# (OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus billion person world By Vinay Gupta (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [753], part 1 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2013-09-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig. 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): Scales the needs model to the whole planet: the resource frame for mass relocation.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer...
  - 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...
  - 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)
  - 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.
- Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Feudalism vs markets vs the new thing (One Network, One World); Rich data capitalism
- Ideas developed here: Global Village Development Bank
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (20%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (15%); disaster / refugee / food (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Stacktivism (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); open-source housing (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); Boing Boing (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); survival needs (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Appropedia (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); water filter (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); basic needs (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); SCIM (1 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 9 undated); critical infrastructure (2 here; 54 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated); Six Ways To Die (1 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): global trade; Stacktivism; open-source housing
- Importance: core-text score 0.85 (1.00 is the top), number 9 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [3] [The Global Village Development Bank v2 (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/3.md): Vinay: frames the GVDB idea clearly, near the end; the GVDB paper is the introduction
  - [840] [Rich data capitalism: economics, environment and governance (2026)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/840.md): the 'new thing' beyond price signalling, later called rich data capitalism (840 cites this talk from 36:24)
  - [165] [The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/165.md): price signalling vs information-rich markets, developed in the Mattereum Manifesto
  - [335] [STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md): same career work: Six ways people die
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): same career work: Hexayurt
- On the same works, just before: [387] Limewharf #STACKTIVISM #BIGPIX Stream 1 (2013); [319] [A sleepless night trying to find words (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/319.md); [385] [test (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/385.md)
- On the same works, just after: [754] [Vinay Gupta shares his vision of a rural future (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/754.md); [161] [Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/161.md); [162] [media ccc de v emf2014 144 hexayurts distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/162.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: (OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus billion person world By Vinay Gupta, video, 2013-09-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [753], https://guptaoption.com/texts/753.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=0s) um so if you're making it out of something like bamboo you're going to wind up in a position where uh you have an enormous number of um people that need shelter but only a limited amount of local bamboo and the fact that you're working inside of an industrial parad where you're actually doing mass production as a core part of the hexayurt is the part of the story that we don't normally talk about and the reason that I'm going to go into some depth in this today is because everything to do with centralization and industrialization is now a key political issue because of what we've seen with the entire Snowden mess does that kind of make sense so what I thought was going to be a very simple talk about technology is now going to be substantially more political and I'm going to wind up making up quite a lot of it as I go along so you know excuse me if there's chaos but that's just the deal we have today um right let's get started um the way that the world works right now is a really simple breakdown roughly two billion of us are rich and live in cities there's another billion of us who are dirt poor and live in these kind of slums which are cities with informal infrastructure the cities with informal infrastructure are where most of the economic growth is happening in the the world because that's the place where there's the kind of chaos which is deeply creative and the lack of creative chaos is the great strangling that you see when we talk about copyright and patent so if you think of the slums as being a place where there's very very weak State and therefore extremely high economic growth you could begin to see that the internet in some ways is a digital slum it's a place where for a long time because there was no way to make money on the internet nobody really cared what happened there now in the world that we currently live in we're are something like four to eight times consumption of basic resources and this is a very crude number it covers land use it covers water use it's absolutely a wild ask estimate and a little bit later we'll talk about a specific resource copper and how serious the shortages of copper are and what that really means for our culture

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=150s) um once you understand that we're at 4 to 8 times consumption a really really big change happens in your understanding of how the world works because for us to have a planet in which everybody has uh a basic standard of living is going to require us to cut our standard of living by a factor of 4 to 10 or at least our resource use um or we're going to face an absolutely enormous conflict because we will continue to consume an enormous amount of resources everybody else will be on the edge of starvation and will be interconnected by a single large Global Network basically the internet does this kind of make sense so far right we're not in the world that we think we're in the world that we think we're in is that our standard of living is kind of normal natural sustainable reasonable and so on but actually it's the product of roughly 500 years of colonial EXP expansion and Military Domination by Europeans we got to gunpowder and industrial production first we basically Enslaved the entire world and the standard of living that we have is produced by unfair trade occasional war and huge burning of Natural Resources so we're kind of sitting in a house which is on fire discussing what furniture we're going to buy next year and it's that radical reframing of how the world Works which gives the opportunities for political change in a way which is directly continuous from everything to do with centralized production right the way through to why we can't get rid of the NSA without getting rid of capitalism too right now let's return to the Practical for a second the hexayurt is a really simple technology it's really simple because most of the complexity is outsourced to the manufacturing process so because we can buy insulated panels for € 20 a sheet as long as you're willing to make things that it's easy to make with insulated panels boom you can make hexayurt ards right the wall is a whole industrial panel the roof piece is half an industrial panel you can make them out of different kinds of industrial panel this one is uh plywood right same geometry you could fit a lot of people in them I mean we'd be much cooler if we had hexayurts here right next year next year um you can make larger ones

