Joe Banks in Vice: Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy.
The last time I interviewed him for VICE, nine years ago, the article was headlined ‘The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It.’ Gupta was described as a “software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, and visionary.” It’s less a career than a vocation—one that reflects a life spent joining together all the scattered dots of where human civilization is now, in order to eliminate the threats that menace its future.
Gupta was part of the original ‘Cypherpunk‘ generation that shaped the utopian early days of the internet in the 1990s. But as well as being a long-established figure in computing, he has a broader history of applying his problem-solving engineer’s mindset to the issues of a sustainable human presence on Earth.
Nuclear war. Resource scarcity. Climate change. AI. Network states. Space travel. In his work as a “global resilience guru” for the US government, the Red Cross, and various think tanks, universities, and institutes, Gupta has run the worst-case scenarios on these and other nightmares you haven’t even dreamt of yet, in order to stop the future destroying us.
Along the way, he’s invented the Hexayurt—a cheap, easy-to-build temporary shelter that could house millions of refugees at short notice—and coordinated the launch of Ethereum, the blockchain platform whose cryptocurrency Ether is now the second largest in the world. Today, he runs Mattereum, a company he co-founded to apply galaxy-brain blockchain tech to real-world assets, aiming to transform the global economy and the daily lives of us all.
Donald Trump recently declared that he would make America “the crypto capital of the world,” while the planet’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, has bet heavily on the future of blockchain. But the crypto world continues to be tarnished by scams and hacking thefts. Amid all this noise, what will become of the dreams of the original crypto-anarchists, like Gupta, who pioneered all this stuff in the first place?
More here.
