# FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 2/4 - "Survival & Politics" > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [763]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2016-08-29 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo. 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): Political economy behind green capitalism. - Career works it belongs to: - Leashless (2009): Manifesto on property and freedom: nobody with unmet needs is free, the Earth owns itself, and land should... - On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia (2012): Blog essay taking apart the cypherpunk dream of a code-made society, and sketching the few cryptographic... - Copyright and the digital economy: a case for reason (2010): Short paper proposing land law, with rights of way and trespass, as a better model for copying than theft:... (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) - 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) - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (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. - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: meditation / lineage / spiritual (22%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (17%); Climate politics & democracy (17%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: The DAO (5 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); DAO (5 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Barlow (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); The Perimeter (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); Guardian (1 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); dispute resolution (2 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); markets (6 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated); political change (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); skills (2 here; 67 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); venture capital (1 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2002) - Importance: core-text score 0.31 (1.00 is the top), number 232 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [322] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md): same career work: On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia - [81] [On the ethics (and pragmatics) of cryptography | The... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/81.md): same career work: On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia - On the same works, just before: [734] [Blockchain: Beyond Bitcoin by Vinay Gupta @leashless... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/734.md); [719] [Cyberpunk to blockchains: Cultural history of... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/719.md); [7] [Capital Partners transcript, August 2016 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/7.md) - On the same works, just after: [679] [FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 4/4 - "Cypherpunk to Cyberpunk" (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/679.md); [276] [Dubai trip notes September 2016 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/276.md); [273] [2 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/273.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: FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 2/4 - "Survival & Politics", video, 2016-08-29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [763], https://guptaoption.com/texts/763.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=0s) you have changed your attitude toward capitalism recently kind of uh go into that a little bit with you you wrote on redit that uh you have to make capitalism work this sickens me considerably but I'm holding my nose and going for it on Twitter you said uh capitalism is coercion because passive property is murder and markets and terrorism are both violence are the statements hyperbolic or literal like what did you mean can you go well look 20 million people are going to die this year of poverty 20 million that's the same number that Hitler killed in the entire Holocaust process right 6 million Jews uh gypsies cripples schizophrenics gay people Freemasons political opponents 20 million people every year in a world which produces twice the number of calories that we need to feed the entire human race two or three million people will die of starvation 20 million people will die of things like lack of vaccinations dirty indoor air because they're cooking on three stone fires we're in a position where the right of the rich to say Rich the right of the middle class to say middle class is directly producing abundant death if these people had the right to Simply walked into our cities and take what they needed to survive we wouldn't have 20 million deaths a year for poverty uh that the connection between capitalism and and and the poverty yes it's very very simple right when you set up a system of property rights where it is legal for somebody to starve to death but illegal for them to steal food the system of law that you have is producing death so that's the system of law but what does that have to do with capitalism property rights capitalism is [1:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=111s) rooted in strong property rights property rights are rooted in the existence of the state so capitalism uh is impossible without the state you you can't separate markets from governance markets and governance are single processes there are no markets without governance there's no governance you know there's no way to separate the market from the governance so even in the case of black markets the governments is trying to get in there and and do stuff and it's still mafas right Mafia okay that's type of governments right yeah governance not government right right yeah soon as two people try and make an agreement right if something goes wrong they either fight with each other or they say [ __ ] it and walk away from the deal or they go to a third party for dispute resolution and if that third party is doing most of the dispute resolution for most of the people they become essentially a government right right and or at least