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=300s) different geometry you can make really large ones same components over and over and over again for an entire range of structures and this thing is basically a free it's run like a free software project no copyright no patent no budget we give away the designs uh about 1,000 units were built last year at Burning Man all of the complexity of this project is in the materials manufacturing and the materials Logistics the construction process is cut some panels in half and attach them if it's wood you use screws uh if it's a foam panel you use tape but all of the embedded complexity that makes the hexayurt project possible is access to high-tech materials does this kind of make sense now once we accept that the hexayurt is just an extrusion of industrial civilization it's a little kind of node on this enormous Global manufacturing Network it becomes much clearer what it is that makes it special it's the raw industrial form of shelter here's the enormous high-tech industrial infrastructure and it's the absolute minimum you can do to turn high-tech industrial infrastructure into shelter um that just nice picture to give you a sense of scale um once you begin to see that the fact that at the end of the process you can do the manufacturing step with very simple tools doesn't change the fact that the panel materials are made in enormous centralized factories that are integral parts of the whole kind of global trade system when we start talking about how to change the world if we ignore the industrial tail that makes it possible to produce Ultra cheap shelter we haven't actually solved the problem so right now the hexayurt is in exponential growth they're doubling every year from a start of 1 in 20 3 uh last year at Burning Man there were at least 750 units we could count from the air and probably as many as another 250 to 500 of the smaller units that we couldn't count uh test units in Sri Lanka test unit in Haiti lots of interest in people beginning to build them in permanent applications the thing is spreading my guess when I started this project was that it was going to take 15 years to go go from the first hexayurt

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=450s) to the first large scale deployment in a refugee camp um partly because you need a kind of generational turnover when you're going to go from the sort of um you know radical new vision to the mainstream usually if you grow up around an idea you think it's mainstream and then when you become adult you deploy it but if you're in a position where a new idea arrives and you're working in a conservative industry it's very hard to change your mind about how things work so imagine a world in which the vast majority of the human race lived in hexayurt so rather than having 40 tons of fired brick steel glass uh concrete and all of these other expensive materials arranged in an incredibly inefficient form which is an accident of history with terrible engineering and Manufacturing properties right could we actually do one house like that as a minimum human right for every human being in the world right it's a question it's an engineering question so we take an average occupancy of say three people so 9 billion divided by 3 3 billion we need 12 sheets of material for each hexayurt so that's 36 billion sheets and typical weight for a sheet is something like four kilos so can we make roughly 100 billion kilos or 100 million tons of hexayurt panels well yes right there are lots of different ways you can do it probably the most efficient way of doing it is aluminium foil very thin aluminium foil over thick industrial cardboard the panels are machine sealed they last forever because the aluminium protects them from the Sun and the UV and the water and the cellulose is incredibly stable as long as it's protected from those things if the panel fails you rip the aluminum off and recycle it and you compost the cardboard so I don't know of another way that we could produce housing for the entire world there aren't really enough natural materials to do it in most places people live in very simple very primitive m huts and they're very

