“Black Elephants and Skull Jackets” documents Dougald Hine’s no-holds-barred conversation with Vinay Gupta. The two met in a Mayfair squat, as faculty members of the Temporary School of Thought, “a free university where anyone can pitch up and offer classes,” which was about to be held in said squat for three weeks (among the lectures they presented: “Deschooling Everything,” “Economic Chemotherapy,” “Infrastructure for Anarchists,” and “Avoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion” — audio and notes here). Hine and Gupta later went on to co-found the Institute for Collapsonomics.
Among various endeavours, the hyperactive Gupta has notably worked on research projects for the Pentagon (focusing on disaster relief), was on the editorial team of several books, and designed a highly convenient and cost-effective refugee shelter called the Hexayurt: inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s famous geodesic domes, this shelter has already been extensively used at the Burning Man festival, but Gupta is actively campaigning for international organisations to make it a feature of long-term/permanent refugee camps — particularly to address the needs of those who cannot go home any time soon. These days, this “global resilience guru” who started off as a software engineer also works for the Ethereum Foundation, and designed a (rather puzzling) “meditation app” for cellphones — being interested in matters of spiritual enlightenment. He speaks with a heavy Scottish accent.
One of the key topics of his conversation with Hine is, naturally enough, that of global poverty, which Gupta has long been focused on. He points out the forces at play in globalisation nowadays that tend to transfer much of the global wealth from the middle classes of the post-colonial empires and into the pockets of people in other parts of the world (with some degree of retributive justice) — which according to him, means that “we’re all headed, on average, for a lifestyle about where Mexico is today, and possibly a good deal worse if climate or other factors really start to bite.”
“Europeans and Americans are soon going to live in the same world as everybody else: the world in which you do not have everything you want, and sometimes you do not have enough. That is coming because the plenty we took for granted was based on the absurd political power imbalances that gunpowder and mechanised war brought us, when only we controlled them. As military force runs out as an option, and industrial production becomes available to everybody, America and Europe lose the economic advantages which came with being in control of the majority of resources of the globe.
In the future, all of us on Planet Earth are going to be dealing with the fact that there are seven billion of us. In the future, you do not get a jacuzzi. Not unless you are very, very lucky and are one of the rich, or unless your jacuzzi runs on abundant resources, not scarce ones.”
He also sees the Hexayurt as being a solution not only adapted to refugees from “poor” countries, but also to people displaced from much wealthier countries in cases of natural or man-made emergencies — in sum, a solution for enhanced local/personal resilience. (Gupta has done a lot of work on the systems that prevent people, on a day to day basis, from encountering an untimely demise — a model he developed under the name “Six Ways to Die”, which I already mentioned in passing in a previous post)
At the heart of his approach is the idea that everyone is sure to die, sooner or later, and therefore nobody can “save” anybody (and the same applies to the planet as a whole). Rather, what can be done is try and improve other people’s lives so that they be a little longer and less miserable. But this requires taking a hard look at the mainstream way of living in industrialised countries, which cannot possibly sustain itself or be extended to billions of other human beings. In a word, a slightly less miserable world requires the acceptance of the loss of these standards of living, if we are to show solidarity with the rest of the world.
“A simple humanism gets you most of the way: think about poverty first. The poor are already living without all these things we are afraid of losing. They’re too poor to consume much carbon. They eat all organic produce because they can’t afford fertiliser. We are afraid of becoming them, if we trash the planet with our insane greed and the standard of living that comes with it. So when you start to get clear about poverty – and I’ll show you what that’s like in a moment – you start to get clear about limitation. … The kind of suffering we are afraid of coming from climate collapse is the ordinary condition of half of the human race.”
After reading this interview, I looked up Vinay Gupta online, and found a wealth of information; the man appears in countless videos, articles and podcasts, and has launched (if not always carried through) a multitude of projects. Although he sometimes seems overly gleeful in his contemplation of possible cataclysms, and perhaps a little self-important in his avowed mission to save mankind, I do find him to be a very imaginative and inspiring figure. His curiosity seems to span all disciplines: see this VICE interview for a few examples of stimulating lateral thinking — including ideas on how to turn refugee camps into global universities, or on settling the Australian outback thanks to solar panels and sea desalination.
More on him all over the interweb.