# Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the Net 2015

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [755]. 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, 2015-10-10 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Automated allocation as low-cost administration.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
- 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)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Blockchain infrastructure & theory — databases, semantics, identity & trust (91%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: basic income (7 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Transparent Society (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Big Society (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); vaccines (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Ian Grigg (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Silicon Valley (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Singapore (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); smart contracts (2 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); citizens (1 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.35 (1.00 is the top), number 189 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [851] [Global governance in the era of blockchain. (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [171] [Taming Black Elephants (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/171.md); [295] [Singapore talk (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/295.md); [225] [Imogen Heap: saviour of the music industry? | Imogen... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/225.md)
- On the same works, just after: [229] [The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md); [695] [Vinay Gupta - Dangerous Old Men: cypherpunk's failure,... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/695.md); [759] [Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.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 | Computers that just work | State of the Net 2015, video, 2015-10-10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [755], https://guptaoption.com/texts/755.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=0s) okay so what I'm going to be talking about today is whether we can gu get rid of the world's third oldest profession which is bureaucrat and specifically uh the bureaucrats that handle resource allocation for our societies everybody thinks of bureaucrats as being kind of a neutral Force but I'm going to make the case that bureaucrats are in fact a very strongly negative force and the automating the bureaucratic functions inside of our society is necessary for further human progress and this is a fairly audius kind of a claim so I'm going to take it very slowly and uh we'll see whether you agree with where I'm going kind of one step at a time uh I'm also going to talk quite a lot about blockchains and Bitcoin and stuff like this so I want to start by asking uh does everybody here know roughly what Bitcoin is okay so most of you've got a rough idea Bitcoin what about blockchain is some kind of technology which is separate from Bitcoin yeah okay this one okay um so smart contract few people for smart contracts so I'll take the technical part fairly gently and uh if we get into train that nobody understands please raise your hands let me know and I'll will explain the concept but I'm going to try and make sure that but I go slowly enough that all this comes along because the thesis is radical so the delivery should be conservative so blockchain versus bureaucrat it's cropping my slides why is it doing that shouldn't matter too much okay so four topics that we're going to cover what is a blockchain what is a bureaucrat what is transparency and what are our options first topic right basically we've gone through roughly 40 Years of really fullon innovation in software 1970s we spent basically 20 years getting everybody's head around databases and what it produces is the modern organizational form that we all know in hate which is the giant Silo and the giant Silo runs everything in your Society it's your healthc care databases your education databases your government databases it's every company you deal with it's most scientific research

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=150s) projects uh it's content Management Systems you know what this looks like 1990s we come along and we spend basically 20 years cranking through uh what happens when we begin to introduce networks into the mix so the internet gets started uh the first access that I have to the internet is on a machine that has a text only screen that looks like this at about 92 or 93 using a technology called uset which to this day is still the best information delivery experience I've ever had um because uset in those days was only filled with smart people and it was a text only medium so people really worked on their language was an amazing medium but very narrow and specific the problems that we have in society are largely technology creating economics creating culture so the problem of databases talking to other databases over the network has never been adequately solved every few years there'll be another generation of proposed Solutions EDI XML EDI soap rest Ajax uh I don't know xmlrpc autonomous agents this goes round and round and round and round it never comes to real conclusion because databases were never made to interoperate each database has a model of the world embedded within it and that's the model of the world the organization that owns the database and databases store what that organization considers to be fact on the network everything that you hear on the network is basically hearsay it's gossip and so taking external stuff which is basically gossip and it's in somebody else's world model Into The Silo at the heart of your organization is basically much more like getting a brain transplant than it is like learning something because our technology is very crude so the result of this is that even in a networked Society all of your personal information is in silos and all of the silos belong to be people that won't talk to each other so it's extremely hard for you to make a change in your life and have that change propagate through your environment when you move house you have to re-enter your address in 7 and a half thousand different systems and each one of those organizations probably has 300 copies of your address and the result is this kind of endless nightmare of human beings inputting the same data over and over again into tireless machines and that's entirely a technological artifact it doesn't really kill anybody it's not necessarily