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=600s) uncomfortable and the standard of living is very low do you begin to see the way that we're looking at this right you have a situation where you start talking about how the future works and you begin to wind up with these enormous numbers for raw materials consumption and those numbers never really come up when people are talking about things like energy policy they always talk about relative to current consumption right our use is up 2% our use is down 2 2% even the environmental movement talks about up 2% down 2% they never talk about if everybody in the world consumed this much how many planets a consumption would be using because the number is so terrifying and there's only really two ways this can go either we find a way of providing what everybody needs in a way that works for everybody in is acceptable within the actual standard of living that we have or we find some kind of situation where uh you have an enormous difference between the access to resources of the rich and the poor and constant conflict in society to manage that uh disparity and that's the position we have right now right we're at the head end of an extremely successful Empire we've been part of the colonial process our entire lives even if we didn't fully acknowledge it and if we want to talk about solving the political problems that come with Empire we have to solve the problem of our own resources consumption because otherwise we depend on the Empire to keep us wealthy even though we feel oppressed by the existence of the Empire do you see how this kind of closes into a loop right on one hand we are complaining about the NSA and the terrible actions of the American government on the other hand we drove here in two tons of steel running on oil that was taken at gunpoint from one country or another right Iran you know the the great you know demon that is being set up for the next War Iran had a democratically elected government in 1953 which was overthrown by the CIA because they nationalize the oil reserves right we live in a system which requires somebody to be oppressed for us to have our standard of living and when we are the people that become oppressed by that system We complain but it is probably much easier to end the system of Oppression completely than it is to change who is oppressed in the

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=750s) system right if you want to get rid of the NSA it starts with the fundamental resource consumption processes of our societies and this is something which is not technologically soluble in the sort of nanotech Biotech uh singularitarianism to the point where we can basically 3D print chicken sandwiches as smari says the problem is that if you can 3D print chicken sandwiches you can also 3D print landmines and in all probability we will not accept a society in which it's possible to 3D print landmines in high school so you wind up with a system of restrictions on your 3D printers to prevent them producing weapons or drugs that we don't agree or legal or whatever it happens to be you know and at that point you now have a new control structure which is regulating the means of production on which your Society operates and it's bad enough for 3D printers it's massively worse when you get to nanotechnology or synthetic biology so even with extremely powerful new manufacturing technology we do not necessarily get to Freedom you just get to a different set of restrictions so the other path is to find an extremely low resource lowrisk mechanism where all of the needs of human beings can be met in a way that doesn't require this uh enormous colonialist or imperialist or capitalist structure to hold the disparities in place and then once in a while the people in the losing end of that are us okay now let me check and see whether we got any questions on the thing okay any questions no okay so moving swiftly on I'm find the D Slide the hell was it of my slides sing macintoshes Oh box sorry it's really hot you know it's been a really fun week uh there we are right now uh let me step forward so let's talk about this in a really simple place where it hits us all which is finding housing the mor ages

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=900s) that we have many of us some of us um basically have gone up in value by what two times in the past 20 years in most countries was most of the sort of Rich industrial countries all of that money is being pulled out of other parts of the society so if you have you know $100 million in a bucket if real estate is in this kind of extremely booming kind of mode and you build more housing most of the value in that housing is actually speculation value the value is not in the bricks and mortar it's not in the services that are produced because the house is in central London or Central Amsterdam it has value exactly the same house in central Poland would be worth 10% as much now that 90% of value difference between these two scenarios all of that is speculative value it's just Vapor it's it's just a ghost so what's happened is that all of our Capital has been poured into the building industry because as everything else got cheaper you know uh technology got cheaper Communications got cheaper energy got cheaper manufacturing got more efficient as all of these other things got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper housing stayed expensive and it took up a proportionately larger and larger and larger part of our total economic output everything else has been starved for capital for Generations because the housing market was pulling more and more and more of the wealth in society into buildings that were badly engineered and haven't changed in basically 60 years we stopped investing in industrial capacity we stopped investing in education we stopped investing in research and development we stopped investing in science all of the money went into bad engineering and speculation so now look at the possibility of doing extremely cheap mass produced environmentally friendly environmentally stable open-source housing there's a possibility to disrupt the housing market we could do to housing what the previous generation did to fax machines right you know that little GIF that you see floating around that says you know you wouldn't download a car and then there's a picture of a rep up and it says just you bloody weight I should have it on here but I don't right um

