This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.
We couldn’t pull together The Rock Bottom Issue without speaking to Vinay Gupta. The Scottish-Indian “global resilience guru” knows trouble when he sees it, having spent the last two decades engaged in what will likely be a doomed attempt to save humanity.
Whether it’s nuclear war, resource scarcity, climate change, AI overlords, network states, or oncoming interstellar apartheid, Vinay has been tasked by the U.S. government, the Red Cross, and various think tanks, universities, and institutes to live out nightmares you haven’t even dreamt of yet, in order to stop the future killing us and us killing the future.
Nailing down his politics can be difficult; Gupta is both visionary futurist and hard-nosed realist, a believer in tech who remains acutely aware of all the ways it might destroy us. He’s a multi-disciplinary engineer with a cyberpunk background and a humanitarian heart who steered the launch of Ethereum, one of the world’s largest blockchain platforms, and believes that meditation is key to creating minds tough enough to dig us out of this existential hole.
VICE sat down with Gupta to talk about all the things that keep you awake at night.
VICE: Hi, Vinay. Why is the world dying?
Vinay Gupta: Overconsumption. That’s it. Of the damage that we do to nature, how much is for things that have absolutely no human benefit? Look at fast fashion. You design the clothes, you make the clothes, you sell the clothes to wholesalers, you transport them around the world, nobody buys them, then you throw them all in the trash. Clothing that went straight from drawing board to landfill without ever touching a human back. That’s probably 2 percent of the environmental footprint of the entire fucking species.
Also, we continue to have internal combustion engines. If we made cars that weighed 300 kilograms and they were mostly made of carbon fibre, you could have tiny little engines that did 400 miles to the gallon and at that point, who cares if you’re burning gasoline?
The laws of physics do not doom us to destroy ourselves. So why do we continue to do it? Because we’re just that stupid.
Are there any big misconceptions about saving the climate?
When you ask environmentalists what’s important, they’ll tell you it’s reducing consumption. However, what does that usually mean to them? That rich people shouldn’t drive big cars.
The Left wants to blame somebody for the problem and they want that somebody not to be the working class. ‘Oh, it’s rich people, they’re responsible for all this.’ Well, kind of, but realistically, it’s the middle classes. The rich consume like crazy but there are very, very few of them. The real damage is a 2 billion person global middle class, and it’s done in three main areas: heating your house, driving your car, and eating meat. So insulate the house, manufacture lightweight cars, and figure out a sensible path to low carbon meat.
“There have always been playgrounds for the rich. But when they add the word ‘state’ to it, and they start wanting control of the law… Now, it gets weird.”
Your ideas must seem counterintuitive to many of those who are on your side about overconsumption.
They’re not on my side. That’s the problem. They might want the world saved, but they’re not willing to ask very simple questions about why it’s in danger. There’s a quote from [Brazilian socialist archbishop] Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why they have no food, they call me a communist.” There are 3,000 billionaires. They control a lot of things. But if you moved control of Tesla from Elon Musk to a pension fund, it would still make cars.
But aren’t some of these issues related to a global overclass divesting itself from any notion of social democracy? Take this idea of libertarian ‘network states,’ for example—isn’t that about Silicon Valley elites acquiring plots of land from impoverished governments, imposing their own laws, and creating their own closed worlds?
Yes, but the billionaires already have this stuff if they want it. San Moritz. Monaco. Take your pick. Currently, you have this new, very rich upper-middle class in San Francisco—but there’s crazy real estate prices, massive amounts of crime, very poor government services, horrible problems with zoning and traffic… so they get itchy feet. They think, ‘Why would we go to New York or Seattle when we could club together, buy some resort town in Honduras or Algeria, stick a bunch of Starlink stuff on the roof, set up our own gated community, and maybe cut a little deal with the local government where they don’t bother us about stuff?’
There have always been playgrounds for the rich. But when they add the word ‘state’ to it, and they start wanting control of the law… Now, it gets weird.
Because in these enclaves they might say: ‘We want to tinker with our kids’ DNA so they’ll have higher IQs.’ And that’s kind of where we are right now—I mean, they’re doing self-experimentations with things like life extension, which a lot of the network-state people are very interested in. They rightly think there’s going to be a lot of regulatory pushback, and they don’t want to wait for the federal government to decide what it thinks about it; they’d just like to start extending their lives now rather than later, please.
At that point, you’re crossing a line where you’re changing the law not in ways that enable you to do weird stuff to yourself, but that will allow you to do weird stuff to other people.
Whatever side is out of power is going to push for autonomy anywhere it can find it: I think the next generation of thinking on network states will not be from libertarians—after all, they’re all in Washington DC now—but from progressives.
What happens if potentially dangerous, unregulated tech spills out of these communities?
