{"id":30,"date":"2017-01-05T03:23:54","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T03:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/?p=30"},"modified":"2023-10-07T00:51:35","modified_gmt":"2023-10-06T15:51:35","slug":"dark-mountain-first-issue-3__trashed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/?p=30","title":{"rendered":"Dark Mountain – First Issue (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cBlack Elephants and Skull Jackets<\/strong>\u201d documents Dougald Hine\u2019s no-holds-barred conversation with Vinay Gupta. The two met in a Mayfair squat, as faculty members of the Temporary School of Thought, \u201ca free university where anyone can pitch up and offer classes,\u201d which was about to be held in said squat for three weeks (among the lectures they presented: \u201cDeschooling Everything,\u201d \u201cEconomic Chemotherapy,\u201d \u201cInfrastructure for Anarchists,\u201d and \u201cAvoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion\u201d \u2014 audio and notes here<\/a>). Hine and Gupta later went on to co-found the Institute for Collapsonomics<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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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<\/a>, and designed a highly convenient and cost-effective refugee shelter called the Hexayurt<\/a>: inspired by Buckminster Fuller\u2019s famous geodesic domes<\/a>, this shelter has already been extensively used<\/a> at the Burning Man festival, but Gupta is actively campaigning for international organisations to make it a feature of long-term\/permanent refugee camps \u2014 particularly to address the needs of those who cannot go home any time soon. These days, this \u201cglobal resilience guru<\/a>\u201d who started off as a software engineer also works for the Ethereum Foundation<\/a>, and designed a (rather puzzling) \u201cmeditation app<\/a>\u201d for cellphones — being interested in matters of spiritual enlightenment. He speaks with a heavy Scottish accent.<\/span><\/p>\n

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) \u2014 which according to him, means that \u201cwe\u2019re 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.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

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“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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He also sees the Hexayurt as being a solution not only adapted to refugees from \u201cpoor\u201d countries, but also to people displaced from much wealthier countries in cases of natural or man-made emergencies \u2014 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 \u2014 a model he developed under the name \u201cSix Ways to Die<\/a>\u201d, which I already mentioned in passing in a previous post<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

At the heart of his approach is the idea that everyone is sure to die, sooner or later, and therefore nobody can \u201csave\u201d anybody (and the same applies to the planet as a whole). Rather, what can be done is try and improve other people\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“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\u2019re too poor to consume much carbon. They eat all organic produce because they can\u2019t 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 \u2013 and I\u2019ll show you what that\u2019s like in a moment \u2013 you start to get clear\u00a0<\/span>about limitation. … The kind of suffering we are afraid of coming from climate collapse is the ordinary condition of half of the human race.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After reading this interview, I looked up Vinay Gupta online, and found a wealth of information; the man appears in countless videos<\/a>, articles<\/a> and podcasts<\/a>, and has launched (if not always carried through) a multitude of projects<\/a>. 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<\/a> interview for a few examples of stimulating lateral thinking \u2014 including ideas on how to turn refugee camps into global universities, or on settling the Australian outback thanks to solar panels and sea desalination.<\/span><\/p>\n

More on him all over the interweb.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBlack Elephants and Skull Jackets\u201d documents Dougald Hine\u2019s no-holds-barred conversation with Vinay Gupta. The two met in a Mayfair squat, as faculty members of the Temporary School of Thought, \u201ca free university where anyone can pitch up and offer classes,\u201d which was about to be held in said squat for three weeks (among the lectures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,3,2],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wazabizapto.org\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}