# Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [711]. 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, 2014-10-13 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE. 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): Simple distributed infrastructure as the way to raise the global floor. - Career works it belongs to: - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut. - Free housing and 21st Century Leadership (2010): Blog essay on the model of personal effectiveness he adopted after inventing the Hexayurt in 2002, with... - Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism (2014): Talk at Electromagnetic Field 2014: the Hexayurt as engineering outside the market, for the three billion... - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine) - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - 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. - Topics: housing / house / quality (40%); contracts / companies / value (13%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: free culture (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); mortgages (3 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); regulatory capture (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); market access (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); hackathon (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Estonia (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); toilets (2 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); composting toilets (1 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Scotland (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Buckminster Fuller (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - Importance: core-text score 0.60 (1.00 is the top), number 44 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [314] [EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md): same career work: Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism - [740] [Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md): same career work: Hexayurt - On the same works, just before: [315] [Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/315.md); [314] [EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md); [384] [test (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md) - On the same works, just after: [311] [Vinay Gupta - Proof of Work / IAmSatoshi (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/311.md); [310] [Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/310.md); [307] [Financial Services Club Jan 27 2015 - "What is Money?" -... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/307.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 – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism, video, 2014-10-13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [711], https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=0s) I'll open cuz I'm not really using slides very much. Uh let us start at the beginning. So, uh that thing right there, which you might be able to see somewhere over here, is a hexayurt. And the hexayurt is a ridiculously simple object, right? I mean, it's a genuinely stupidly simple thing that by rights should have been invented in the 1960s and should have become a standard part of human culture decades ago. Right? Take six sheets of plywood, put them in a circle or hexagon, take six more sheets of plywood, cut them in half on the diagonal, and turn them into roofs. Right? And you can see the pictures here. There is nothing to it. It is so simple that even drug-addled weirdos from Burning Man managed to build thousands of the bloody things. Right? Why this wasn't figured out by Buckminster Fuller or one of his disciples literally 50 years ago, I've no idea. It kind of just sat there slumbering until I stumbled on it in 2002, looked at it and went, "Crap, there goes my future." Um so, I've been lugging around this awful shed for at this point 12 years, uh trying to get the thing into mass use largely for humanitarian purposes, right? We've got on the order of 60 million people living in tents. And I mean, you're living in a tent, how is it? Sucks, right? And that's for a weekend in a relatively nice climate with tons of modern infrastructure around you. So, imagine a tent city of 10,000 to 100,000 people where the expectation is you're going to be there for 10 or 15 years, which is a typical length of time for people that don't live under canvas in refugee camps. Right? So, you know, it's a country the size of the UK scattered around the world stuck under canvas in horrific climates. Right? And we can fix it with plywood, and the entire set of instructions is take six boards, put them in a hexagon, take six more, cut them in half, put them around to form a shallow cone, and that's your roof. Done. If you want it to be nice and hot, staple up insulation on the inside. If you want to keep the sun off, wrap the outside in tin foil and wallpaper paste. Did anybody not get that? Right? If we want to be really technical about this and ask how you hold the pieces of plywood together, you could cut little blocks out of pieces of 2 by [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=150s) 4, or you can make little metal brackets in a sheet metal press. Now, if you would be good enough to tell the NGO people how to do this, and perhaps persuade them it was worth taking people out of tents and putting them into something better, we could solve the problem and I could go home. Right? Because that's it. That's all there is to the hexayurt. Right? It takes a minute and a half to explain. You understand basically everything there is to know about the humanitarian uses. I could walk off [2:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=177s) stage now and we'd be done. Except for the hard part about why is it taking 12 years to get anybody to use the bloody things. And that's actually the hard problem. It's no