That notion that you’re breaking ‘the Vegas rule,’ that’s when stuff becomes super intense. If you start having network states exporting problems into other countries because their technology is out of control… Oh my God, now what?
And these are people who specifically love making money and changing the world.
Yeah, that notion of unregulated enclaves in which new technology is developed and potentially exported around the world with huge consequences, that’s a whole new game. At this point it gets very complicated; looks very cyberpunk, very William Gibson.
‘What’s going on?’ ‘They’ve got some weird enclave and it’s on some street in the middle of nowhere. Private jets in and out, satellite internet, everything is encrypted, everyone is anonymous.’ ‘What are they doing down there?’ ‘Well, they’re regrowing nerves. People go down there and get chips installed in their head. It’s like medical tourism but you wind up with a permanent silicone brain-part that makes you a better programmer.’
How far off is that? Five years? And how do you regulate it? How do you deal with the network state that accidentally exports a problem to the rest of the world? It could be software, it could be hardware, it could even be a meme or an ideology.
Patri Friedman is one of the best-established thinkers working on setting up new states. He views them as being a little bit like start-up companies, in that they can implement new ideas from scratch and road test them. Whatever works will scale or be learned from and imitated in other countries. I’d say he views network states as part of an ecology of ideas that could improve or even fix the mainstream governments.
That’s not an unreasonable position. Singapore, for example, is often studied by other governments trying to figure out how they managed to pull so many people out of poverty so quickly, from a very difficult start as an independent nation in the 1960s. More recently, a lot of nations are looking at Dubai’s meteoric rise.
But if you’re a citizen from an old liberal democracy the danger is that the lessons from the network states will be “we don’t need liberal democracy, we just need to get things done” or “appoint an absolute ruler, and depose them when their popularity numbers drop too far” or some other crazy thing that works in a network-state setting, but irreversibly destroys liberal democracies when adopted more widely.
I think a lot of the political thinking coming out of Silicon Valley is dangerous in exactly this way.
Are you still a fan of Elon Musk’s journey to Mars?
I think it continues to be absolutely necessary. I think Musk is probably on track for delivering it and I don’t think you can do it properly without a nuclear reactor. So I think Musk is going to need a licence to take a nuclear reactor to Mars to fuel the energy needs of a base. Of course, Musk’s new position in the Trump administration will probably facilitate the return of nuclear rocketry, a real relic of the golden age of atom-smashing mad science.
How long does it take to get to Mars?
I want to say four months, something like that. Here’s the 58 billion dollar question: Is it possible to conceive a healthy child on Mars? Nobody knows, so you go up there and you take a bunch of mice and rabbits and squirrels and see what happens. After that, you take up some monkeys, and then eventually maybe some brave woman gives it a shot.
What would be your sense of a time frame for that?
Less than 50 years; possibly way less. Because here’s the thing: until recently, the human race was under an enormous cloud that prevented innovation, whether you think of that as being market forces, government over-regulation, or intelligence services classifying anything interesting.
Take solar roll out—we could have decarbonized the entire world three times over by now, we just didn’t get round to it. This inability to run our science and technology anywhere close to its limits because of governance issues, is essentially why Musk is interested in Mars. With Mars, you rip the lid off because you have to rip the lid off or you die. Every single thing has to be done properly and it has to be done in the best possible way because you’re super short of resources and there are no rules. That’s the prize. And then you import that culture back and fix Earth.
Mars is almost the ultimate network state, isn’t it?
A hundred percent. When you give that mindset a desk in the White House, the results cannot fail to be unpredictable: possibly appalling, possibly amazing, too soon to tell yet.
JG Ballard used to say that space exploration ran out of steam in the 70s because people lost interest. That the technology of rockets had been around for centuries and so no longer charged our imaginations. Whereas it was the new technologies, the ones essentially taking people inside their own heads, that had a greater hold over the public. I find that quite convincing and don’t know how it could be reversed.
Think about it this way. Without a shadow of a doubt governments have staggering amounts of space technology. So I think what happened in the space race is that it began to become important for military purposes and then the governments kind of decided that maybe they don’t want all this out in the open any more. If we start to declassify those critical technologies, in all probability space becomes very accessible and very exciting but you probably also discover that everybody’s been ignoring the space-based weapons treaties and every serious faction has dangerous junk up there.
Clearly, the governments are getting stuff up and down without making it super visible to the rest of the world. I don’t believe for a minute that the U.S. government has no way of getting a spy satellite into space without strapping it to a rocket. But if you get an agreement that we’re going to let people into space again in a big way, I think you’re going to see an enormous explosion of stuff in space. What would it take for us to feel comfortable doing that? Probably a bit more world peace than we have now, but maybe we’ll get some.
You may be more optimistic on that than I.
