printers there's going to be a struggle to put DRM on them and there's going to be a struggle to put proprietary uh printing materials into them and we're going to have to fight through that entire body cycle again the difference is this thing that we know where we're going and the red problem guys were bloody Geniuses when they put the entire PE uh process on the path of start with replication then make it good rather than making it good and then winding up the proprietary version they might have saved our Bon on genius right really really bold thinking um all of these kinds of political decisions about where do the feed stocks come from and who's got the ability to turn off your hard care get into the core question which is all the way through the Modern Age of who

[50:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3030s) controls the things that you need to work in Marxism the question about who owned the factory was you needed the tools in the factory to be able to do your job but the factory owner took most of the profit out of the situation and the struggle between the person who provided you with the tool and your skill as a laborer was the struggle between capital and talent that dominated the political landscape really since maybe 50 years after marks Russian Revolution you know all the shenanigans in Russia and China all come down to this fundamental dialogue we have no New Politics that accurately discuss the relationship between a human being their software their computer their feed stocks for a 3D printer their solar panel vendor and the person that cuts off their water supply every time they have an Insurrection which happened several times last year once in China once in Egypt a couple other so that entire set of systems I call infrastructure Centric politics and what I'm really trying to raise here is the infrastructure cent of politics might turn out to be the key to freedom in the 21st century what we did for software we must do for critical infrastructure the water the power of Sanitation the electricity Supply the communications and everything else that's my thesis so in few words of Source ecosystem is a form of class struggle by Marx no however right stallman's original political framing very accurately identified software as the key struggle between people and any kind of authority whether it's a Marxist Authority or whether it's a capitalist Authority or whether it's a kind of authority we've never seen before Stallman accurately predicted that controlling the software was going to be the same as controlling the society so we got most of the way on the software certainly good enough to be holding our ground however the next choke point is electricity Network provision and water supply and all of those choke points are being used by governments right now to throtle to throttle Freedom movements all over the world if you keep watching the news carefully several times year you'll hear a story of a government cutting off the water supply to an area that has been stret right think about how vulnerable Greece is to water supply Interruption

[53:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3180s) ouch and we've lost a lot of the psychological understanding that went with the Fortress mentality I see fortresses all over the Greek landscape theyve all got huge ssts to store the water because otherwise you could just Siege them and they'd starve and they'd come out and kill you right thirst was what you use as a weapon they're doing it in Egypt they're doing it in China um the notion that you have to have complete control of your life support infrastructure to be free is gandi but it's also bumin for it's also Thomas Jefferson the ability to stand on your own land and provide your own needs is the core of political freedom in most of the older political philosophers once you got heavy industrialization people basically sold out to the market and assume that control of the factory is the same as political Freedom which it's nor make sense okay so I figured take maybe two questions and then we'll wrap up okay any um system for building premises houses or whatever as far I've seen we had um some slides you posted on H spaces Facebook uhhuh uhhuh and very interesting um comparing with um open is sometimes like I Mar as of the open source ecology free software ecology like movement and I your proponent of a more op way as in open like open initiative yeah yeah so practice as far as I'm concerned I'm I think most of the people here think the same way I is that

[55:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3330s) actually most of us yes proponents of the free soft free uh foundation and uh we believe that uh free software is the key but we usually use uh closed Source systems too to do our stuff mhh to be productive actually we don't want to I me in the end we believe that it is a transitional uh condition we are using Skype because uh open source uh P2P not exactly yeah yeah don't have it's not there so I think that actually that's A system that would be it would be a way to something a hybrid between open source ecology and what are you what you're trying to say so I think in the end we will end up having more freedom and having more open sour stuff houses but uh actually it's more like um we're on a way to that we have we are way way far away from that because uh using uh software it's simple I am flag in a USB and it goes I have a laptop running Linux and phone run in open source version of Android mhm MH MH but I can do that in my house I yeah yeah if you were a fer it might be easier yeah if you live in an urban setting there's so much already installed infrastructure that you're kind of embedded in but if you were a farmer in say Zimbabwe you don't really have any infrastructure and you could go directly to the fre yeah and I think that that's quite an interesting angle on this that displacing the Sol is a big

[58:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3486s) issue yeah good okay good thank you so imagine you you're an English steam train Enthusiast you're very into big steam engines you know you like to read about the history and the different railway lines and the different manufacturers and all the rest of this stuff and you have a forum with all your friends and there's some new kid on the Forum who's about 12 or 14 he's reading WPD and he's really interested in all this stuff and you kind of get chatting to him and you know he's he's you assume that he's in shupure or irand or you know he might even be in know some place like California um and then he says by the way we've got an outbreak of Ebola in my Village I live in Malawi and I'm wondering if anybody knows how to treat this particular set of symptoms and whether it's a bu or not because my sister is sick and the whole mental world of your steam train Enthusiast completely collapses because what they've just discovered is they're talking to a 12-year-old kid that saw a steam train in a museum when they were seven and got obsessed with it but the kid is in Milam and their complete model of the world collapses right this is coming it's going to be the worst culture shock the human race has ever seen because the poor are coming to us part of the danger of Facebook is makes it extremely difficult for poor people and rich people to communicate buffers and buffers and buffers and layers and layers and layers unlike email but it's a simple flat space bad right what happens when you start getting 419 scam messages from refugee camps only now go real right I am in this Str gcom here are my GPS coordinates here's my Facebook here's my blog here's my Twitter here's my PayPal here's my flatter here's my Bitcoin same me some money I'm hungry I'm really smart I will go through your email and I will take out the spam I will help your kids answer their college questions right I used to be a school teacher now I'm stuck in this bloody refugee camp and my kids are hungry sort me out right we have no idea what's coming off the internet when we get lot of Android phones decent operating systems in every single Pro person's hand there's a decent chance that it's going to break Western Civilization like a w being the because the guilt that we all share for colonialism and for the exploitation of the poor that goes on all the time every piece of Hardware in this room was manufactured by people who have no