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=300s) important but it's a sign of deep underlying pervasive dysfunction so last 10 years or so there's been another wave of uh kind of rediscovery of cryptography largely around this thing called Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that underlies Bitcoin is simply a database that works like a network or a network that looks like a database and Bitcoin takes that concept and builds a single application on top of it which is a currency and it proves that the technology works it proves that it can store information securely everybody is very happy with it apart from the people that think that only central banks should be able to issue currency and you get this enormous kind of Cambrian explosion of expertise in software because enough people make enough money doing Bitcoin stuff that they can then go off and work on their own projects and one project that came about that way is the thing called ethereum which influence a thing called a smart contract and a smart contract is where we take a piece of software and we store it in a blockchain database so the blockchain ensures that everybody sees the same version of the software and because computers are predictable if every single one of us runs the same piece of software in the same environment we all get the same results and the result of that is that if you've got software inside of a blockchain and you've got a kind of predictable secure way of running the software what comes out with this is consensus about what the software does so we can take a piece of code we can all run the piece of code we can all agree on the conclusion and as a result we can perform computation that's done at a societal level rather than with an individual running the computation and then telling you what the results are and asking you to trust them so this is a very very very early implementation a of a kind of genuinely Democratic software because everybody shares in the computation everybody shares the result and you can have confidence across the whole of a society that this is what the software does and this is what the software says and that really hasn't happened before the old model is that the software runs in The Silo and the people that run The Silo tell you what the software says if the computer says no that's the end of the story in open source software this is modified a little bit if the computer says no at least you could examine the source code and find out why it said no but you still have all the issues around security and Trust about the hardware it runs on in the rest of this kind of stuff so the notion that you could have

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=450s) software that runs for the benefit of a society that the entire Society can participate in an audit this is new stuff and I think that that has gotten obscured a little bit underneath the early uh sort of press around blockchains and Bitcoin there was a lot of confusion about you know what does it all mean and how does it all fit together but you know these underlying lessons are become clearer as the stuff grows more mature now is everybody roughly with me so far okay good I just wanted to check because this blockchain stuff is really new and really complicated sometimes second topic what is a bureaucrat would anybody in the audience like to Define what a bureaucrat is for me ah so you're going to wind up with my definition which is a bureaucrat is simply an imperial collector of tax most of the cultures that have bureaucrats are cultures where the government is funded by taxation and the job of the bureaucracy is to identify who should pay how of the tax who has paid their tax who has not paid their tax and who you need to send the boys R to to get the tax off this is why I say bureaucrat is the world's third oldest profession um in theory once you've got bureaucrats that are working for democracies the bureaucracy is working for the people as a whole in practice if you have an institution which has been Imperial tax collection for 4,000 years and then you put a couple hundred years of bureaucracy on top of it not very much changes which which is why every time you deal with bureaucrats in central government or in big companies you feel like you're dealing with an Imperial uh entity rather than with something that represents your interests and there is no good bureaucracy because the organizational form of hell is the pyramid and every bureaucracy is a pyramid all that it lacks on top is an emperor and even that seems to keep coming back look at the increasingly Imperial machinations of the American presidency right this kind of structure in society never worked for the people and it was never designed to work for the people this is an old Power structure that we tried to repurpose for democracy and that in fact has never been successfully repurposed for genuinely Democratic goals reasonable maybe so once we accept that bureaucracy is the organizational form of hell and that it defines imperialism you could begin to understand that there is an incentive for tearing down the bureaucratic structures around us but we'd like to do that without also taking