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1050s) so that's the position that we're actually in with housing right I mean the hexayurt is an early stage project it probably needs 10 more years of work to the point where we could get it to the point where you could buy a kit that was designed in a completely open process for 15,000 put it up in a weekend with your friends and live in it but that's the long-term Vision right let's just kill the conventional housing market it's terrible obsolete technology it's bad for our culture it's not scalable to the rest of the world it's producing enormous amounts of conflict within and around our societies it's a disaster you have a question uh come to the microphone if if in general if people have questions so please put them on the ether pth so killing a housing market is quite difficult because you need to have a lot to put something and then you need to have a permit that you're allowed to put your ugly uh um um aluminum stuff there and next to you there's a big vill and and the people say what's that ugly stuff there it has to be removed and so you get little bit uh problems there you're you're absolutely correct and then you have a problem that if you have a um dense area where they have maybe 20 story houses where all the poor people live um then how do we want to make this you need need steel frames and things like that and you get into constructing something that that they have so the gdr made some efficient housing but the people didn't like it or the because they are made from concrete ready finished Parts but it was quite intelligent because you could uh remove some panels and you were were were able to to fix the piping because they were not uh put under the concrete but just just just remove some panels and you can service that yes so everything you say is correct right so for low density rural housing the problem is very easy for high density Urban housing the problem is very hard right and I'm not suggesting that the first thing that we approach as an open source housing project is cities cities are difficult um but fully 50% of the world lives in rural areas and many of us would quite like to have a more Rural Life it is possible now um this I will come back to so once you have housing right you just have a shell what else do you need in order to be able to cover for the rest of your

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1200s) needs it depends on the climate that you're in it depends on what your personal needs are it depends on uh your chosen standard of living your technology base your industry all of these things so this is a model called uh six ways to die and it's part of a thing called SCIM simple critical infrastructure Maps lists the ways that people die too hot right too cold hunger thirst illness injury and there are seven tiers of political organization which are mapped in this system individual household village town region country and world so it's a super simple abstract model of the system that keeps you alive not mapped in physical space but mapped in political space so we get out here right what's keeping us uh let's say warm in Winter although it's hard to imagine now is a heating system that connects to a power system that connects the International Energy market so every time you you know turn on the heating in Winter you're turning on you know a service that's directly connected to this enormous structure of global capitalism and then the enormous structure of global capitalism is maintained largely by the force of the American government and to some degree the Europeans and the Chinese and then their intelligence Services protect that status quo from any kind of disruption you see what I'm saying it's the closing of the loop between the provision of critical infrastructure and the need for a defense and security service which gets in your lives that is the core tension at the heart of why we don't seem to be able to make real progress against these forces as long as we are dependent on a system of global oppression to give us cheap natural resources and to maintain the wealth disparity between us and the poor of the world those systems of Oppression serve our basic needs and as a result we can't get free of them right the snake is eating its own tail and the only way of getting out of this is to get into a position where we are no longer dependent as a culture and as a civilization on the standing means

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1350s) of political oppression for our basic survival needs right the solution to the war in Iraq was to stop driving but not one or two of us all of us right if they stop the war Coalition rather than having 2 million people go out for one day had simply turned London into an area where cars didn't drive for a year because everybody commuted to work on bicycles a real message would have been sent but it's not about sending a message it's about finding a way of life which doesn't require the NSA to protect the state to protect us from the people that we're ripping off to make a living now shall we go a little further down the rabbit hole here right how many of you have a Computing device which contains components manufactured in China right now do Chinese people get to vote no not in a substantial way do they get to form unions to protect their interests against their employers no do they have first class protections of their human rights do they get to work reasonable hours for reasonable wages do they get collective bargaining no so we're fighting for free software running on top of Hardware produced by slaves this is exactly the same Paradox of the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson talking about human Liberty while living on a farm where slaves did most of the manual labor we're in exactly the same position that Jefferson was in the tools that we are using to talk about Liberty are being produced by people who are fundamentally unfree and this goes right to the heart of our problem we can no longer trust that Hardware because the hardware is produced by the Machinery of Oppression which we're attempting to challenge by writing software and as you all know you can write the best software in the world but if it's running on an untrusted Hardware platform really good luck with your privacy and security how are we going to reclaim Electronics manufacturing from non-free States how do we make sure that every human being involved in the production of your laptop or your cell phone had political freedom and chose to