longer a problem of technology. It's a problem of adoption. And the question is, why do we have this enormous blind spot about applying modern technology to housing systems? So, it's taken me years and years and years and years and years of thinking, you know, we should be using this hexayurt. It's better than tents. It's pretty simple. You know, this shouldn't be a hard thing. And only really only in the last couple years has it finally hit me, the reason it's hard to get people moving on the hexayurt is because we're all still living in houses which could have been built 200, 300, 400 years ago, and in the UK in some cases were. Right? Your mental model of what a really nice house looks like is actually derived from medieval castle. It's a cheap brick knockoff of what your overmasters lived under lived in in feudalism. Right? And Englishmen's home is his castle because we're all going to pretend that we're nobility even though we're enslaved by crap jobs and mortgages. And this psychological mindset that a real house is similar to the castles of the nobility has completely paralyzed our ability to innovate in housing. So, everything around us is becoming amazing, right? The cars run on electricity. They're becoming self-driving. The computers, I mean, my laptop would have been a top 500 supercomputer in the top half 20 years ago. Not even an expensive laptop. Uh solar panels dropping in price by 7% a year for the past 40 years. They're roughly the same price as coal. 10 years from now they'll be roughly half the price of coal. The economy will decarbonize. We won't get an economic crash to bail us out of this terrible political problem we have. And then we'll have to deal with the solar-powered American Reich. Um Did I say that out loud? Uh so, inside of this context, right? Gore-Tex. Anything that you look at that involves technology is becoming amazing. Every time you turn away from it and you turn back to look at it, it's doubled in quality and halved in price. It's not just computers. It's material science, knife steel, you know, you name it. Carbon fiber tubing, my god, it's so cheap now. Um except housing. Housing? [5:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=327s) Old building technologies, terrible building quality, plumbers. My god, have you seen the quality of plumbing as an industry? The stuff is crap. The people rape you every time you look at their freaking, you know, I I you looked at my phone number, that's 90 quid. Right? The quality of the work they do is terrible. We joke about the industry all the time. Oh my god, they're so terrible. They're worse than plumbers. And if you think plumbers are bad, wait until you see roofers. Right? [5:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=356s) Everything to do with our built environment, architects. What a joke. 7-year qualification longer than it takes to be a brain surgeon. And have you seen the crap they're building in London? Right? So, the point that I'm making is that everything to do with building is fundamentally broken, and we've made a special sphere of exception around building in which technological progress is zero, quality is terrible, there are no review processes where you could figure out whether the thing you're buying is good or not, and it absolutely dominates our economic landscape. Right? How many of you feel you're paying too much for housing? Why haven't you done anything about it yet? Right? Why is housing a special exception to the general rule that open source improves quality and reduces cost? Why have we not gotten started on this? Right? I mean, do you see the question now? Right? Can anybody come up with a compelling reason why we haven't started on working to free ourselves from enormously overpriced housing as a fundamental economic fact that chains us to systems that we generally speaking despise? Right? The reason would be something to do with the vested interests. Mhm. Yeah, so vested interests from people that own the assets. Does anybody here feel like they're making a ton of money from owning a house? Anybody here in the vested interest class? Two or three people, right. The rest of you, why haven't you done something about this? Right? Why do we not have active ongoing research to take the worst engineering in our culture and fix it? Yes. Zoning regulations. Zoning regulations. So, planning regulations are an obstacle that we would need to overcome to get a real breakthrough in housing. Planning regulations are the equivalent of the copyright lobby when it came to file sharing. Right? And I will come back to talk about the difference between Napsterization and Spotifyization. It's a really fluid, easy word. Okay, I'll take one more. And the most obvious individual thing you could do is just join the vested interests. Join the vested interests, right? So, we've got a defection problem that people who have the get-up-and-go to solve this problem usually say, "I know, I'm going to make a ton of money and buy a really nice house in a place where the values go up." Right? So, the defection problem is [8:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=506s) basically like being a scab in a labor union situation. Right? We've got an entire population being oppressed by mortgages and obscene rent. This is particularly true living in London. And rather than doing something about the political problem which is driving our own repression, we go, "You know what? I think they have it better over here." Right? And this is how the British class structure has always worked. The upper classes continually buy talent from the middle class and the working class, give them junior positions in the feudal bureaucracy, and the reason we live like this is because the Norman Conquest never ended. Right? When we run out of England the Normans run out of England. By the way, the Normans are Vikings that settled in France for about 150 years, then came here. Once