# Vinay Gupta & Marleen Stikker discuss the future of technology and commons

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [707]. 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, 2018-09-26 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M. Text: automatic captions, partly 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): Values in technology.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - 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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Climate politics & democracy (15%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (10%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: code is law (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Silicon Valley (3 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); vaccines (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Barlow (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Mars (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); hackathon (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); open hardware (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); pandemic flu (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); digital identity (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.26 (1.00 is the top), number 308 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
  - [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [609] James Bruegger - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [610] Jerry Stone - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [606] Mattereum Highlights - Rob Knight on the idea behind the... (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [600] [Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/600.md); [721] [Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md); [597] Mattereum Smart Property Register - Rob Knight (2018)

## 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 & Marleen Stikker discuss the future of technology and commons, video, 2018-09-26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [707], https://guptaoption.com/texts/707.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=0s) I hope you all really enjoyed your lunch that you warmed up a little bit during the break and I hope that you're ready to be inspired again because we have two people who have a very much experience I think in the blockchain and in the internet world but have quite different views on the role that technology should play in society and they're gonna have a fireside chat and I hope I only have to ask few questions to spark their discussion and so may I ask to the stage my lane sticker and pheenoh Gupta so welcome I hope you really enjoyed the morning already I know PNA was a little bit cold but I think he's doing well right now so that's good Tina you were the man behind material man Ethereum and you have a lot of experience in the blockchain world and I was talking this morning it took her about the hot summer and a lot of discussion there was in the Netherlands about if it's blockchain really a hype or is it really a transformative technology for society so what is your view on that so first I should say that

[1:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=79s) a theory on my project managed I helped with the release but the original team had been working a year before I joined although I've gotten a reputation as if I was wrong from the beginning came on board early as for the I mean people could use the token price with value right the token prices have bounced around in crazy erratic ways for the entire history of Bitcoin and Ethereum and all the rest this stuff the general pattern is it goes up by a factor of 100 and then it falls by a factor of 10 and everybody says blockchain is dead the world is over and then after a while people are like wait it's still here people are still using it there's still innovation there's still a whole bunch of new ideas and really nothing else is happening and then the price goes for another warm door and everybody goes oh it's gonna change the world it's gonna change the world and then it goes up by another factor 100 then it crashes again and everybody's oh it's over it's over door and this is probably the seventh or eighth I thought that we've seen and basically it's to be ignored it's it yeah it's you know because if you look at the price graphs the phrase graphs have always had these enormous run ups and then crashes and then another or a row turn up in that a crash and then another enormous run up in that crash it's just hard to value new technologies do right - just a loser and hype dissolution or a heist disillusionment then at some point it's kind of everywhere and you don't really notice yeah like the Internet so yeah -

[2:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=163s) Marlene because you were one of the pioneers of the internet revolution in the 90s in the Netherlands and you're just recently on Stromer hosta which is a very popular Dutch TV show where you kind of explained what you've seen happening with internet since that time so and you seems I think a little bit disappointment disappointed in what happened so do you see parallels with the blockchain movement today and what could we learn from what happens with the Internet yeah I think back in 1994-95 we had this independent the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace mm-hmm by Barlow and this was like a story that since we now have the internet cyberspace we didn't need any national states anymore we didn't need governance so yes something resonates this morning as well says we don't need governance anymore national states we don't need so this they started a sort of a belief that they took technology in itself will be so disruptive that it will change everything and I think also back in the 90s I think this sort of this critical debate in critical in the sense of being more precise not negative because critical in a sense get what is it really what does it really do and in which context in that moment it was the tcp/ip protocol everybody was like everybody could join it if it was an open protocol so he used it that was why the ins had expanded so fast that's why it was possible to build a digital city and just hook up to the Internet and and everybody who was part of the digit city could be part of the Internet and the other way around so this was the storyline at that man yeah and the idea was that we didn't need any sense for confidence and that everything would be fine and yeah I believe I think I have a good reason to be disappointed since nobody trusts the Internet that's my word anymore so the Internet is broken in a lot of different ways and yeah there's also how partly the naivety how we engage with the technology that it's not neutral it's it's also creating new power structures it's not never been an analytic Network and I think also it's the blockchain we have to be as critical also not being negative but being more precise yeah what do we really mean in what context does it really make sense or not making sweeping statements that we're going to change the whole world because we have