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=600s) down the society because a post bureaucratic democracy might be a democracy that actually feels like a democracy rather than a democracy that feels like imperialism where you got to choose your Emperors this is the Hope anyway um the agency problem is the kind of technical economics description of this the bureau always works for the bureaucracy the um uh broker always works works for the brokerage or for their own interest finding somebody that represents your interests any kind of scale larger than the individual is extremely difficult so if you're interested in this question of who do the bureaucrats work for agency problem is where you look for the discussions of that okay now transparency there's a lot of discussion about things like open data you know transparent Democratic processes transparency in government Freedom of Information uh you know all of these kind of efforts inside of government to be more transparent but I think the transparency when you boil it right down is actually a question of jurisdiction right you can have a certain amount of secrecy inside of government to protect things like a procurement process but what you want is for the legal processes that oversee the government to be fully transparent and if you have a transparent legal system usually it gives you the ability to get the transparency in the other areas where you need it by force if necessary you can subpoena information so what is transparency law you can read opens courts where you can actually have people go in and listen to the court making its decisions um the ability to always name who makes a decision so if you've ever worked inside of uh a context where you had health insurance the health insurance people will never take personal responsibility for making decision the decision is always the system's decision and you cannot extract the name of the individual that made the choice and in theory this is about protecting these people from reprisals or it's about corporate responsibility but in practice it allows you to shuffle somebody who makes terrible decisions out of one job and into another job without anybody ever having to get fired the bureaucracy serves the bureaucrats rather than the people that it purports to serve um the other important part of this is a public discussion about what is true so in many cases you wind up in a position where there is no publicly agreed on definition of true in the areas where there's real controversy and the great mother of all of these

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=750s) problems is global warming but you can also see it around vaccines you know America has a recurrence of terrible diseases that we'd gotten rid of generations ago like uh I don't know whooping cough um because people have simply started to refuse to vaccinate their children based on a bunch of botched science and a whole bunch of kind of new age propaganda and the result of that is a terrible destruction of Public Safety um caused by what's essentially a new Superstition it's like the reinvented Witchcraft and they called it vaccination um so you need some ability in a transparent Society to have a general Ascent about what is true based on a public examination of the facts that doesn't become politically corrupted and political Corruption of science is how this is being ATT attacked right now um finally all of this does no good if you never learn anything so when things go wrong you have to have mechanisms inside of the society that don't repeat the same error endlessly and usually that means you need some kind of mechanism uh to draw conclusions like they do for inquiries after an air crash and then apply those conclusions to the society that you're operating in so you don't repeat you always have some kind of accountability so that when things go wrong you can point the way and my suggestion is that blockchain technology particularly smart contracts so software in blockchains has all of the attributes necessary to provide transparent governance you can have a piece of software it's stored in public the decision-making processes inside of the software completely transparent the people that put the software into the system are named individuals and the audit processes are also all done on a blockchain uh the public analysis of fact is in the form of a thing called an oracle which is where you take information that is not in transic inside of a computer like temperature of the ocean and you agree on the fact before it's placed in to the software uh and then finally the outputs are all visible so it's possible to go over the entire set of outputs of the system and look for what actually happened so if we have software that can Implement transparent governance the question then is what can we do with it and I have a kind of radical suggestion which is really just something to play with but I think it gives some scope of the new possibilities and if you could do this specific instance there must be 800 other things you can do which are

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=900s) smaller easier to implement or less uh controversial so my suggestion is this we could Implement basic income on a blockchain you could take a small Society or even a big society and you could decide that every citizen will have so many tokens which are issued to them every day or every month or every year by virtue of their citizenship and you could say that these are Euros but this creates a problem of financing these things so you could suggest that you're going to use some kind of electronic currency so you have a basic income unit which is issued into the society in known scarce quantities and what that unit is worth is allowed to float on the market and becomes worth whatever people decide it's worth and you can uh increase or decrease the amount issued depending on social policy decisions blockchains are ideal for this you want to identify every citizen that's entitled to payments you log them into the blockchain systems you want the parents the payment to be transparent the software issues the pay payment and everyone can see what the payment was there's no ambiguity in this uh because everybody is known to be receiving exactly the same size of payment there's no social stigma associated with the payment so having it be fully transparent might have less of a negative impact than you would get if it was say a means tested benefit and I think that this is a you know it's a jump but I really wanted to show something which is a little sci-fi just to see what we think the outcome of this is that you get transparent spending so because all the spending is done on a blockchain you can see what the stuff is spent on and at this point you have a decision to make you can require that citizens are identified on the blockchain by their name or you can protect their name and have them add uh them identified on the blockchain by a pseudonym or an alias or a randomized identity number so in one of these paths you get complete transparency about individual spending and in the other path you only get transparency about the general aggregate of spending and then there are questions about can people be de anonymized successfully the answer to that is it depends it's a complex technical question but generally this is one of these social Choice decisions where you've got to decide whether you want full transparency or not with a transparent spending database you could then do really detailed analysis of how the money from basic income is being used and I think everybody involved in