they dealt with Britain, they dealt with Wales. After Wales, they did Scotland, then they did Ireland. They ran out of white people to oppress, then they went to Africa, South America, North America. Once they'd gotten rid of oppressing those and they couldn't really find anybody left to oppress, then they headed for India and China. Right? The simple political history, if you ever need to explain it to somebody, is the Norman Conquest never ended, and today we call it capitalism. Um It's Vikings in suits. We call it lawyers. Right. Now, how are we doing for time? [9:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=578s) Uh I should really do talks on 3 hours of sleep more often. It's a lot more fun this way. Uh yeah, great. I even have some time left. So, um Napsterization was the great thing that was meant to happen to music, right? The certain notion was that everybody would take the little bit of music that they had access to, share it in an enormous bucket with no taxation, no regulation, no rights framework, none of that crap, and we would all have infinite music. The artists would get a little bit starved to death, but we maybe find some way of supporting them on an infinite Kickstarter or Patreon or something like that. And Napster worked with 15-year-old technology better than anything that we've had since, and that really shows the power of centralization to solve problems on no money and no budget. Centralization works, except for the little problem that it makes a target which you can then whack with a legal stick. Bam. But, the fact of Napster is what eventually gave us Spotify, and Spotify represents the complete capitulation of the copyright industry to the nerd reich, which is us, by the way. So, the complete capitulation of the copyright industry is, unless you give us an offer which is better than piracy, we will take piracy. We have a choice. We can buy your stuff at enormous prices and wait weeks for delivery of a physical plastic object, or we can download it for free now. Make me an offer. Uh uh uh Would you like some DRM on your CDs? We find that's really helpful. Uh uh download download download download download Finally, in utter desperation that they're going to get completely annihilated, they say, "Right, here's an offer. It's better than piracy. How does 10 quid a month for all of the music in the world sound? Just please stop stealing it." Stealing it? I hardly feel like I'm even paying for it. Uh right? And this begins to work. The only problem with Spotify, you hear the Spotify advertising where it says, "Blah blah blah blah blah, we make lots of money for the rights holders and the artists." Wait, what do the rights holders do now? Right? What do they do? You upload a file to Spotify, people listen to the file on Spotify, Spotify collects the money and gives it to you. What are the record companies for post-Spotify? But because the record companies have Spotify over a barrel, which is give us a deal that we like or we'll take all our music back, Spotify's prevented from disintermediating the record companies and becoming the Amazon of music. [12:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=728s) Right? So, what you've got is an established, entrenched monopoly, which is the record companies, co-opting Spotify to block market access for small artists. Right? And this is how monopolies figure out how to step forward in time in these very cunning ways that allow them to stay monopolies long after they should have been disintermediated. Right? Does everybody get this as a model? Right? The record industry fought like hell for a bad model until it could find a model that would allow it to survive and take all of the real power out of the hands of the artists for another generation by wiring themselves into the deal using their pre-existing monopoly power. Right? [12:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=773s) Building codes. So, the pre-existing industries that provide housing spend an enormous amount of time and energy making it impossible to innovate in the housing market, and the business end of that is building codes. The business end of building codes is called bulldozers that will come to your experimental building project and drive over it with a tank to make sure that you don't innovate in housing. Mhm, right? This is the oppression inherent in the system, oh peasant mine. Now, do you remember that nice little story about this kind of hobbit house that got built in Wales? Off the grid, very beautiful, you know, all the all the rest of it. Do you know what they're going to do to it? They're going to bulldoze it. Right? They took the thing to the review, the review panel said, "No." The current ruling, last time I checked on the situation, was they were going to spade that thing under. Why? Because it is better for these people to live with a 70,000 euro mortgage minimum in a crap Barrett house in some awful corner of nowhere than for them to build their own house and be substantially off the grid because you cannot tax people who are free. And the place where we are oppressed most particularly in the UK, particularly in the UK, is housing. We've got 10 times the population density of America. Housing is just about the only product that we sell internationally other than fraud, sorry, finance. Right? The fact that people are still willing to do business with us after the what what we did with the rest of their money is unbelievable. Right? But we're really good at this, right? I mean, we conned the In- Indians into thinking that the English arriving was a great liberation. You know, remember when we used to be basically the equivalent of the mandolin cartel to the Chinese? Right? You know, the British Empire continues. Norman conquest never ended. But the place where we are taxed as peasantry is through our housing. So, the case that I'm going to make is extraordinarily simple. Stallman starts