[5:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=313s) blockchain yeah so we should learn from the internet and the development there and try not to follow the same pitfalls again an interesting thing is that at that moment in time already in the beginning of the 90s there was this debate where the critical Europeans were already raising flags and saying well this cyberspace is not independence where the Silicon Valley still was sort of building up this this narrative so I think again I think it's very very wise actually from Europe to have this critical approach and and really think hard you know how we can apply it in which context we can apply it and not being naive about it yeah be prudent

[5:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=355s) I would like to confront you both with a quote from yourselves before and ask you to reflect on that we're gonna start with a quote from Vinay I think you said it at the last blockchain hackathon in April you said we all had to grow up so let's have a look at the quote we got a choice to make about how we run this planet I think it's very important that the human race becomes at all and I think doctrine is an essential technology to facilitate that transformation so we have to grow up so at least I remember you saying that and it really came I really remembered it so what did you mean do you do we have to grow up that's technology you have to grow up or are we have we been childish about technology until now or have we been childish about the challenges that we're facing as humans so the way that I like to talk about this is stock with the difference between software and hardware right we all have a phone and the phones generally speaking run a lot of free software in the case of Android it's the whole operating system in the case of iOS it's large parts of it and there's been a long-running campaign to do free software right we've all heard of the free software movement open source all the wrestlers we've all talked about freedom cyberspace independence is over so the wrestlers these are very compelling narratives when you drop down to the hardware level you know it's an environmentally contaminating destructive to produce short shelf-life piece of crap which gets used for a few years and then thrown away because it's not made to be recycled it's not made to be reused that often manufactured in ways which are intentionally designed to shortened lifespan the reason your phones all have such short batteries is because the battery degrades after 500 charges and leaves your phone impossible to use so you throw away the older phones when the manufacturers didn't do that you could take the batteries out and you could put a new battery and your phone was as good as new it's designed in obsolescence and every time you hate your phone because it runs out after Viking on 8 p.m. it's because they're trying to make sure that you have to buy a new phone in a year and a half you pay every day for this price but the real killer is the amount of human suffering which is also embedded in the telephone it's the forced labor conditions in the places where they extract the minerals it's the factories in China with the terrible suicide rates all of the information about those facts is available all that information is there but what we don't do is we don't attach all that information and bind it to the object right when you buy the phone at

[8:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=505s) the end of the day you know when you check your bank balance your credit card statement it ought to tell you you spent you know 700 euros on the phone and it involved you know 36 days of forced labor and 725 tons of carbon and a hundred thousand gallons worth of water for clean up and all of our information should be on the same balance sheet he say we could have known that information just that we kind of don't want to know and just and this is what I mean about becoming adult right we have to take responsibility for our actions and our impacts overall we have all the information we need to start a content for that stuff in the same that we do for money and the logical technology to do that with at this point in history is the blockchain you use it to make it transparent to people what the cost of our living actually is and most of that cost is buried in international trade lines buried an environmental damage we pull the information from hidden behind the curtain of capitalism behind the advertising we pull the information to where we can see it and it will inevitably change our behaviors so you're trying to change the behavior I