they become governance of a kind that is indispensable most of the places you look historically you know these big Market places the bazaars are taxed and the tax is used to pay the soldiers to protect the bizar there's 's never really been large-scale Market activity without something resembling the state to support it and to to all intensive purposes the free market is the product of the state even even any time in history um I mean um I don't know neic or there's always going to be a weird counter example here or there okay but most of the historical evidence as I understand it is that states create markets the need to protect the people who are trading turns into the ability to raise taxes to pay for the protection turns into somebody who makes a decision about what is right and wrong so how do we um so you know there's these people [3:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=215s) that call themselves anarco capitalists which in this instance would be considered an oxyon so how but but it's kind of an ideal maybe so uh no not for me look you know well look the the problem with anarco capitalism is defining property right your version of anarco capitalism assumes that songs can be copyrighted no well that I don't know about that well let's Pro let's say as an example right well I don't think that's a good example because very few Narco capitalists believe in intellectual property so maybe different yeah but plenty of them do right oh God they're idiots well they may be idiots let's just take this as an example right so you've got your idiotic anarch capitalists who believe in copyright right who meet a bunch of anarch capitalists that don't believe in land ownership right we believe that land should be uh you know is is obviously just like air we don't talk about air ownership you know we've got these enormous Buffalo ranges where the buffalo go backwards and forwards freely and then we hunt the Buffalo that cross in the places where we happen to be that year and your idea that land can be owned is absurd as their idea that music can be owned right so when you get two different systems of property rights meeting each other what you get is a bunch of anarco capitalists waving bones in the air and arguing why they're culturally constructed form of property is actually natural law and as soon as you question the existence of absolute land tenure as being an integral human right the entire system of Anarcho capitalism Falls to Pieces because we can't Define property well enough to Define what come to what constitutes non-aggression right I think it does come come down to non-aggression and but I think there's the scarcity of course at at the root of of property where um that's an essential difference between say land and intellectual property but no no let's no let's drill down on this a little more carefully this is super important right so when you've got two groups of people that both call themselves capitalists meeting from two different cultures yeah the problem is figuring out how property is defined right because there's a whole bunch of weird weird weird Voodoo in everybody's definition of property for example water rights in the eastern US and the Western us operate on a completely different legal basis right resulting in different people getting their land destroyed by drought depending on which kind side of the W Rockies you're on basically right so same thing with land rights UK has this weird system of leas hold and freeold it's crackpot it's left over [6:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=365s) from the feudal era but it's completely baked into our Lander system you go to America the separation of land from Minal rights huge weirdness around that so whenever you get two different groups that construe property in different ways meeting trade is impossible because they can't agree what it is that is being traded and how and the Machinery necessary to make that agreement uniform turns into deao state right right I mean I agree with that completely and there's no way of objectively defining what property is or what property rights should be because every culture in the world has a different story about that stuff what about fantasy in the Anarcho capitalist world that we could come to a single common universally agreed on Intercultural agreement about what property is and that's just not true um there's you know some relatively Hardline Anarchist thinkers such as Jeffrey Tucker I don't know if you're familiar with him um he he definitely uh said explicitly that he believed property was only that which somebody could defend themselves yep and so that would be a somewhat decentralized view of property but of course it's kind of a warlord um you know Road Warrior is if you really take it to the extreme so is that work toward that would work that maybe work through conventions no you undoable no well the reason it's undoable is as soon as you've got groups of people that disagree about what property is they can't trade without one side or the other side feeling like theft is occurring and the process of negotiating a single Universal Property standard for the entire world is just as bad as negotiating a single universal language for the entire world so when aarco capitalists say you know well we've got this system of property rights and it's going to work for the entire future of humanity it's like saying well what first what we got to do is teach all of the natives English and once they can all speak English properly and they understand all of her words then they'll agree with all of our ideas right the anarcho capitalists have no way of dealing with cultures that construe property differently because when two cultures meet with different ways of construing property trade is almost impossible it tends to turn into violence because both sides assume that theft is happening so until you've got some kind of protocol per two PE groups of people can meet and agree how property will be defined for their interaction it's extremely difficult to get anywhere and when I raise this kind of discussion with the Narco capitalists B and War [8:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=515s) what