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1500s) manufacture it rather than not having political freedom and being forced into it by their government or even by economic pressure how much do you think it would cost for a fair trade laptop right 5,000 €2,000 we don't know do you know about fairphone fairphone is a company that's attempting to produce a fair trade phone so far it looks like the prices go to be fairly manageable yes just a moment ago you spoke about either being forced by their government or by economic pressure yes um is it conceivable that you would ever live in a society where people aren't forced to do things by economic pressure if I live on my own on a sustainable Farm in the middle of nowhere I am forced to farm de feed myself by the economic pressure of needing to eat don't we all choose to work in part of a society where we can sustain ourselves based on the economic pressure of needing resources um so yes and no so the distinction here is about the meaning of the word Force which gets into the whole question of libertarian political theory about whether or not um economic coercion is still coercion the question is at what point will the state deploy violence or will other people deploy violence to compel your behavior so if you're in a position where you're comp hiled by the laws of nature to get up and farm it's very difficult to change the system in such a way the laws of nature no longer apply to you but if you're in a position where other human beings are acting by force upon you you're in a very different situation inevitably this discussion eventually terminates in talking about land rights and once we start getting into that discussion we're going to need 3 hours but uh as with the question earlier on about cities and urbanization you cannot get all the way down this path without doing Land Reform too now um I am going to switch to a separate set of slides assuming this software is going to behave I've gotten so of the habit of using Mac contructors I can hardly find the buttons anymore uh right so um earli on I mentioned copper so the situation with copper is

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1650s) absolutely astonishing I only figured this stuff out about a month ago and it just blows my mind so the total recoverable copper reserve the economically recoverable copper Reserve is 1 kgam per human so in a sustainable Society uh in fact in any society if we're all going to consume roughly the same amount of copper we're going to get about a kilogram each now it may actually turn out to be closer to 10 kilog by the time you have new technology and change your economically recoverable reserve estimates and all this kind of stuff but does this explain why people are stealing copper out of the ground at every opportunity why they're taking copper off roofs right as more and more and more people are joining the global middle classes the pressure on the planetary supply of copper goes up and up and up um British Telecom apparently is now conceivably worth more as a copper um storage facility than it is as a telecom provider right because at the time only the very rich countries were mining copper and using it so we had an enormous concentration of the global copper Reserve inside of the UK which at the time was a dominant Imperial power now the rest of the world is beginning to want its share of the copper and the copper which is in the ground in the UK is not accessible right this is very weird can you imagine what civilization will look like when we've got you know a very very large Global middle class all competing for very scarce copper reserves it almost makes me think that I should sell my Bitcoins and move into copper um if we resolve this kind of scarcity using market pricing what will happen is that copper speculation will become like land speculation so an unproductive land market produces astonishingly High valuations the money pours into land the land is a not economically productive asset because it doesn't produce anything other than a very basic set of services from say housing and as a result your Society stops investing in research and development industrialization R you know all the rest of these things right so there is a profound problem in using standard market economics to solve problems of global resource scarcity because it results in a massive me misallocation of capital that causes your Industrial Systems to

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1800s) collapse this is the long economic cycle right people talk about you know the global economy just crashes every 30 40 60 years what's driving that process is almost certainly the misallocation of capital inside of the market economy format is that a message for me no okay okay sorry I wasn't sure whether you're were passing me a note right so once we talk about the problem that we've got this persistent tendency of the market to misallocate resources to non-economically productive things like massive long-term copper speculation the question then is what's the alternative right we're in a position where the culture that we are in is dependent on massive indust uh use of military force to maintain the wealth disparities on which our industrial system is based and it's misallocating the necessary Capital by which we could dig our way out these kind of problems in a way that produces cycles of Boom then bust then protectionism then War then boom then bust then protectionism then War then boom then this is what they call the economic cycle so the point that I am attempting to make is this right you cannot solve these problems one at a time right it is almost certainly impossible to unpick consumer cryptography to give everybody in the world access to privacy without noticing that 5 billion of those people are being screwed by our governments because every time they try and charge a fair price for their natural resources we assassinate their political leaders it's one problem it looks like 700 different problems it's one problem and the way that you get to the bottom of that problem is by analyzing where your stuff comes from your food your water your computers your electricity uh everything you track what you use back to its point of origin and it goes through our free Society for so many feet and then at the edge of our free Society it gets into slavery or communism right you track your natural resource tracking you go through the store you get to the store you get out of the store you get to the strip mine you get to the enormous waste dump once you actually start following where the stuff comes from and where it goes in your own life very quickly you begin to