[1:00:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3636s) political freedom in China every single piece has a little piece of Chinese fascism inside of it which is why you paid €1,100 not 55,000 all of that stuff is coming up and it's going to hit us really freaking hard really before we're culturally ready for it all all I can say is take a holiday in the third world take a good look around those people are going to come a mind to and the challenges that we have with the current R of economic difficulty now people use words like collapse or austerity or whatever it happens to be compared to the cultural chaos and the need for radical political change that is going to come as The Villages come online as the refugee CS come online as the uh slave holding Nations come online um the slums come online it's going to blow our world to pieces and we're going to have to negotiate that within the next 10 years so as you guys face this first round of trouble you know I'm facing my own round of trouble where I live in Ireland a bit less when I'm in the UK as we actually have to face that stuff head on the next wave coming after it is the people with much worse problems who are going to turn around and be food I understand that you guys are having some trouble but you're still making 17 times our national average income and you buy products from us at $11 a ton because every time we raise the prices you assassinate our president we're having a problem here right and these people are going to start talking to us and asking us to change our ways they're going to start blogging about the fact that their kid sister has just died of malnutrition I've had my PayPal up here you know for 17 days and all I've gotten this $551 and I can't get it out because of the bloody terms of surface and my kid sister is dead Jesus Christ This is a disaster yeah it is right we're in the easy part right now to put yourself in the global 1% you only require an average income of $36,000 a year which is about what 28 26,000 that makes you Global 1% occupy oh those people over there they're the 1% where don't we screwing us oh my God where did all those people come from there are 99 of them uh it's me right occupi was completely turned around the wrong way because occupi wanted to believe that if they got their politics right they could have some of the stuff from over there they didn't want to look

[1:03:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3786s) behind them all the people over here who were trying to get their share body right how poor would we feel if we have to pay fair trade prices for our coffee for our tea for our sugar for our gasoline for our electronics for our clothes if all of the countries that produce the things you wear and the things you use had full political freedom for workers what would the prices really be like we live in an artificially inflated bubble of prosperity that is extracted from the P gun and if we're going to be fighting for Freedom it's eventually going to have to go beyond software it's going to have to go beyond Hardware it's going to have to go right to the ends of the Earth because we're heading towards the point we're asking questions about why not a global democracy becomes realistic because after they all have telephones and after they all have names and database we can start asking questions but why they don't all have votes and that's really where the fun the United Nations automatically assumes that you have political representation at home and therefore you don't need any direct representation from orary people at the United Nations this turns out to be absolutely not true most of the countries in the United Nations guard their citizens at home they have no direct representation and so the UN is not an effective representation of the people it's simply an oligarchy of States tend to prot perpetuate the existence of the state once we've got internet in The Villages it becomes possible to realistically talk about one world one man one vote or should say one world one person one now can we imagine the consequences of that and that's not so far from where we are in the room right you know browser ID if you get that stuff right becomes a hard enough identity to you could use it for voting really seriously you could do this or maybe Facebook will do it and then we'll all be screwed because Facebook will own voter rules and once in a while you lose a couple hundred million the fight for Global democracy and I'm not even sure democracy is the right thing to build but the fight for Global democracy goes from being Theory to practice by 2020 does this begin to sound like f all the processes that run that transition need to be as open as possible all the software needs to be free if humanly possible um the interesting part of the free software

[1:05:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PwmbIFDIR4&t=3936s) story is just about to beginning because if the artifact that connects you to the world right the the little Android phone that takes you from the 4th Century to the 21st century if that phone is fully open and you control it then you get p IAL rights out but if it runs proprietary software and runs on a proprietary Network and they can turn you off and they don't like what you say you get no political rights out B at all you know software freedom is human freedom and it's about to become a real critical issue because we're going to start having people who only have software to connect them to the real world they only have software to connect them to their political rights they only have software to give them a path to life and freedom and that's going to be the real Challenge and it's coming faster than anybody sees all of this current ground economic posterity stuff and all the trouble in the developed World States is a tiny r one the real show is

---
End of [322] Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2, 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, [408](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md) H4D2 review (2012); the most closely related, [689](https://guptaoption.com/texts/689.md) Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru | London Real (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.