[9:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=567s) think marlane tried to change the phone yeah it's very good as an example because we did research if it's possible to make a fair phone yeah and then we start so let's start at it's a spinoff from the back for more research oh I didn't know for a phone with your phone is fantastic and if you look into what's the challenge there is I absolutely believe that in certain aspects of the whole chain blockchain can help but it's a lot of macro politics there's a lot of war being financed by part of the the research the minerals that are in the phone it's a quite complex system and so if you look at what's fair phone tries to do to interfere in this chain is trying to make a transparent trying to explain and to make it also in the narrative that you want to have you don't want to have to be have child labor in your pockets as we stretch chocolates as with the fair fair clothing so I believe it's part of it but there's so much more to it convincing people creating even if you want to have labour changing the labor conditions in China in the factories it's also convincing the labor organizations not just the owner of the factory because there's a sort of balance there so there's a lot of different tissues and structures that you have to change so we want to mature and take responsibility for future of our planets we have to do so many things at the same time and I absolutely believe that technology can help but it can also destroy us I mean this there is an iris also a lot of fear for the artificial intelligence in the hands of the wrong people so it's not artificial intelligence itself can also be a big threat to society I think that's interesting that you you think it technology could also be here to destroy us and I think DNA is actually seeing technology as a way to give people incentives and to steer them in the right direction I think you once said laissez-faire didn't work so let's try something else yes I mean it's the tricky part about this is that we're a very very destructive species right I mean we've been that way from the beginning and every time human beings colonized and you call it a new continent you immediately get an enormous die-off on whoever it is that's good to eat and they burn down most of the forests and the cultures that we think of you know as living in harmony with nature initially went through very destructive

[11:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=717s) phases then they matured and I can a steady-state condition relative to nature um if we think of ourselves as being a destructive species the needs rules the needs boundaries that needs accountability and the needs responsibilities they need some woman's I think it's much more likely that we can build a world that works then if we think that we are a kind of peaceful and friendly species that just kind of accidentally trashes everything that it touches right and you know our models of human nature are really important right if we think of ourselves as being predatory apes that have managed to make a kind of halfway decent Society it's much easier for us to take responsibility for the places where our society is still not half decent but if we think of ourselves as being kind of descended angels well you know we've all gotta where our hearts are always in the right place and you know yes terrible things happen but we're not really responsible for them then where did the problems come from everybody's pointing the finger everybody else so my feeling is that the lesson from history is we're kind of a difficult nasty species we can organize society in a way which rises us above that biological base and gives us a utopian potential but it has to be seen as an effort of it has to be seen as an effort of personal and social transformation and it has to be maintained and it has to be policed and it has to be darted because when those things stop we tend to slide back down to much worse conditions and much worse ways of treating each other

[13:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=799s) it's so funny because I have a totally different view on mankind and the fingers really starts there but maybe we come together the same solutions but I believe people are generally cooperative because it's a almost a law of nature that the one who cooperates survives we are social beings we can survive if we are not being touched as baby so we are very dependent on that and I believe that we have we are managing our societies on distrust and therefore we get distrust and it would be really different if we would start to design our systems on high trust and not a competition bit of cooperation so our markets are being being defined backed by competition everybody competes but underlying the principle is that we have to cooperate otherwise we don't survive so it it depends where you started I totally agree with you that's there's even these mathematical models were saying what is the best strategy with prisoner's dilemma and tit for tat and then it's the best model SAS computer is to have to start with high trust and if somebody is full play you say tit-for-tat once and you go back to high trust which is different from the point of view that we have distrust and then we try to gain trust by policing so maybe you come in the middle I totally agree we needs rules we need the governance we need accountability we need all that so I believe in the end we we can't just think it will happen by itself but I would start with high trust but the problem that we have is all the people that are maintaining our standard of living we're in very locked-in low trust relationships right the people that actually make it possible for us to enjoy the standard of living that we have and the natural systems that we're exploiting these people are being screwed yeah there are absolutely so when we started talking about the high trust environment you know if it's a high trust environment that rests on a low trust world then we're in the position of the French aristocracy at Versailles right we have a beautiful beautiful refined space and everything is very wonderful and just outside of the gate that's where hell on earth starts well I think one of the reasons that one of the topics is the common izing or comments or commenting and I believe if we could if we can bring this back in our

