# Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [741]. 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, 2021-07-23 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc. 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): Design lineage of the hexayurt.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (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)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (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)
  - 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)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. (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: culture / history / fiction (22%); fab / yes / laser (22%); flu / infection / risk (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: The Future We Deserve (2 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 2 undated); Fuller (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); skin in the game (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); VICE (1 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); Buckminster Fuller (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); cyber (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); jobs (2 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); expertise (1 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); standards (1 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.18 (1.00 is the top), number 393 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
  - [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md): close in content (cosine 0.91)
- On the same works, just before: [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.md); [160] [UKJT Digital Dispute Resolution Rules (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/160.md); [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md)
- On the same works, just after: [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md); [245] [Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md); [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.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: Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips, video, 2021-07-23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [741], https://guptaoption.com/texts/741.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=0s) you also mentioned and a lot of things uh bucky uh buckminster fuller for people um that are not familiar and the concept of effermilization which is doing more with less so maybe um can you talk just a little bit about his influence i guess we don't have to get too far into it but i mean he's one of my biggest influences so i mean buckminster really begins to kick in probably 95 um a friend of mine in chicago has like the entire bucky library okay and has figured out how to do a software engineering practice based on a whole bunch of bucky's thinking so it's like oh that's interesting um so i kind of absorb a whole bunch of it there and then um begin to move on in it's kind of hard to express this exactly so i've always tended to make things so you kind of absorb the bucky story and then the question is what do you do with it ah right and then maybe we can transfer it into the hexayurt and stuff because that i'm assuming plays into some of this well so this is this is kind of where the game really gets started right you know prior to the stuff i'm about to describe i'm still very much a kid i'm just wandering around trying to find my feet sure and then in 96 uh things really begin to lock on right late 95 96 that's really when some life gets started so the kind of two form of events there are i go down and i visit a place called the farm in tennessee and um the farm was the the apex of 60 civilization a guy called stephen daskin takes something like 200 school buses of hippies out of the hay in 71 because they're pretty convinced that the whole hey ashby culture has become toxic and it's crashing so they haul everybody out and they drive cross-country trying to find a nice part of land to settle down on and the thing that people forget about the back to the land movement is they were expecting a nuclear war right that's right yeah and all that was still very much around there was a whole survivalist aspect to the hippie trip that people totally forget so you know they were really going out to start a new civilization somewhere out of the city because they didn't want to get flashed if things went bad right um so there was a there was a

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=150s) sort of hardcore pragmatic field engineering aspect to all that so they go and they sell and in the course of a few years they move from you know school buses to buildings some of them were conventionally built houses some of them are domes and they'd be living in these things for 20 years by the time that i got there so and i thought yeah the farm was a whole other story they went horrifically bankrupt in the mid-80s oh it was often researched that then oh it's rough and when they went bankrupt a whole bunch of their people left for california many of them got jobs at a place called the whole earth electronic link okay which is uh then becomes generally known as the well which is the place where most of the early cyber culture stuff gets established okay right that was the first real big culturally significant bulletin board system because it was for the san francisco we you know kind of hang out and talk to each other so that was her early internet culture really got you know stabilized and then went mainstream and a whole bunch of that was foreign people so in any case they go down to the farm and they completely change the course of my life in a weekend so they introduced me two concepts firstly a guy called albert bates who's still kicking around and runs in the gold word world watch says this is the environment right this is the environmental crisis we are screwed and this is in 95 maybe 96. prophetic well he he just had the data right he's like look you know here's our deforestation right here's our carbon emission right here's the amount of toxic crop we're putting into the ecosystem and if you put all these things together then here's our trajectory right and unless we get massive change with cultural and engineering practice this is the inevitable future and you know he's thinking numerically right and i'm like oh i understand numbers oh and then the other thing is they say hey Vinay can you figure out how to make a genie zig dome with no waste ah i said then that's and this starts the whole thing so you know once that question's locked in it's obviously a good idea right um so i start making my way methodically through all the buckminster 4 math trying to figure out exactly how all that stuff works right not just how do i build it but why is it the way that it is and i spend literally six months on this basically re-doing fuller's work you know like okay this is where he wound up this is where he started how do you get from one to the other just kind of in betweening it so that i actually understand what happened and at the end of that whole process i

