# 'Changing The Relationship Between People and Things' > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [590]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2022-08-22 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53d6Ak0l2ak. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Rich data capitalism explained by analogy. - Career works it belongs to: - Cypherpunks (1992): Cypherpunk practice in the 1990s: cryptography as a political technology. (suggested by machine) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine) - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, 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 (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mattereum (1 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.10 (1.00 is the top), number 604 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - On the same works, just before: [790] ['Mattereum is Blockchain Cypherpunk' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/790.md); [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md); [800] [Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md) - On the same works, just after: [573] ['Digital Assets, Digital Chattel' (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/573.md); [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md); [780] [Vinay Gupta and Ian Grigg Speak On Arbitration and... (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/780.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: 'Changing The Relationship Between People and Things', video, 2022-08-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53d6Ak0l2ak; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [590], https://guptaoption.com/texts/590.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53d6Ak0l2ak&t=0s) does anybody remember the sort of transformation that occurred when we started to get digital mapping in cars and then on phones right you get that i mean i remember 20 years ago right they'd be like somebody would invite you to a party in like some weird corridor in london and you would carry a physical a to z and you'd be guessing about bus routes to get there and consequently you tended only to go to places that you knew because getting anywhere else was difficult then came the maps then came uber and now at this point you know as long as you know roughly how far away some place is generally speaking you never wonder about where it is the robots know that for you so what i'm going to be talking about is a transformation like that and not that kind of scale for a relationship with physical goods right you know the microphone clicker the shoe the bicycle the car the house really really deep into the fabric what happens when you start using computers to assist our ability to own and use physical matter as a category so has anybody seen these videos of the places in africa where the container loads of used clothes wind up after they've fallen at the back end of the charity shops and about half of it is just winding up in these enormous gigantic hills of clothing that's not happening because nobody wants to wear those clothes it's happening because the people in that specific city don't want to wear those clothes right you put those clothes in the places where people do want them they will go they will be used very little in this world is so broken that nobody wants it given how much poverty there is what we have is a routing problem and for this we need an ontology of things and we need an ontology of needs and we need some way of matching so this is all basically a data problem and if you solve the data problem as digital mapping did for navigation um Mattereum will do for ownership it changes the relationship between people and things --- End of [590] 'Changing The Relationship Between People and Things'. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [573](https://guptaoption.com/texts/573.md) 'Digital Assets, Digital Chattel' (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.