[15:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=949s) thinking about what makes a household's an economy work then Commons becomes a real very important part of how we think about value creation at the moment everything is only defined by capital about the very extractive business models so I totally believe have family businesses because they have to sustain their relationships longer they aren't for long term value creation but the type of short short term value creation quarterly figures shareholders value is a very extractive model which is at the moment almost ruling everything all our technologies but also our natural resources so I think this rise of the Commons might be also a possibility to get a more diverse idea of how we can create value and I think projects like fair for but also a lot of different other and like a lot of the open source open hardware movement is in the same space well I mean I think we've seen a very clear example the victory of the Commons in the free software movement you know 70% of the phones most of the internet on one hand it hasn't been economically successful in the you know I mean stole a Richard Stallman who originated that movement estimates that they lost a trillion dollars of value out of the Commons the dot-coms because there were bugs in the licenses that the software was released under that didn't allow them to enforce the license against software as a service companies so the software is the service companies all built their technology on top of free software but they weren't compelled to give away the software that they were servicing users with because it wasn't covered by the license terms and Stallman says if gplv2 hadn't had that bug instead of having a hundred billion dollars and the free software ecosystem it would be closer to a trillion dollars you know he's convinced that 90 percent of the value we get out of that buck and you know that still shows that even with our poorly maintained probably protected Commons you have enormous wealth creation I don't see any reason that that shouldn't scale the problem is always at the boundary of the Commons right how do we ensure that the things which are going to be governed by the Commons are appropriately locked in an appropriate protected so that you don't get these kinds of extractions because the history of the Commons is that as soon as somebody figures out a way of stealing the Commons from the commoners that they will do so so to me these look like problems of protection and they look like next generation labor unions how do we build the protective structures for the Commons so that when

[18:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1099s) you do have a legal problem when you do get invasion of the Commons you have the ability to marshal the legal resources you have the ability to renegotiate and you have the ability to protect the shared assets from privatization predation enclosure and the rest of the history so we have to think about the rules of engagement for the comments and don't go in it's naively I think as also Michael said this morning and Dimitri did and I think Elaine you talked about in Soma house in a third way is this what you mean with maybe we should look at your quote first yeah I

[18:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1136s) just want to say that there is this whole notion of public code which means that it's not just open but that you need an organizational structure it's a stable structure around it so I think we move into from I just put it on github and now I'm open or have open data and that's enough we've we need to have a curation we need to have a system that really supports and also and also of course protects it I totally agree can we see more lanes quote we can't about a frontal here hostiles heavily have a justice to Silicon Valley technology machine AZ fair she is Silicon Valley Haddad for not in if you do that is that stupid word also never belong another slave machine I have to start and these are the staff are terrific a hood men's bent yeah and I hope our equity motive villain and from the hakuna matata of thinking they have a villa for the remains of a villa - Sharla in the television is that naive for is can we still accomplish this are we not too late already well I had a very I'd have this discussion so yeah and I said well we were occupied by the Nazis but we didn't say well just let leave it about that maybe it's a very harsh comparison but you're not going to say well this is it's not an option we can't just say we will lose our serenity we have no idea about our privacy we being part of an extractive model and especially as Europe this isn't this can't be the answer mm-hmm so I think here I think naivety could be good it's in the sense that we start to actually also put our money where our mouth is a vision and that's what I try to say is that we need this vision that Europe has something in his roots in its values and since technology is not neutral we can put these kind of values into the technology it's a kind of a very very explicit about it not just think it will happen but to be very explicit so how is your going to spend its money on artificial intelligence how is it going to spend his money on digital identity can we make but we have some solutions like signal and protonmail and took the go and brave and like that are that are good services on email or browsers and so on but I have more ethical business models so I think there is a huge possibility for your