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=1950s) understand where the systems of Oppression are operating and how you are supporting them by your very existence um my friend J spring it kind a fantastic term for this kind of analysis he calls it stacktivism right here is the stack of essential services that put together your world and the political analysis of that stack and its externalities is stacktivism so my contention is this tinkering with the layers of the stack individually is massively harder than doing it over and you don't do it over by pulling the old one down you do it over by building a new one prototyping it bootstrapping it from the resources of the old proving that it works and then pulling the population across one at a time now we've done this already in some areas right Wikipedia completely transformed access to human knowledge and the collaborative methods by which knowledge is produced more or less invisibly over 10 years wow okay that's pretty substantial and it's not by the way a coincidence that mainstream Academia is absolutely collapsing at the same time as Wikipedia is becoming a completely uh dominant Global Knowledge resource that's not coincidence um I'm not going to try and explain it cuz I'm not sure I understand it but I'm pretty sure there's a correlation similarly stop giggling Mr mcarthy similarly you look at the operating system market right you know the internet 50% of the stuff on the internet runs Linux right is it about 50% uh it Android is well over 50% um you know it's not that we are not having partial success as long as we are talking about software systems we're we're doing pretty well in the world of bits at displacing authoritarian structures from our lives now that's a very very delicate claim right in the world of bits not the world of atoms we're making a pretty good job of displacing authoritarian structur from our lives problem right firstly the world of bits is actually just the world

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=2100s) of atoms being taught to play tricks with electrons right it's actually all still fundamentally huge bloody server forms and pipes and cables that are controlled by people that we actually don't think like us because you know they're spying on us right problem number one problem number two the assumption that uh Wikipedia and Linux are not authoritarian right if you look at Jimmy Wales or wus tovalds these guys are basically rubber baronss they're politically unaccountable they're charging through the world on enormous piles of social capital and they are forging forward to build a bold New Destiny etc etc etc right they're absolutely stereotypical you know pirate Kings so we might in the long run have to ask whether a new generation of pirate kings that are supported by piles of Social Capital rather than piles of physical you know Financial capital is necessarily progress we might have to start talking about Democratic representation inside of Open Source projects as a way of ensuring that the users and the contributors have some control over these you know rubber Baron priest king guys the the Pharaohs of our new age but within that frame right now we are definitely displacing um greater evils with massively lesser evils in the world of bits right um and I think that that trend is very very positive and very likely to be a reversible so this is a bit of a change of gear I I'm going to start talking about information Theory and economics but I'm going to try and keep it short thank you yeah good so in the old feudal system information and power are concentrated at the top through a feudal hierarchy decisions are made and then information and decisions are pushed back down to all the people that are actually implementing feudalism capitalism comes along and capitalism has a many to many Marketplace in which information is exchanged through price signaling but price signaling is a very very narrow offer it only gives you a few bits of information about what's being said here's what we've got here's how much it is and the whole thing operates as a s partially stochastic IC search algorithm to produce an economically efficient