happens is a whole bunch of drawing about how actually absolute land tenure is obviously what animals do in nature and therefore is correct and all of the different examples of land rights from around the world that other human cultures have practiced get steamrolled in this completely racist imperialist way they're uninterested in understanding that the rest of the world manages land differently from Western Europeans and as a result they go out in this completely unconsciously racist way talking about how Western European land rights constitute good governance of property don't where to begin with these people so vene do you think that technology could be of any assistance in uh in creating some sort of uh decentralized trading Paradigm for property management well so let's start with big [9:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=566s) objective goals right big objective goals human doesn't kill itself with technology right I mean we ought to start with the idea that not killing our own species is a fundamental output that is necessary for all political work if it's not going to Keep Us Alive it's not worth doing right so that means any kind of system politics we're talking about has to put climate right at the top of the list H it's got to deal with nuclear weapons it's got to deal with nanotech risk it's got to deal with biotech risk and if we're not dealing with those things we've also ought to be factoring in things like asteroid scanning if we're not factoring those things into our political thought it's not that we're wrong it's that we're irrelevant it doesn't matter whether we succeed or whether we fail we might still all get wiped out by our own stupidity so I don't think it particularly matters what systems we use for managing trade right high taxes low taxes you know rightwing to the point of being practically fascist left wing to being practically communist if it's all running on carbon I don't think any of these systems have a better chance of survival than any of the others the differences between all of these political Ops are extremely small when compared to survival oriented politics or uh survival careless politics and almost the entire political spectrum is made up of survival careless politics it's a whole bunch of people yapping about whatever their local priorities are and acting as if this is the highest goal of all political thought while we are shoving the entire Ros of all life that we are aware of in the entire universe off a cliff made entirely of handbags right you knows we're destroying the world for an enormous pile of consumer goods um need any of this crap so how do we how do we use this comes back to the precautionary principle right how do we use it to determine the correct course I mean you know for example in the climate debate there is a lot of information out there and I I personally don't think that anyone really knows what's happening in that now with replicator tech the risks are very clear with with climate we're just really really guessing here we don't have enough Firepower on you know in our CPUs to be able to really actually model every atom and until we do we're you know Running on Fumes here we're we're kind of guessing and the [11:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=716s) scientific consensus turns over so fast it's incredible so I ne don't necessarily think we're going to be warming cooling I think we don't know so how do we move forward with that lack of conclusion well so let's talk about [12:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=731s) processes first right I think the problem is that we've got essentially a Marxist perspective on everything let me explain what I mean by that so Marx decides that the conflict between rich and poor class war is the core of politics and that idea that class war is the core of politics that all politics is about resolving conflicts between the classes in one way or another has pervaded the entire Western political landscape to the exclusion of all other principles the Libertarians are a tiny little cordiner saying no no it's not about class war it's about freedom and you could say there are a few anarchists over there but generally speaking the entire political space is constrained by the idea of the politics is about class war after the invention of the nuclear weapon class war became IR elephant the real politics was about survival or death but we've never really managed to break free of crossw War politics and say look the real politics is survival or death I am in the Survival Camp what about you so if we had large scale political movements that said the first job of all political work is to make sure that the human race survives it would be nice if most of the animals around us survive too because I don't think we can live without them what is bad for them will eventually be bad for us so let's just protect nature as a whole let's also start thinking seriously about things like managing the asteroid risk because we've got the capability to do it let's think about managing the technology risk because these things are really dangerous and we should be doing them next to our life right if you had a large scale political movement towards life-based politics right this is the politics of survival we're going to make sure the human race survives that's our number one job after that we're going to deal with the rest of these problems I think if you saw that we could you know a large scale movement based around that kind of principles could very easily break the entire culture out of the Marxist dialectic and I think the Libertarians have shown that you could get very large scale political change simply by sticking to your principles and if I could figure out the rest of that political platform in some kind of coherent way I might be well and give it a push but I'm not there yet I need a bit more time to get my head together on this and I'm sort of hoping that somebody will get there first and I can just follow that' be right PR is good but PR is prenuclear I mean okay it was cooked in the 1970s but it was cooked in the 1970s without an