[21:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1286s) also use markets because it will become more and more an advantage to have privacy by design or to have this kind of values inside of the technology yeah the professor and the TU delft was working on responsible innovation once said to me in China they have children too so they will start worrying about the future of their children and might want to adopt these better products that are being made you know I'm sorry I would say these are universal values I'm not saying that they're specifically for European but if you see it as a market then this is a huge opportunity yeah and it's it may be also that we need the pillars of the French Revolution the freedom and equality and fraternity maybe we should reinvent them for this new digital era because I think they were very much focused on the economy we had back then and maybe it's time to re-invent them or at least fill them again if you nee what's your take on that so the biggest change since those

[22:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1351s) days is the at the time of the French Revolution we didn't have the ability to destroy the planet right humans were tenth as many as they are now far lower standard of living no nuclear weapons no global warming all of these things were still to come so I spent quite a lot of time with Asian religion and you know all of the kind of old Hindu and Buddhist material comes from a period in which right action was defined by the way that we treat each other in a very close personal sense because that was the only action that we were capable of now that we have this global reach and these global problems I think there's a pressing need to redefine right action in a way that frames it against the existential risks that we face and this to me is absolutely critical in terms of our understanding of the whole world that we're in or how everything fits together we need to work backwards from the survival of the human race and the species that we carry with us on Spaceship Earth and everything has to be factored towards those goals exalt the other goals that we have are contingent on human survival if we go extinct which we might which we all know that we might which has been a realistic problem since the nuclear bomb was invented and multiplied in the 1960s there were 60 years into the age of extinction where we ourselves are on the chopping block of history so we have to work backwards from we don't know extinct we have to work backwards from the biosphere survives and then all of our other goals have to be contextualized within that they have to be framed within that if we manage with because if we don't do that then what we wind up doing is hemorrhaging energy into whole bunch of frankly completely irrelevant side-quests you know we go off and we make our you know whatever is our you know organic dyed blue jeans which have enormous amounts of press lavished on them and you know actually it makes no difference at all to whether we make it or we don't and because we don't know you feel like it's there a sense of urgency everywhere in society there were almost going distinct because I mean you're saying it and I see my lay nodding but I think most people in the Netherlands and in Europe think I don't know what this man is talking about because what we're doing fine yeah it's precisely right and the thing is that if you look at the climate scientists they're all freaking out if you look at the people working on existential risk they're all freaking out if you look through people looking at a pandemic flu that all freaking out right normally when you look at a risky thing the more people know the less

[25:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1501s) afraid they are like vaccines or vaccines are so scary you talk to people that know about vaccine so Michael come on you're more likely to die from a paper cut get over when you look at films like global warming when you look at things like pandemics when you look at things like nuclear policy the people that know more are more afraid right and the risks were more knowledge equals more fear the risks that we only need to pay attention to so we're in a position where we need a global mass mobilization to take these risks seriously and to do something about them this is also true for mass surveillance and the political risks that are embodied in mass surveillance these things are real existential crises but because we have this kind of nice thick layer of media could have pulled over us like a warm blanket reassuring us that the little fear should be taken seriously and the big fear should never be thought about we're in a position for retained of sitting ducks for history we're exactly the generation that somebody will look back and in seventy years and say but didn't they know and what we need to do what do they do right why didn't they act so you know cutting through that is what I see as being the best possible outcome of the blockchain revolution it's the possibility that you get absolute clarity about what it is that's happening in society because the Box chain is the audit system for the entire society it shows you how much your car burns it shows you heard your phone came from and what it was made of it shows you you know what it is that your neighbors are doing with their green solar panels on the roof and does all that work or not I don't know have you check the right so I think that the idea is that we could bring a lot of transparency to the position as a way of fighting back the mythology that traps us in in action a time that should be filled with unprecedented global dynamism and cooperation but do you trust technology more than you trust humans then is that um I don't trust either technology or humans right the technology always serves human agendas and the humans will get away with anything you let them get away with right so what we need is to use technology and society together to make sure that what we get is the best of human nature not the worst of human nature we've all seen what human beings are capable of both at the high end and at the low end and to me technology is an assistant in the mortal struggle for integrity