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=2250s) Society um what's interesting about that is that command economies are essentially feudalism with a new uh heuristic whereas capitalism is a genuinely new thing and the United States government in 1948 decided that they were going to fight communism by waiting for it to collapse because feudalism was unworkable at the scale of the Soviet Union so that model has been used it was in a paper called uh the long graph by Man Called George Cannon and I heartly recommend reading that document it's the foundational document of our current civilization like it's why the Cold War happened it's why the US won it explains most of us foreign policy The Long Telegram now in the environment where you've got rich Network heavy maps of social capital and so on what's happening is that much more accurate and much more comprehensive communication is happening than price signaling and as a result more efficient and more effective systems are beginning to displace systems which work on price signal so my contention is that Wikipedia could not have been built with any amount of money it doesn't matter how big your budget is when it comes in when it comes out you do not receive Wikipedia um once we get into the domain of social production of artifacts which are impossible to produce with money because of the inherent information theoretic limits of financial exchange as a way of allocating resources we are now in a completely new ball game right once you start out competing the market you are no longer talking about civil rights and capitalism is Naughty and you know it all runs on violence and all the rest of that stuff which are moral arguments you're talking about capitalism and the new thing get into a fight and capitalism loses right and weirdly enough capitalism has always been a live by the sword Die By The Sword kind of an approach to life so encyclopedia branica and windows get their ass kicked Macintosh Apple gets its ass kicked and it turns out that this is a really important thing because once capitalism starts losing you can start talking about the end of capitalism in a realistic way capitalism has already ended for certain of our critical utilities we're not going back to running proprietary software where capitalism has already ended for some of

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=2400s) our critical utilities why not the rest but what replaces capitalism is not feudalism it's a more information Rich more Equitable system if we're lucky right because we're either going to make the jump to that system or we're going to roll back to feudalism right the roll back to feudalism is is essentially the fascist movements that you see in places like Greece taking hold as the system begins to collapse there it's a roll back to a previous authoritarian way of doing things now I have strayed a long way from talking about the hexayurt but this is actually very close to my core motivations in doing the hexayurt project I wanted to build a lifestyle where a single individual or a family could live at One planet's worth of consumption in relative comfort that's the core design principle what does a one planet lifestyle look like 1 2 3 4 five hexayurts for the family water filter organic agriculture uh extremely durable long-lived Computing devices that you have now in use for the rest of your life or at least a couple of decades I am not suggesting that Western Society immediately reverts to that lifestyle right I'm not suggesting that we go back to the land that we go back to primary Agriculture and all the rest of that stuff not viable what I am suggesting is this 5 billion new people are going to get internet access within the next 5 to 10 years the entire developing world is about to get online because the little 12 button feature phones are dying and they're being replaced by smartphones and those smartphones are all internet connected on 3G 4G 5G mesh networks and what have you so we're about to get five times as many people with Ed involved in our entire Global process three and a half times right huge numbers of people are about to swarm into the conversation the number of smart talented brilliant funny people that can actually help start thinking about these Global problems and start solving them is about to go through the roof but we're also going to get into a position where they're about to start getting political educations because they're going to start asking why does my life suck when I go on the internet and what I'm looking at is the New York

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcxS1nLpig&t=2550s) Times website or boing boing right what does the internet look like if you were a poor child in an African village that just got a tablet that cost $11 and was printed on cardboard wow right the internet is a very self-indulgent place with a lot of very very very weird people looking at funny cat pictures while we completely ignore the state of the world and where the hardware is produced if we don't grow up and begin to seriously look at Global problems and solving Global problems as part of a necessity for a Global Network to exist we are going to get rolled back to feudalism right we have to roll forward we have to start producing all the basic necessities of life for everybody in the world and the place where there is the most rapid massive change socially culturally technologically is the villages and the slums of the poorer countries so what I'm suggesting is this the best route for us to find freedom is to make sure that the Villages of the developing World get the highest possible standard of living by using the knowledge that they can get from the internet to transform the resources that they have political control over into the resources that they need you get online you build the little machines that it tells you to purify your water and to make your agriculture easier you buy a few bits and pieces off the internet that are delivered like a little uh cell phone charger that runs from the Sun and some LED lights uh you get basic medical information you learn really interesting new things about agriculture that your culture never knew about because they didn't have microscopes and within 5 to 10 years your standard of living doubles or triples and you haven't had to go out on the streets and March and start wars and you haven't had to expose your kids to the risk of having a revolution in your country you stay where you are you massively enrich the knowledge that you have about how to live well in the world that you're in and you become part of a global global collaborative community that is not mediating your access to the material things you need to live through the financial markets you begin to radically increase your standard of living and your standard of well-being not through access to financial Capital but through

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/753-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [753] (OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus billion person world By Vinay Gupta, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.