explicitly survival orientation you know it's still largely [14:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=881s) now this is where the limits of knowledge on PR may be important so there may be a boot by Anand merti which is basically like oh yeah and here's everything I think about nukes and I just haven't read it but um the prank material I've been exposed to does not start with by the way the entire planet is in danger from human stupidity maybe we should do something about this how do we get from here to survival-based politics is that what you're still figure out I mean you know this is the first time that the word survival-based politics has come out of my mouth so maybe that's a beginning right thought for a long time but I've never found the words for it so you know maybe that's a start right I'm looking forward to my footnote in history W well I mean maybe you'll figure out the rest of the platform and go forth and Conquer cool man I'll let you know something interesting that you've said recently um that I thought really hadn't been elucidated publicly was uh you were TW tweeting about the prevalence of mild autism in the information technology community and its effect on society via the work they do is this a uh is it a Revenge of the Nerds and what is its importance well I so I don't think it's [15:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=947s) revenge on the nerd I mean first thing is we all know that computer programming tends to Brak out whatever autistic traits people have already right even neurotypical people after three or four weeks staring at compile our messages begin to act like autistic people right you know so whatever it is you know I don't know whether the initial consciouses that came up with Computing were extremely autistic like for example I don't know whether vman had autism but there seems to be such a tight link between Autism and computers that it's just it's just there that's what we're dealing with so I mean I know myself right I went back I've largely been dealing with human beings in English for about 10 years three or four years ago I spent six months doing a full stack programming gig because I had an idea that I wanted to do a prototype of and I thought how hard can it be within a month I'd was all of my social skills and it took weeks of not writing code every day for that stuff to come back again yeah it's almost it's almost like software itself is like a concrescence of the autistic uh angle of humanity yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely right so I mean you know I'm joking we talk about this as being the rise of the nerd right that we're winding up in a position where autistic people are the only people that can understand the tools that they've created and these tools are what run the rest of society so we're winding up with an enormously bias towards artistic values say that again en normally biased we're winding up with an enormous bias towards artistic values in ways that may cause people an Norful lot of trouble in the long room hasn't this just been going on for a long time I mean the first bone that was used to crush uh you know a turtle shell you know that could have I wouldn't be surprised if that was an autistic guy who was just you know thinking it through 70,000 years ago um certainly could be but I think there's no denying that computer programming has given autistic people an enormous route to success and power you know it's way easier for autistic people to get ahead of the world than it was they're getting preferentially hired by a lot of organizations you know it's pretty well understood in tech companies like ah the force is strug in this one right right and you know that this person will be fantastic at their job um because they've got you know they've got The Knack right it's like you you can just tell this guy's going to be a really good programmer how can you tell well there's a certain flatness of AFF voices and everybody knows that implicitly what you're discussing is [18:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1097s) this guy is really kind of nerdy which is a code phrase for this guy is somewhere on the autism spectrum um so the idea that you know the artists might be the first group where what was previously considered to be a disability winds up being socially converted to a superpower I think that's really interesting like we are not used to the idea of disabled people ruling and governing because their disability turns out to be enormously socially productive and Powerful uh and I would love to see for example how the identity politics people deal with that you know how do you figure out a politics of identity or an intersectionality where a group that was previously stigmatized uh and you know punished for their neurological makeup become lionized and become Heroes because of it it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next 10 or 20 years but I think that we've got to face the fact that we're dealing with a population that was previously considered to be disabled and are still disabled in many ways but are also turning out to be you know super empowered relative to the jobs of doing a technology and you know I really feel like the neurotypical you know folks need to start really thinking about Okay so we agree that the autistic folks are incredibly good at building the technology that we use and you know I don't want to be fetishistic about this right it's not that all autistic people are great programmers it's not all great programmers are artistic it's that there is a huge overlap between the two areas that we all know about that we don't talk about very much so I wonder whether what happens over time is that we wind up having to build corrective mechanisms where we can explain to these folks okay look so here are 250 neurologically typical people that have looked at the system that youve built and here are three things you need to add to it before it causes us no pain and it becomes like you know what happens when your lead graphic designer happens to be color blank right you have somebody check every time the work goes out that it makes sense and things