 I'll have one because I'm not really using slides very much. Let us start at the beginning. So that thing right there, which you might be able to see somewhere over here, is a hex here. And the hex here is a ridiculously simple object. I mean, it's a genuinely, stupidly simple thing that by rights should have been invented in the 1960s and should have become a standard part of human culture decades ago. Take six sheets of plywood, put them in a circle, or hexagon. Take six sheets of plywood, cut them in half on the diagonal, and turn them into roofs. And you can see the pictures here. There is nothing to it. It is so simple that even drug-oddled weirdos from Burning Man managed to build thousands of the bloody things. Why this wasn't figured out by Buckminster Fluror, one of his disciples, literally 50 years ago. I have no idea. It kind of start there slumbering until I stumbled on it in 2002, looked at it, and it went crap. There goes my future. So I've been lugging around this awful shed for at this point 12 years, trying to get the thing into mass use, largely for humanitarian purposes. We've got on the order of 60 million people living in tents. And I mean, you're living in tents. How is it? Sucks, right? And that's for a weekend in a relatively nice climate with tons of modern infrastructure around you. So imagine a tent city of 10,000 to 100,000 people where the expectation is you're going to be there for 10 or 15 years, which is a typical length of time for people to live under canvas in refugee camps. So it's a country the size of the UK scattered around the world, stuck under canvas in horrific climates. And we can fix it with plywood. And the entire set of instructions is take six boards, put them in a hexagon, take six more, cut them in half, put them around to form a shallow cone, and that's your roof. Done. If you want it to be nice and hot, staple up insulation on the inside, if you want to keep the sun off, wrap the outside in tinfoil and wallpaper paste. Did anybody not get that, right? If we want to be really technical about this and ask how you hold the pieces of plywood together, you could cut little blocks out of pieces of 2 by 4, or you can make little metal brackets in a sheet metal press. Now, if you would be good enough to tell the NGO people how to do this, and perhaps persuade them it was worth taking people out of tents and putting them into something better, we could solve the problem and I could go home, right? Because that's it. That's all there is to the hexagon, right? It takes a minute and a half to explain. You understand basically everything there is to know about the humanitarian uses. I could walk off stage now and we'd be done. Except for the hard part about why is it taking 12 years to get anybody to use the bloody things. And that's actually the hard problem. It's no longer a problem of technology. It's a problem of adoption. And the question is, why do we have this enormous blind spot about applying modern technology to housing systems? So it's taken me years and years and years and years thinking we should be using this hexagon. It's better than tents. It's pretty simple. This shouldn't be a hard thing. And really only in the last couple of years has it finally hit me. The reason it's hard to get people moving on the hex here is because we're all still living in houses which could have been built 200, 300, 400 years ago and in the UK in some cases were, right? Your mental model of what a really nice house looks like is actually derived from medieval castle. It's a cheap brick knock-off of what your overmasters lived under, that lived in in feudalism, right? An Englishman's home is his castle because we're all going to pretend that we're nobility even though we're enslaved by crap jobs and mortgages. And this psychological mindset that a real house is similar to the castles of the nobility has completely paralysed our ability to innovate in housing. So everything around us is becoming amazing, right? The cars run on electricity. They're becoming self-driving. The computers, I mean, my laptop would have been a top 500 supercomputer in the top half 20 years ago. Not even an expensive laptop. Solar panels dropping in price by 7% a year for the past 40 years. They're roughly the same price as coal. 10 years from now, there'll be roughly half the price of coal. The economy will decarbonize. We won't get an economic crash to bail us out of this terrible political problem we have and then we'll have to deal with the solar-powered American Reich. Did I say that out loud? So inside of this context, right, Gore-Tex, anything that you look at that involves technology is becoming amazing. Every time you turn away from it and you turn back to look at it, it's doubled in quality and halfton price. It's not just computers. It's material science, knife steel, you know, you name it, carbon fiber tubing. My God, it's so cheap, you know? Except housing. Housing, old building technologies, terrible building quality, plumbers. My God, have you seen the quality of plumbing as an industry? The stuff is crap. The people rape you every time you look at their fricking, you know, you look at my phone number, that's a 90 quid, right? The quality of the work they do is terrible. We joke about the industry all the time. Oh my God, they're so terrible. They're worse than plumbers. And if you think plumbers are bad, wait until you see roofers, right? Everything to do with our built environment, architect, what a joke, seven year qualification, longer than it takes to be a brain surgeon. And have you seen the crap they're building in London, right? So the point that I'm making is that everything to do with building is fundamentally broken and we've made a special sphere of exception around building in which technological progress is zero. Quality is terrible. There are no review processes where you could figure out whether the thing you're buying is good or not. And it absolutely dominates our economic landscape, right? How many of you feel you're paying too much for housing? Why haven't you done anything about it yet? Right? Why is housing a special exception to the general rule that open source improves quality and reduces cost? Why have we not gotten started on this, right? I mean, do you see the question now, right? Can anybody come up with a compelling reason why we haven't started on working to free ourselves from enormously overpriced housing as a fundamental economic fact that chains us to systems that we generally speaking despise, right? Yeah, so vested interests from people that own the assets. Does anybody here feel like they're making a ton of money from owning a house? Anybody here in the vested interest class? Two or three people, right? The rest of you, why haven't you done something about this? Right? Why do we not have active ongoing research to take the worst engineering in our culture and fix it? Yes? Planning regulations. So planning regulations are an obstacle that we would need to overcome to get a real breakthrough in housing. Planning regulations are the equivalent of the copyright lobby when it came to file sharing, right? And I will come back to talk about the difference between napsterization and Spotifyization. It's a really fluid, easy word. Okay, I'll take one more. Join the vested interest, right? So we've got a defection problem that people who have to get up and go to solve this problem usually say, I know I'm gonna make a ton of money and buy a really nice house in a place where the values go up, right? So the defection problem is basically