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=1050s) the basic income debate whether they're for it or against it could agree that basic income is a really uh good thing to get complete knowledge about so you take this new technology which is kind of untested at a large scale blockchains you take a set of requirements for a system to be transparent and Implement a blockchain technology that is faithful to those which is pretty much all of them but you want to be clear you need a much more detailed specification than the one that I've outlined and then you take a new social policy instrument like basic income and you implement it on top of the blockchain to give you a laboratory in which you can see exactly what's happening inside of a social Innovation to decide whether or not you want to scale it whether you want to continue it just to understand what it is and I think that there's an enormous amount of room for taking problematic areas of society and deploying these kind of lens solutions to them we're going to take this problem we're going to implement a solution that we can monitor every single aspect of we're going to run it on an experimental basis and we're going to agree all the way through what the rules of the game were to make sure that people aren't cheating in some way to make the idea look like a better idea than it is the software can be audited by all parties before you put it into the system and in this instance the code literally is the law There's no distinction between who uh implements the software and who makes the law the law and the code are one so you need to have a legal process by which the authority of the state or the authority of a corporation or you know a sort of a charity even is transferred directly into a piece of software and those mechanisms already exist you can get there through binding arbitration you can get there through what's called a reardan contract uh designed by a friend of mine called Ian Grigg there are lots of approaches to that problem but you just need to pick one and implement it does this generally sound even slightly possible yeah yeah right so I saw sat down as I was writing the slides for this thinking can it really be that easy is it is it even remotely reasonable that you could just come along and take a bunch of new social policy write a bunch of software put the software into the new social policy and then do the analysis in real time as the transactions were done and I kept looking at it like that can't be right there must be some catch it must be anti-democratic or blatantly illegal or it must give you corrupted data or something and I kept looking at it and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't a reasonable thing to suggest so here we are talking about it and if

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=1200s) anybody can tell me why it's not reasonable you know let me know come up and tell me afterwards or you know talk about it on Twitter because as far as I can tell it means that you could try basic income at a whole of society level with very little risk and very little cost and you could monitor exactly what was happening and given that half of Europe has an enormous problem with access to liquidity it seems like you could have an injection of liquidity into the societies without necessarily causing mainstream economic disruption and if it doesn't work it's fairly easy to turn off so it was it was quite surprising now what this kind of suggests is a method of government innovating because right now we're in a position where governments have ceased to innovate in fact they're all living inside of this bizarre fantasy world which is left over essentially from the end of World War II uh the state hasn't really gotten to grips with modernity in any fundamental way anytime you have a decision being made the basic structure and process that makes that decision is the same structure and process they would used after World War II things are a bit different preor War II there's much more diversity in how governments operate after World War II there's a strong consensus comes out this is pretty much how a state should be run and we kind of fall into this pattern the problem is that that pattern is very very poorly suited to exactly the kind of complex modernity uh that David Orban was talking talking about all this kind of strategy up exponential curves business you know rapid rate of change plus 400y old DE Democratic design plus bureaucracies that date back to World War II gives you this problem where the rate of change of the world massively exceeds the rate of change for democracy to be able to adapt to the world and the result is an increasing transfer of power from democratic to non-democratic institutions the only reason that the corporations wind up with such enormous power is because the government is unable to solve problems without them and basically lets them run around doing whatever they like the rest of the time so because the corporate fors can evolve rapidly because you have actual competition between forms there's this continual push and this continual acceleration and what it produces is a much better understanding of how to deliver change than you get if you're inside of a bureaucracy where your boss changes every four years using a procedure that's 400 years old and the institution does quarterly reporting but really it only measures on