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=300s) can't do any better than four i get like a three or four percent improvement but it's totally marginal it's just not really not really worth having done and at that point i'm stuck i don't know how to do the next part okay fine and i go back to software and then i've been belonging doing software for the next four or five years and then you know right around 9 11 that's when the next phase begins i quit software and i go into energy policy and then i spent basically 12 years doing energy policy and defense right and then so you also then in 2012 you edited a dense tome called the future we deserve which is a collection of 100 essays from different people across all walks of life and i'll just do a quote here um utopia or oblivion plenty or famine freedom or slavery we do not know but we do know that there is a vital thread of insight which emerges when p emerges when people think about what they really want what matters most to them and how we're all going to live in just a few years so can you speak more about maybe how that changed since 2012. so the future we deserve was a project that came out of peak twitter right twitter had this kind of enormously productive spike right around then where pretty much the entire early adopter community was on twitter and basically nobody else right right i mean i remember those days right at the very very beginning and it was amazing right um you know once my once i got my friends onto twitter i s literally there was a summer maybe a year even where i saw twice as much as of the people that i liked than i had the previous year because people would habitually tweet what they were doing and if it was interesting you just go tag along right and that was an amazing period and then people discovered that you could tweet hyperlinks oh yes and the sharing of information and it went from being twitter was about the physical world to being twitter was now about the the kind of uh intellectual world and at that point people stopped putting the physical world stuff onto it or you couldn't find it and twitter became a completely different thing if twitter had not enabled the pasting of hyperlinks and it had retained this purely physical aspect i think it would have been a completely different thing i think it would have actually changed the world in so much more interesting ways somebody i'll do that well i mean but so then let's keep it on twitter because you're you have a very active twitter presence as of now so like what what are your most what do you use it most for i mean other than hyperlinks because you do have these kind of not soliloquies but some type of monologues or stream of

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=450s) consciousnesses that you kind of put out so twitter has recently broken itself right this switch to uh prioritized uh rather than timeline view oh yes you know where it does this algorithmic sort so twitter's actual utility to me has dropped through the floor in since they made that change like to the point where i'm like oh crap i need a new medium if anybody twitter is listening fix it go back to timeline um so twitter for that period before they broke it with the timeline change was where all of the smart people that i could find were right and if i run across smart people that weren't on twitter like priority number one get them on twitter that's where the community is so that kind of soft edge network of a thousand three thousand five thousand people um that was essentially my university right that was the place where you know the other professors were and the students were and the culture was and the game was and things would go through that like a metabolic structure somebody would drag in something new and amazing and they'd tweet about it and then a whole bunch of other people would read it and then they'd do some more research and then some of you do some analysis and there'd be a couple of blog posts and it was a kind of i mean i really have is astonishingly really strong distaste for the term collective intelligence i see but what it was was a culture right and it was a culture that thought for all of it right right right um and that was that was twitter was where that was happening um but again as you began to see more and more and more people pile into it and more and more and more of the kind of celebrity counter stuff um twitter begins to round off as a tool for that community because they're being diluted um and that happens i've known that would happen to twitter inevitably for years because by the time you get to my age you've seen that happen to three or four different mediums right the diluting out process is a thing that happens over and over and over again um and you get either deleting out or neglecting twitter is basically dying of dilution right and then so but do you think that that also has to do something with um one of my other uh big big i guess influences other um is the late aaron schwartz and one of his you know the founder of reddit and his one of his things was that you know before the internet or before you know a lot of these new kind of things with twitter reddit is that um not everyone had a voice but now everyone has a voice but now the question is who gets heard

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=600s) and then that is kind of the interesting kind of thing what you're speaking of like expertise versus culture versus a community so maybe just talk about more the the overall trends of the internet may maybe because twitter is one aspect of that and if you've seen many different iterations i mean you've been in it from from almost the beginning yeah i mean i was it's funny how that works right so in terms of people online you know i got an account in i don't know 91 or something like that and at the time you know we sort of looked at ourselves as being like third generation internet people okay okay quite funny and now we look like first generation people because all the early generations have just gotten smooshed up into you know the old days absolutely like you used it before the web yeah i did use it before work um but you know before the web there was like five generations of technology before the web oh totally you know it's quite it's quite weird how it all compresses so the main thing is that you know global culture is just sliding into the toilet in the worst possible way right now um and the internet is being dragged right along with it right right i mean you know the line between the internet and the real world was very very strong in the 90s oh absolutely like that was when we were growing up we were talking last night about how we're probably the last generation to then have well i mean not the last bit like what you were just talking about before the web like i remember when we got a modem you know and a dsl i remember that like i remember all of that and then now we start looking at kids that are just you're on tick tock snapchat everything like that's all they've learned at such a hyper pace they're plugged in from the beginning right exactly from the get-go yeah and i mean that that separation really comes with mobile right so of course you know when the internet was in your office or in your house when you were outside you were offline there was no internet you weren't very true two worlds once mobile came along you know the the tendency of the internet just fuse into everything as a default state very very very strong electric it's like electricity now right if you're in a place without data the place is broken um yeah because i'm not learning anything no information is being provoked find your friends can't do any work you're offline like if you're if you're in some cellar bar and you don't have a mobile signal in there you know it's like oh broken yes that's happening you know they should put a repeater in here right so it wasn't like that right