to fight for freedom with software. Right? And we have a tragedy in Stallman in that his ability to write the same amount of code as 10 ordinary people is counterbalanced by his ability to offend at least a hundred times as many people as any ordinary person. Right? And this is the tragedy, right? If Stallman had been a little easier to get on with, I think that Stallman would [15:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=923s) be recognized as being the closest thing that we have right now to a Gandhi. Because he comes up with a concept which will actually liberate poor people because they get, as soon as they connect to the network, 5 billion dollars worth of software for free. And that's an individual empowerment for every poor person with a Firefox phone. Right? You know, viva la revolucion, right? Kids, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years from now, sitting with a Google cardboard box on their head and a Firefox OS virtual reality device sitting in the slot, looking around in an imaginary universe at 6 and 1/2 frames per second. In a thatched hat. Right? Virtual reality for peasant farmers is our actual reality within 2 or 3 years. William Gibson, thou art avenged. So, [16:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=973s) Stallman basically provides us with the first real political breakthrough since Marx. And the advantage of Stallman's approach is that it doesn't seem to devolve into mass murder when you try it in the real world. Although the mailing lists are a sad counter you know, that's a risk. We have to keep an eye on it. So, once you get it into your head that Stallman is responsible for Wikipedia, he's the first person to propose it, right? He's responsible for the free software movement which gives us open source as this kind of, you know, bastard apoliticized stepchild. He's responsible for the very vision of software as speech and a human right. If Stallman was not so incredibly good at offending people, he would be enormously higher profile than he is. Right? But nonetheless, Stallman is Stallman. We have to live with him. Please be nice to him. Just keep passing him from nerd to nerd to nerd to nerd to nerd. Read the handbook. It actually turns out to be important. Don't laugh at it. You know, that 70-page rider, it really is what he needs to function. Um and he still gets all of this done. Right? So, firstly, Stallman, no joke, right? Not to say that the Torvalds and all the rest of these guys are not super important, but Stallman lays the groundwork. We're actually winning in software, and I think we all know that. Open source, 70% of the phone market. It's actually going pretty well. Operating systems, Ubuntu and the rest of the modern Linuxes are fine. You know, Macintosh, it's still BSD underneath. We won in software. We are now rapidly going on the crusade for gadgets. Right? Phones, uh badges, you know, little solar-powered things, all the rest of this little bits and pieces. All of that stuff is getting built super quickly. We're beginning to operate on freeing the supply chain. You know, Fairphone? Right? Fairphone, very nice idea. Next step, fair laptop. Somebody will eventually get around to fair consumer goods. You know, all of this stuff is good progress. There is no reason that we can't win on gadgetry in the same way that we won on software. Right? But we've got to take the next step, which is going after basic physical infrastructure, which is housing, water, solar panels, wind turbines, uh toilets, and all the rest of this kind of stuff. Right? Because you can have perfect gadgets, perfect software, total intellectual freedom, and rent that is 65% of your income, and you will still be a slave. And at the point where you [18:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=1123s) decide that you can't pay the rent anymore and you get kicked out of your house, they will criminalize the fact that you're illegally homeless. Right? You still have a collar around your neck, and software will not fix it, and neither will Bitcoin. Right? And if we are in this for the free, right? Free as in freedom, not free as in software, right? You have to think of software as the thing that we could do because we had relevant skills. It was not the end of the process. It was the thing that we could reach first. Now, does this make sense or have we completely left uh contact with the ground? Right? Okay. Cuz this is, you know, in a in a hacker context, this is a fairly bold perspective. It involves an awful lot of nail guns and hammers, right? Not our typical tool set. So, [19:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=1180s) once you take that step to saying that the goal of the free culture thing, the free culture movement, was to produce freedom, given that we've done so well on round one and round two, we're now in round three. What we have to make sure of in round three is that if we are going to get this kind of Spotify-ization offer, we do not take it en masse. Let me explain why, right? Uh I think it's pretty clear to just about anybody that if you had to build a house and you had 20,000 hackers on the internet helping you, you and your friends could do it. How complex can it really be? Right? If you look at the people that make their livings in construction, they are very big, they are very strong, and they are generally speaking not software engineers with PhDs. Right? So, if ordinary Joes with seven O levels can manage to build houses without breaking their brains, I think we could figure out how to do this. And if we could do this for ourselves, we would have taken another industry and we would have opened it. Here's a plan for a very nice set three bedrooms. I've downloaded it from the internet. I've made some changes. This looks fantastic. I've run it through the structural engineering code. That looks great. Let's go out and build it. Great. What are we going to do? We're