Whatever; before we do any of this stuff, there’s just a bedrock radicalism needed of: ‘Stop fucking around and do what works.’ Does nuclear work? Yes. Should we do more of that? I guess so. What about demand reduction? Do we have any great ideas for that? Maybe we can insulate people’s houses. See what I’m saying? But like, the stubborn refusal to even look at what works, and then just fucking do it—holy shit, what is wrong with people?! And what is wrong with people, is they’re just very stupid. Something like 20 percent of human beings in First World countries don’t understand that the earth goes around the sun. You ask people about biological evolution, most cannot describe what Darwin figured out. You ask them how diseases spread, they’ve got some vague notion of germ theory.
“An enormous number of really smart people completely fucked up the world.”
That’s a failure of the education system, isn’t it?
No, no, it’s just that people are stupid! Look, I mean this absolutely clearly. People are stupid. Half of them are below average and average is really fucking average. We have a tiny number of staggeringly intelligent intellectuals building things like nuclear fucking bombs and the internet, and the vast majority of the population is living trapped in a world with these terrifying geniuses, who are fucking up the entire structure of reality with shit that was never meant to exist. Human beings are geared for living in villages and farming vegetables with pointy sticks. That’s what they’re really for.
Think of it like this: ‘Oh, what do you do?’ ‘I live in a village and I have a pet cow and I farm with a pointy stick.’ ‘And are you smart in that environment, or dumb in that environment?’ ‘In that environment, I’m quite smart. I know when my cow is sick, and I bring it inside.’ ‘Great, so in that environment you’re smart… Now, what happens if I put you on the launchpad of a rocket that was designed by 240 people with PhDs and another 180 people that are so smart they didn’t even bother getting a PhD—now are you smart?’ ‘No, I don’t understand how any of this shit works.’ And the thing is, actually, neither do they, the people who helped build the rocket. They only understand their one individual component.
In short, we’ve assembled these cosmically complex macro structures that required thousands and thousands of geniuses to assemble. And then the ordinary individuals are left dwarfed, confused, and terrified by a world they have no relationship with.
That’s a very important point, I think.
That’s why the people are stupid. They’re vegetable farmers and deer hunters stuck in a world that was designed by fucking armies of PhDs building the most complex things they could possibly imagine. ‘Holy fuck! What do you expect me to do about it? I’m a fucking vegetable farmer who occasionally shoots deer.’ ‘Oh, we were thinking you might be able to vote on who should be in charge of managing this incredibly complex socio-technical system that’s absolutely beyond your comprehension.’ ‘I don’t know, I just vote for the tall one!’
You see what I’m saying? We’ve made a world where almost everybody is stupid almost all of the time. An enormous number of really smart people completely fucked up the world. They invented coal mining, they invented steam engines, they invented nuclear bombs, they invented bio war, they invented AI—and even the smart people are totally lost. If you happen to understand roughly how nuclear power works, you understand jack shit about how the internet is engineered, and you know nothing at all about modern biotechnology.
So even the specialists are left having to rely on other specialists.
…and at that point, everyone’s filled with doubt because even the specialists are stupid in their worlds. If you really understand nuclear power, you don’t necessarily understand the defence implications of nuclear power, or how to dispose of the waste. So everybody feels disempowered by the systemic complexity and nobody can make the call. We can’t take any action; everything is stuck. Our best shot at punching through that is AI. Or desperation, where we finally just appoint a bunch of smart people, who have as many meetings as they need to come to a decision, then everybody does what they’re fucking told.
What does it mean for the world, now that Musk is part of Trump’s new administration?
We’ve always had some degree of rule by unelected technocrats: You didn’t vote on the UK 3-pin plug design, or the Apple user interface. It just got done and it worked.
So the argument is, at the end of the day, democracy didn’t really create problems like climate change and AI risk, and all the rest of it. Those things emerged from horribly bad technical decision-making outside the scope of government. Technocrats did technocrat stuff and pretty soon the whole world was imperiled. Government, outside of weapons development, has basically no skill at handling technology at all. The only people in government who know how to do management of technology processes are the military.
Now, the free market technocrats are showing up in Washington DC and taking direct responsibility for running the government. Maybe that relationship can be formalized: activities like the Center for Technology and National Security Policy started to map the interface layer between technology and government. Not enough was done, but a start was made.
If they established something like that at the White House layer, a Department of Technology—like the Department of Defense—and directly integrated the idea that you can solve problems created by bad engineering with good engineering, and that this is a natural function of government in the same way sponsoring scientific research is? Maybe in that world we could finally get something done about problems like climate change: by treating it as a technology problem.
The deployment of technology in the service of democracy is in its very earliest infancy. There’s a lot to be hoped for, but it looks like we are going to have to go through hell to get there.
This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.
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