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=750s) the internet was a direct extension of academic privilege pretty much everybody that had an internet account was on a university system or a big government or corporate system where they were getting their internet access directly provided by a hierarchy so if they did something you didn't like you complained to the hierarchy in the hierarchy put the hammer on them right and that was how the internet ran prior to september 93 like september 9th when aol built the gateway between the aol system and the main internet system and the entire aol subscriber brace piled into the internet that was the point where we lost accountability because if you wrote the aol admins about the behavior of their users they didn't do anything because they were being paid by the users rather than the users being provided with internet as a side effect of a job or an academic role interesting and that distinction where we lost the accountability network around the user was where the barbarians really got in right right right because you went from a position where people had to maintain reasonably civilized standards of behavior or their administrators yelled at them and threatened to take away their internet to the point where people could do anything they damn well liked and there was no recourse so it went from being a highly structured highly policed highly civil space with a very very strong enforcement culture to being literally an anarchy and then a violent anarchy right right and then now like to do something on twitter now you're just yelling into the ether unless you get enough people to get on to the bandwagon of then making someone do something so we went from a structured hierarchical federated system right so the internet's kind of legal system pre-aol was essentially like america's old west with sheriffs okay right you know oh i'm i'm the sheriff of you know upend.edu and none of my users are sending junk mail to your user and i'm gonna make sure that right and it was quite kind of square-jawed system administrators upholding the internet way because their jobs depended on it right they had skin in that game that's skin in the game so you're a hierarchical but federated system and you know if you were kind of a troublemaker you could get an account in a place where the system administrators were a little more forgiving and lacks and you know but there was always a leash right and we look at that as the golden age of the internet without anybody understanding that it was incredibly heavily censored right right yeah you have to have that

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=900s) other side of the of the coin you know there were a lot of things you just couldn't do on the internet because the system administrators couldn't let that happen because it would you know if it didn't get dealt with it would affect their departments and if the departments didn't deal with it it would affect the university like you know we don't really want to have to cut university of wisconsin off the internet but if your users keep doing this we're going to do it that's the kind of stick that people could waive so they never had to right right but you know the entire mythology of like early internet anarchy is its mythology it seemed that way because nobody was paying attention but it also seemed that way because the people that were doing the enforcing were hippie weirdos right right the system administrators were generally speaking not authoritarian but the system that they were in was authoritarian in a vice profile they profiled you the man whose job it is to constantly imagine the total collapse of humanity in order to save it so i don't know how much you take of that but then in the same piece uh in one of the quotes you had your mission it's it's all i do i get up in the morning i figure out what i what to hit and then i hit it so how is that kind of your personal philosophy or mission changed over the years well so all this comes out in 2001 right 2001 the world changes of course and we go from having a 10 years world peace to being back in the middle of a war which has run pretty much uninterrupted since the first contact between islam and christianity right right right and at that point we're back in you know more than a thousand years of war right you know we had a we had a brief kind of uh period where the christians had kind of won right after world war one islam is seriously broken and christian civilization kind of rocks back on its heels and sits down in the armchair and then we've got the whole kind of socialism versus capitalism of course and then you know you know christian capitalism kind of comes out on top of that and then we get 10 years of world peace because we essentially have american hegemony because christian capitalism is held up and everything else has collapsed right and you know both of those systems have problems but at least having a single soul superpower that was generally speaking attempting to be benign maybe falling short but attempting life was pretty good and then after 9 11 and then the cultural changes that come with 9 11 there's this thing of like oh we're sliding off a cliff right and you know it was really clear i

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=1050s) remember really as early as bush versus gore you know when the supreme court comes in oh yes yes and decides the bush's president yep right florida and everyone just like poopoos that or forgets about it or whatever a man not me yeah right i mean i know it because of research then and stuff but man that's an interesting story oh my my entire subculture right right all my friends look at that what happened and write oh my god we are screwed all right right you know you could just riding on the wall yeah well because you know at that point it was two completely different versions of the future that were being held out right and once you take the fork in the road everything else that happens becomes you know affected by that fork it's path dependency so we'd taken the volatile path we were on the dangerous track and then you got a gigantic global crisis which is 9 11 but the gigantic global crisis it gets handled by people that are fundamentally militaristic and at that point it's like lighting a forest fire yeah you know 911 was the spark but the tinder it was already there laid out ready to go it just burns and burns and burns and burns burns but because of where i was located culturally i could see the tinder right i could see the enormous heaps of dry brush and i watched the fire star like oh we are screwed um and then my guru was basically like luke you know so far you've been on this track of heading towards being a you know kind of professional teacher of meditation when you grow up i think that's a total waste of time you should go and do something about the state of the world right well then there you go that's right uh and that was really where the load began to shift so i wound up at rocky mountains to you know do a bunch of energy policy stuff there that i invent the hexayurt right then from the hexayurt i go to taking a look at how you'd use it in u.s domestic which turns into the question about evacuating entire cities which turns into the nuclear work and once i get my tooth into the nuclear work you know what i realize is i have an unnatural talent for worst case scenario right like you know i mean i worked on stuff that had also been worked on by classified planners right and the because none of my work was ever classified right i was strictly on class um but there were areas i'd worked on which classified flanders had also worked on and it was you know consistently that the work that i'd done was vastly superior to work

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuHS3yTuOEc&t=1200s) that had been run on classified planners and i heard that from people in the uk and the us because the classified planners are just regular folks that wind up being asked to do worst case scenario planet and if you don't have a head of titanium you can't do it your mind shuts down because you can't model a scenario in which two-thirds of the people that you know die

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End of [741] Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt | Vinay Gupta | Conversations Clips. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [773](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md) Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021); the most closely related, [724](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md) Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.