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=1350s) a four-year cycle for elections you see this kind of mismatch of speeds right it's a it's a problem of tempo um so if we can develop mechanisms for leaving the existing superst structure of democracy in place but performing experiments inside of transparent subsystems it's possible that you could use blockchains and similar Technologies to build experiments at small scale with the mandated authority of the state but without going through corporate ations as the implementers so open- Source software commissioned by a government built by a university dislo deployed across a population with a social mandate behind it gives you a kind of test pool for New Concepts that can be tried in an environment where nobody can accuse anybody of hiding cards up their sleeve and that sort of notion that we're lacking an ability to test new ideas in society is behind a lot of the crazy thing that comes out of Silicon Valley so the seasteading movement by potri Friedman or the potri Freedman run initially was this idea that you could build kind of little artificial Islands out in the oceans you could stick a flag on them and declare they were Sovereign and then you could experiment with new forms of government this one will have an election every 15 minutes and your phone will do artificial intelligent voting for you this one over here will have six person you know MP groups rather than individual MPS and they'll rotate off the job this one over here will randomly select who the MPS are and they'll have a tenure which is decided randomly this one over here you'll just have sortition every four years you'll randomly select you know all of these kind of different approaches could be tried in these kind of microcosms and we could potentially find something that works better than four or five year electoral democracy but the problem with this is the assumption that you need to be able to take territory have sovereignty get land and all the rest of this makes it incredibly difficult to get these kind of experiments and governance going and who watches the Watchman what do you do when one of these things turns into a total disaster are these people going to then go back to their original nation states and beg for help you know you can imagine these projects if they go down the humanitarian Fallout could be quite substantial because you'd have a crash of governance in a micro you know a tiny little all on society and I don't like the smell of that at all I mean I'm quite I'd love to see the experiment tried but I think it's quite risky and we certainly can't solve problems quickly if we have to establish a new nation every time we want to try an

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMCPTX806ns&t=1500s) experiment so what I quite like is this idea that we could do lots of experimental stuff inside of the body of democracy by using transparency technology to drisk experiments in government and the notion that these blockchain Technologies are a fundamental transparency breakthrough and that you can push forward with that set of schemes to try these experiments in all kinds of different places and for all kinds of different things with the ability to document exactly what happened for future Generations seems like a really sound and sensible way to do experiments in governance and you don't really hear experimental governance all that often but it's clear that we need it because the existing systems don't work we all know that I mean does anybody live in a country where they feel like their government really works right I went to Singapore their government really works I mean it's it's incredibly efficient but they basically run the entire Island like a single Corporation and private Enterprise complains that they can't get enough Talent into private companies because all the smart people work for the government and they just hire them right at University and give them a job for life and it seems very unlikely that we're going to succeed in changing our Societies in that way and we probably wouldn't like it even if we did so we have to get better at learning inside of democracy and my suggestion is that blockchain technology is an inherently useful part of learning inside of democracies it came from the Libertarians it was dressed up in some very weird clothes when it arrives but if you get a you know a good solid chance to look at it and talk to it and get some sense of what's going on under the hood I think it's pretty clear that it's simply about transparency and transparency is a technology that or a methodology that can be pulled out of any political setting and reapplied everywhere else because the truth is only one right when you get right down to the fundamentals a transparent system is the same for everybody that uses it and there's no reason that that should be identified with libertarian or any other kind of politics it's something that people of any political persuasion can apply so that's by basic thesis I think the blockchains are good for democracy and I think that if we use them wisely inside of government it will give us an opportunity to do social experimentation in governance in fact just experimental governance in a way that is largely de-risked and politically neutral because of the transparency aspect uh I will also go on to some kind of sub topics after this but that is the main talk thank you

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End of [755] Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the Net 2015. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [229](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md) The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015); the most closely related, [864](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.