like that happen right you know we we're used to working around the limitations of other people's sensoria and I think that we might discover that in the long run learning how to build systems which compensate for the weaknesses that sometimes go with autism turns out to be a really important part of our political culture because if we're going to have large scale infrastructure which is built by people who have autism or is built by teams in which autism is prevalent you're going to discover that there are gaps that neural people would call so I think it's very much about partnership how do we make sure that we balance [20:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1247s) these teams in such a way that we get the best of all worlds and that applies to other kind of um uh nonot typical standard you know types as well for example gchq apparently preferentially hor dyslexics because they're really good at organizing information wow yeah I I was I read it [21:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1264s) the guardian right but you know apparently this is so and it kind of makes a bunch of sense I had somebody this is so good so I met with a lawyer recently right and Midway through the conversation the lawyer points out that I'm dis graphic and I'm like how did you know and he's like it's the way that you use models to structure reality I'm like and you know it it was just it was amazing like I I'd be totally busted oh my God and you know I don't know very many people with dis graphia so the idea that we all basically build models because we can't work with language properly it's amazing like this is really cool disg graphia is when you have difficulty writing is that correct yeah it's basically like output stage dyslexia um but dyslexia generally speaking is pretty constant over a lifetime just graphia lots and lots people with dis graphia get most of their function back between 16 and 25 so I got back basically everything except the ability to drive which is really inconvenient oh man wow I can't J I can't judge distances properly when I'm in motion oh wow it's a really subtle neurological glitch it damned near caused the car accident when I was learning a drive and after that it was like oh I can't do this so no fighter pilot vet well I mean you know as long as I can do it with one eye closed maybe I don't have to judge distances yeah well my dream is to get an anti-gravity uh UFO so maybe we'll uh we'll fly around in that I'll give you a shot at the controls self-driving cars right oh yeah that solves your problem oh so I cannot wait to not be disabled right the idea that I could just get into a self-driving car just like everybody else gets into a self-driving car and I could say see that mountain toop over there take me as close to there as you could get and you can just drive into the Backwoods in a in a self-driving car oh my God I can't imagine how much I want this to be true yeah I can I can definitely imagine you know that comes back to the uh to this idea of people who have disabilities you know being able to Leverage The their other skills in society you're a perfect example somebody with extreme disg graphia and uh other problems you know you levered your other abilities in a really great way yeah I fortunately most of my neurological [ __ ] came to get there as I got older and I'm I'm pretty convinced that video games got me over the first hump and meditation got me over the second the magic of video games Tai Chi as well but yeah dyspraxia and video games there's a huge relationship [23:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1414s) lots of kids are dyspraxic they're not properly coordinated you stick them in front of video games you know come back three years later and they're like doing card tricks with two hands um so you know there's a huge healing effect in video games mom uh and uh you know taii just speaks for itself right if you've got any kind of movement disorder you know if anything is going to help taii is well off the list of things to try yeah ta Chi helped me a lot too in my teens uh a little bit I was not a natural athlete never have been a little bit Clum slightly clumsy and Tai Chi made me way other side yeah yeah yeah it's amazing it really is that thing where like you've been D taii for a few years and the first time you knock something off a table and catch it on the way down I don't know if I got to that level but uh certainly helped my dancing ah interesting I have a friend whose mother has been like way into taii quite late in life and apparently she did the kind of drop cash thing at some point at a family dinner and every was like whoa It's just fantastic speaking of superpowers right well I mean you know the uh what's the limit on what a human being can do you watch people doing stuff at the Olympics and it's like this is incredible yeah and the mind too with memory tricks Darren Brown is a very extremely entertaining guy he's a very total master of reading Mind Tricks and everything like that yeah and you know [25:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1503s) we're not really good at producing Excellence as culture you know we don't have good mechanisms for supporting people to go and push those kind of limits or find new limits you know you know imagine if it's was possible to get like a 100,000 Euro grant that says okay so I'm not going to go to college but I'm going to learn just how far it's possible to throw a ball you know or I'm going to learn you know exact how far it's possible to go playing the violin with one hand and drumming with the other yeah I think we're going to see some development in that area with crowdfunding as crowdfunding up interesting because I just feel like you know we haven't made an attempt sorry this just kind of hit me now it's kind of like we haven't actually made a disciplined attempt to map the perimeter of human capability I don't think it exists I don't think there is a perimeter that's kind it'd be nice to look for it fail to find it that's the idea right for everybody you know like we've got the Olympics we've got kind of math olympiads and there are lots of things where