[27:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1636s) melanne again I would start somewhere else I would start with the if with a narrative and I believe the narrative and I like a lot the story about line and the narrative of gateway work we started economics which doesn't point fingers that we are bad actors and we are terrible and we are animals that are but so I don't think it works if it doesn't have a realistic model human engine and what she's what she's doing is saying we have to rethink economics and reclaim economics and get away from this extractive infinitive growth model except we think growth and if we think we think growth that means that you can mature so you don't have to go infinite like exponential these are always the graphs which tend to miss technology this like exponential growth for me this is really like like a hidden narrative that everybody believes you that's the best thing to happen and she says no we need not need exponential growth we need maturing things have to mature and this is also in our body if we have exponential growth dense cancer so we don't want to have cancer so you have to rethink what growth is for our societies so I think we have to rethink economic and that means that all the economic models that we have are inside of politics inside of how we measure our success inside of how we define if this needs to have attention or gets capital so she Macy's donuts as the planetary boundaries and and also the social for the foundation and if you take these measurements and I think we have more or less understanding what we need to do not everybody is I totally agree that nobody not everybody believes that but there are not people that know and have enough knowledge so it is also political movement it is it is a new type of politics because it's not either liberal are left or right it's it's very pragmatic as well it's very pragmatic how are we going to survive the coming 20 years because if we don't make this changes fast we're getting out of out of out of out of control and we are almost out of control so I would start with the mister narratives of the people I think we have to need AB narrative that people can buy into and can also think that they have a role in this so we say the technology will make you trustworthy means that they don't that they don't their existence is not of importance

[29:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1786s) anymore and I believe a lot in when people feel that they are needed that makes them happy it's not what you get is what you can give so if we start to trust people again and start to say that they are part of this and we believe in structures and social structures and also commoning as as models in which people can take responsibility for their environments we can build also affirmed on that so I will see it always as something that is a combination so if we we have not a social movements and not reclaiming the models of economy and make them more sustainable and more maturing that this technology will be in the hands of the same type of economy that we don't want to have that will be extractive it will be power to as elitist people that maybe they can buy their there dig to go to Mars but the rest is not going to go to Mars we also I believe that I don't the technology at the moment is too much elitist mm-hmm so much in the hands of some and know-it-alls too much too much geeky too many too much too smart people actually that's our problem few people that understand and that are running with there's an education going on as well I mean and for me if you look at all the different knowledge fields there are people that that are because I think well maybe we are extinct because we are not so important why should human species survive is there any reason for that well that's that's quite the extension that's the planet will survive a sort of life form can survive so it some of these questions I think we have to address it and it's on a deeper level and I think what is life what is consciousness what is what is intelligence maybe we have more in common with trees than we think there's a lot of pre assumptions for us to think that we are on the top of the chain yeah for me I would be really great if we can open up this this this debate and this discussion all this kind of different questions and then maybe we know what we want to survive off humanity maybe not all of it ok that's interesting let's

