Meaning: Vinay Gupta on the perils and possibilities of the future

*Catching up on my liveblogged notes from last week’s Meaning Conference – I ran out of laptop battery, so couldn’t post them at the time. *

What does that have to do with Hexayurts?  They’re built from standard industrial manufacturing sizes of materials – sheets and half sheets. If the hippies had had these things they would have won. Burning Man is covered with them. In year 10, it’s starting to acquire exponential momentum.

Our houses are three things: accommodation, storage of wealth and investment. Right now – accommodation is well met, storage of wealth and investment are ruined, because prices are going down. If we build millions of new homes, you can drive prices down so far that everything changes. Mortgages go away. Ireland has 200,000 empty units. The over-build is gigantic and we won’t let the housing prices drop, because no-one wants to admit that the houses aren’t worth what they once were. The market is totally illiquid. Abundance breaks the financial system.

Economists get a bad rep, but there are some good new ones. The new economists:

• Coase – companies are efficient pockets of command-and-control within market chaos. But that only holds for some costs of decision making.
• Nash – it’s possible that everyone can get stuck in a situation which will destroy all of them, because the costs to the individual of changing the situation are too high – you need co-ordinated action from all – the goat rodeo.
• Benkler – new kinds of value creation exist in an abundant information, cheap communioncatin world. It appears commons based per production works bett than capitalism.

Valve is apparently the most profitable company per employee in the world. They mythology is that you pick and choose your projects in the company. It has no internal coercive structure. If you drive out fear, you get good quality communication. Hierarchy create fear which reduces productivity. The boss of Valve can’t get his own games made – but the people who work for him make him $300,000 a year. The pyramid doesn’t work in this environment. It’s an internal anarchy.

Hexayurt is not a business. There’s no bank account. There’s just a domain name. Yet, it’s the most efficient shelter in the world, and its growing exponentially.

Windows is a corporate ecosystem, and is full of evil midgets – the crapware. Apple is a benign dictatorship – unles you’re the app developer who gets kicked out of the store. Linux is structured like the Goth tribes that sacked Rome. The secret to Open Source success is looking like you can finish it on your own. They’ve sacked the server market and haven’t quite done the same with desktop. Apple has put a thin level of dictatorship on top of Open Source BSD and sacked Microsoft, but you can’t contain the anarchy.

The three futures:

• Cheap energy, cheap information
• Resource scarcity and war – the classic bleak future
• Decentralise (Naxalites) – a machete version of capitalism

Fear of the nuclear bomb stopped us thinking rationally. It might all work as long as we can get the nanotechnology or biotech risk under control. Stop anyone making an open source 3D printer for genes…

We could end up in a world where the largest functional organisation is 24 people for 4.5 months. Could happen. To survive, we need one planet consumption and no apocalypse technology.

They did a book: The Future We Deserve. Sourced on Twitter, two weeks to edit. Go.