going to have a two-week hackathon at my house called build me a house. Right? And this is how this is how housing used to be done. Barn raising. You threw an enormous party. You fed all of your friends. They helped you put up a house. You lived in it. There was no mortgage. Amazing. Right? No, really, that's what we used to do. In England, before all of this building code stuff, we built our own houses. And we lived in them. And our friends helped us. And there were no ludicrously expensive professions that would block us at every hand and turn using regulatory capture with things like building codes. Right? No mortgages. Where are you being screwed? Mostly the mortgage. Right? Yeah, yeah, all right. You're you're going crazy. What do you mean build our own houses? Right? If you could save 60,000 pounds over the course of your lifetime for the sake of a few weeks of hard work with a collective of friends, you'd be making three grand a day. How does that compare to your consulting rates? Right? Oh, right. Housing is the world's last [22:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=1330s) truly inefficient industry. The mortgage, it's 150,000, 200,000, 250,000 euros. At least half of that in most places is paying for people to use close imitations of 18th century building techniques. It's like having somebody come round your house with a loom they took out of a museum from the back of a you know, in the back of a truck to weave you a suit with a shuttle. That's what you're paying for in the housing industry. Right? So, let us consider the possibility that we could use a free hardware approach to housing. The hexayurt is basically an alternative to tents. It's by no means the be-all and end-all of the housing thing. There's a guy in the states whose name escapes me and where's my timer gone? Nah. 5 minutes, great. So, there's a guy in the states whose name escapes me who's working on a thing called houselets. And houselets is grid beam for housing. Very simple. Potentially, you could do multi-story. It's funny looking little cubes. Great idea. No problem with it at all. Go out, take a look at it. It might suit your needs better than a hexayurt. Right? But we've only got two or three credible teams that are working on housing as a thing. And this doesn't even begin to approach the other problem, which is land rights. So, let me talk very briefly about land rights and then I will try and tie this thing off on time. Um in the UK, we have 10 times the number of people that it is possible to house at say an American population density. We are jammed in here like sardines by American standards. Um that makes everything to do with land very difficult, particularly given that the inheritors of the Norman conquests still own most of the land. You know this guy called the Duke of Westminster? Right? One of his ancestors was given most of Westminster, Mayfair, all that area of London by the king or the queen of the time. And they've lived off it ever since. We just gave them the land. The crown said, "Here, have a patch of land." Um it's very unlikely that we're going to be able to make a breakthrough on land in the UK because we've got a feudal society which locks land as a manner of tax taxing the population to concentrate wealth in the hands of the Normans. Oh, peasant mine. Right? But we have European Union passports. So, imagine, if you will, [24:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvf3ZQSNMhE&t=1480s) uh a radical proposal. Imagine that there was a nomadic hacker festival. Right? Comes in a bunch of sea containers or very large truck. You unpack it. It's a bunch of really nice domes. It's got a couple of big tents. It's got excellent Wi-Fi, off-grid composting toilets using an open source design, solar panels, wind turbines, water purifiers, the entire shebang, and it houses about 500 people, maybe 200. In the summer, it's in Norway or maybe Finland, Sweden, you know, somewhere nice up north see a bit of the world, maybe Estonia. Uh as it gets towards kind of late sorry, as it gets a little colder, late summer, you might move it somewhere nice like Devon. When Devon becomes a little frigid, you go to say Portugal. Move the thing four or five six times a year. How many people do you think in Europe might take that as an offer so they could work from home and basically live in a hacker festival year round? Yeah, we got one. We do. Five, all right. So, if there are 10 or 15 in this room, I think that the kind of European hacker culture footprint could have a nomadic year-round hacker village without even trying. Right? And that nomadic year-round hacker village could be the development ground for an enormous amount of R&D in open source housing and open source infrastructure. And if people were to go and find, you know, little corners of oh, I don't know, empty villages in Portugal or you know, chunks of say Tunisia where you could take one of these villages, clone the infrastructure, and then set it up permanently, I am not sure that those places would mind. Because you've suddenly got a whole bunch of extremely advanced technological thinkers living in your society, helping your folks get oriented to the 21st century, helping them learn how to make real money. Right? Sounds kind of crazy, might be worth a try. hexayurt, it's very plausible technology as part of that, but it's not about the hexayurt. It's about simply taking the next step. We got freedom in software. We're getting it in gadgets. We get it in houses and infrastructure, and we walk off the map. How does that sound as a proposal? Yeah, good. Right. Hopefully, thank you. Thank you. --- End of [711] Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [311](https://guptaoption.com/texts/311.md) Vinay Gupta - Proof of Work / IAmSatoshi (2014); the most closely related, [314](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md) EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.