[32:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=1926s) have a look at the last quote it's I think it's from Elon Musk and it's about taking a prudent way forward so what are you gonna do man it's not nothing you know something you do stop certain terrible ideas from propagating yeah anyway I don't want to sound like like thanks for too dark because I think like you kind of have to be optimistic about the future there's no point in being pessimistic it's just too negative does this house doesn't help you know I think you want to be I mean my theory is like you'd rather be up to Mystic I think I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right right at least or on that side right yeah is if you're pessimistic he was going to visit his rule yeah yeah and nobody wants to be around you anyway if it's the end of the world you like a folk told you bro yeah the world ending yeah it is we're all I mean enjoy the journey you see the pupils definitely smoke something so Feeny doesn't help to be pessimistic very optimistic yeah it does right I mean the people that we rely on to keep us safe the people that plan for fires for floods right every dike yeah in this country has a pessimist excited an optimistic side the optimistic side is all this great stuff you can do if the dike holds the pessimistic side is the guy who's worrying about making sure that it does hold right the optimism the pessimism are two sides of the same thing if we manage the risk then we get the wonder but consumer society makes an enormous amount of money from us by blinding us to downside risk and persuading us that tomorrow will never come it's the same impulse it gets us to smoke cigarettes it's the impulse it gets us to overextend on credit cards right we are constantly encouraged to take foolish risks and to ignore the systemic risks of the societies we live in by people the profit directly from us being complacent so you know what I would say to people is your ancestors even going about your grand grandparents generation were much more risk-averse there were much more cautious they were much more alert and because the world was a lot more dangerous and a little

[34:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=2076s) more difficult and the world is still dangerous and difficult it's just the capitalism has provided this enormous insulator which gives us all the good side and all the risky difficult stuff is pushed off into developing world countries right but it's an integrated system and this is what the blockchain teaches us it shows us where the risks are being taken it shows us where the prices are being paid as we go forward and we get more and more and more technological power and more and more and more technological possibility as we get this enormous expansion that comes from example not a tech and by technology as all that opens up what comes along with that is we're going to need a genuinely responsible global society that looks at these technologies and really does the analysis all of this are we gonna accept all of this we're gonna reject what will we buy and Holloway ban and that's like our planetary immune system it's the thing that basically surrounds us with a kind of protective layer to make sure that we don't get as some kind of you know dreadful infection from the future of some terrible technology or terrible idea that gives us the next global warming crisis or the next fascism yeah you know we need a strong immune system that basically looks at the potential futures assesses what's good and what's bad and systematically weeds out the stuff which is bad and Foster's the stuff which is good and this is like a foreign policy right I used to say to people you know the future is a foreign country but it's also our single largest trading partner and our foreign policy relative to the future is the critical asset right I mean this this entire meeting is basically a foreign policy meeting the future is a foreign country we're here to figure out what our diplomatic relationships of that foreign country should look like we also need a defense policy we need to make sure that we've got a way of ensuring that the bad futures don't invade the present in the same way that what we have here is a meeting about finding the good features and bringing them forward as called everybody here today the Knights of the future and I think they have to the protect the the the the good stuff we have and fight for for a good future and I think we should let people slowly get back to work yes well 30 agree it's it is about future as a foreign land but we also can act now there's a lot of things we can do in the moment and what I see is that for example cities are taking really a good position Barcelona especially but also cities as Amsterdam Rotterdam they they are explicit in how what their

[37:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKiu8TNd1M&t=2226s) responsibilities for these technologies are so how is the public space how are these technologies are being implemented how transparent is it's how civilian is it so I think what I see is a lot of actions in the in the good in in in a direction that is making showing that people don't see technology just as something that comes over as an act of God but as something that should constitute that you are responsible for you don't buy it off the shelf you have to fit you have to understand what is inside what's what's in the black box what is the algorithm and I think this kind of more knowledgeable societies politicians younger people I think this this is really the starting point for getting more smart all together in understanding that in the technology there are routines there are instructions as the as if they were law and this whole thing about code is law is a whole area of new research and new possibilities also to bring humanities and gamma science together with better science so the future is too important to leave to engineers so we have to come up with this sort of like collaborative effort and bringing new people on the table I think that's how this here yeah I think that's a wonderful note to end this talk and to send people back to work so thank you VNA Thank You Marlene for inspiring us I think you will be at drinks still discussing with each other your views on the world because you have a lot in common but also some very different views which is interesting for us to hear so thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

---
End of [707] Vinay Gupta & Marleen Stikker discuss the future of technology and commons. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [600](https://guptaoption.com/texts/600.md) Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart... (2018); the most closely related, [572](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md) How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.