we've got competitive Frameworks where people are fighting against each other to be the best at something but I don't think we've got a mechanism for finding new somethings for people to go and try and be the best at well I mean in this book right there yeah I wonder wonder it almost makes me feel like it' be nice if we had an ontology for mapping human capability and then we could go out there and systematically search for like okay so you know we've got Sports to exercise every muscle group except the little finger little finger bench press Olympics or something and you know we could just go and figure out all the places like okay so color matching right there's no color matching Olympics no no I tried I tried to do that like four years ago and I just couldn't get any any listeners and that was my big Capital project and uh nobody was into it I I should have talked to you frontiers of human perception that's right yeah no I'm joking I'm J okay okay I wondered for a minute I was imagining in my head that you had a some kind of Doom startup yeah color matching. color matching is a skill that could be trained for say graphic designers or artists no just BS but it's amazingly trainable right I mean color matching like perfect piit is really hard to train but color matching is really drainable um in fact I've often wanted to do you know they have captures right also wanted to do a gender based capture which just shows you a bunch of colors you have to name [27:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1653s) them if the answer is blue blue blue blue it's like male Aqua tur female right yeah um that's well well we'll be talking about that uh you know for your new capital um you know Venture Capital company but we'll get to that a little bit later there's a few more things I'd like to discuss in the meantime cool Co cool so coming back to um social versus technology you once said that currently social cohesion is more important to develop than more sophisticated cryptography can you describe the relationship between social cohesion and cryptography all right so um once upon a [28:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1700s) time there was a dream called you know crypto Anarchy you know crypto capital anarco capitalism whatever you want to call it right the idea was that you're going to have a bunch of anonymous cryptocurrencies with smart contracts and that you could build a completely free trade environment with these tools um what we have seen from the DAO is that people are just dumb right you know the people that were piling into the DAO when the DAO was worth $130 million knew that they were taking enormous irrational risks they knew that the DAO was an amazing Target for hacks they knew that the team standing behind the DAO had never anticipated it getting it this big but once you wind up with this thing of last chance to get your door people behave irrationally it's her behavior it's exactly like yelling fire in a crowded theater you're stamping on an evolutionary buttton that people have no control over and it's in the same class of activity as providing addictive drugs you know there's a really fundamental problem with offering people what looks like money for nothing because they're biologically compelled to take it and as a result it seems like we're in a position where if we build anarco capitalism in those kind of forms and I Have Nothing by the way against the idea of limited anarco capitalism in areas where you've got non uh scarce non-rival RIS Goods so for example I think you could have a perfectly healthy an Anarcho capitalist market for digital art right because you don't hit any of the hard property rights problems that make it incredibly difficult to operate Anarcho capitalism in the real physical world you know you don't have a point for two people are having a contest over an interpretation because it's in the code the goods that are being exchanged are pure digital so there's no scarcity you know you can set arbitrary pricing by mechanisms you know it's not that anarcho capitalism can never work for anything but as a general theory you get terrible problems in culturally specific definitions of land and because the land is older than the Anarcho capitalism you wind up with terrible problems grandfathering it in if you establish Anarcho capitalist rule set and then create property like software within that rule set I don't see any reason that should cause anybody any problems so that is a that's a very specific point so the social cohesion problem is how do we get large scale agreement about the kind of templates that we want to use you know if I'm in a position where I'm an early bitcoiner there's large scale agreement that what we're going to have here is a Libertarian currency and the biggest diversity you [30:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrD87vYYLo&t=1850s) get is you get the Libertarians versus the anarch capitalists who are talking about in the long run do we overthrow the state or not rough paraphrase so if we had large scale social cohesion so that we could make really compelling demands to the government about say bicycle Lanes or ending carbon emissions from cars or bloody hell let's get together and go to Mars and you know some space probes of Barlow and Tor and could we please just get the space thing going if we could build really large scale pressure groups of how applied pressure raised funds Ram movements then there's an enormous amount of stuff that we could get done in the world and everything would progress in a very different direction but right now we just are having no luck at all getting that kind of work done and as a result things are very very for granted and they're very very drifty --- End of [763] FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 2/4 - "Survival & Politics". Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [679](https://guptaoption.com/texts/679.md) FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 4/4 - "Cypherpunk to Cyberpunk" (2016); the most closely related, [322](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md) Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.