about being a scab in a labor union situation, right? We've got an entire population being oppressed by mortgages and obscene rent. This is particularly true living in London. And rather than doing something about the political problem which is resultant in our oppression, we go, you know what? I think they have it better over here, right? And this is how the British class structure has always worked. The upper classes continue to buy talent from the middle class and the working class, give them junior positions in the feudal bureaucracy. And the reason we live like this is because the Norman conquest never ended, right? When we ran out of England, the Normans ran out of England, by the way, the Normans are Vikings that settled in France for about 150 years, then came here. Once they dealt with Britain, they dealt with Wales. After Wales they did Scotland, then they did Ireland, they ran out with white people to oppress, then they went to Africa, South America, North America. Once they'd gotten rid of oppressing those and they couldn't really find anybody left to oppress, then they headed for India and China, right? The simple political history, if you ever need to explain it, to somebody as the Norman conquest never ended and today we call it capitalism. It's Vikings in suits. We call it lawyers, right? Yeah, how are we doing for time? I should really do talks on three hours of sleep more often, it's a lot more fun this way. Ah, great, I even have some time left. So, napsterization was the great thing that was meant to happen to music, right? The certain notion was that everybody would take the little bit of music that they had access to, share it in an enormous bucket with no taxation, no regulation, no rights framework, none of that crap and we would all have infinite music. The artists would get a little bit starved to death, but we maybe find some way of supporting them on an infinite Kickstarter or Patreon or something like that. And Napster worked with 15 year old technology better than anything that we've had since and that really shows the power of centralization to solve problems on no money and no budget. Centralization works except for the little problem that it makes a target, which you can then whack with a legal stick. Bam, but the fact of Napster is what eventually gave us Spotify and Spotify represents the complete capitulation of the copyright industry to the nerd Reich, which is us by the way. So, the complete capitulation of the copyright industry is, unless you give us an offer which is better than piracy, we will take piracy. We have a choice. We can buy your stuff at enormous prices and wait weeks for delivery of a physical plastic object or we can download it for free now. Make me an offer. Would you like some GRM in your CDs? We find that's really helpful. Download, download, download, download, download. Finally, in utter desperation that they're going to get completely annihilated, they say, right, here's an offer, it's better than piracy. How does 10 quid a month for all of music in the world sound? Just please stop stealing it. Stealing it, I hardly feel like we're even paying for it. And this begins to work. The only problem with Spotify, you hear the Spotify advertising where it says, blah, blah, blah, blah, we make lots of money for the rights holders and the artists. Wait, what do the rights holders do now? What do they do? You upload a file to Spotify. People listen to the file on Spotify. Spotify collects the money and gives it to you. What are the record companies for post-spotify? But because the record companies have Spotify over a barrel, which is give us a deal that we like or we'll take all our music back, Spotify is prevented from disintermediating the record companies and becoming the Amazon of music. So what you've got is an established, entrenched monopoly, which is the record companies, co-opting Spotify to block market access for small artists. And this is how monopolies figure out how to step forward in time in these very cunning ways that allow them to stay monopolies long after they should have been disintermediated. Do you ever really get this as a model? The record industry fought like hell for a bad model until it could find a model that would allow it to survive and take all of the real power out of the hands of the artists for another generation by wiring themselves into the deal using their pre-existing monopoly power, right? Building codes. So the pre-existing industries that provide housing spend an enormous amount of time and energy making it impossible to innovate in the housing market and the business end of that is building codes. The business end of building codes is called bulldozers that will come to your experimental building project and drive over it with a tank to make sure that you don't innovate in housing. Mmm, right? This is the oppression inherent in the system, oh peasant mind. Now, do you remember that nice little story about this kind of hobbit house that got built in Wales off the grid, very abusive, all the rest of it? Do you know what they're gonna do to it? They're going to bulldoze it, right? They took the thing to the review, the review panel said no, the current ruling last time I checked on the situation was they were gonna spade that thing under. Why? Because it is better for these people to live with a 70,000 euro mortgage minimum in a crap barret house in some awful corner of nowhere than for them to build their own house and be substantially off the grid because you cannot tax people who are free. And the place where we are oppressed most particularly in the UK, particularly in the UK is housing. We've got 10 times the population density of America. Housing is just about the only product that we sell internationally other than finance, right? The fact that people are still willing to do business with us after what we did with the rest of their money is unbelievable, right? But we're really good at this, right? And we conned the Indians into thinking that the English arriving was a great liberation. You know, remember when we used to be basically the equivalent of the Mendolin cartel to the Chinese, right? You know, the British Empire continues. Norman Conquest never ended. But the place where we are taxed as peasantry is through our housing. So the case that I'm gonna make is extraordinarily simple. Stallman starts the fight for freedom with software, right? And we have a tragedy in Stallman in that his ability to write the same amount of code as 10 ordinary people is counterbalanced by his ability to offend at least 100 times as many people as any ordinary person, right? And this is the tragedy, right? If Stallman had been a little easier to get on with, I think that Stallman would be recognized as being the closest thing that we have right now to a Gandhi because he comes up with a concept which will actually liberate poor people because they get, as soon as they connect to the network, $5 billion worth of software for free. And that's an individual empowerment for every poor person with a Firefox phone, right? You know, vive la révolution, right? Kids, two years, three years, four years from now sitting with a Google cardboard box on their head and a Firefox OS virtual reality device sitting in the slot looking around in an imaginary universe at six and a half frames per second in a thatched hat, right? Virtual reality for peasant farmers is an actual reality within two or three years. William Gibson, thou art avenged. So, Stallman basically provides us with the first real political breakthrough since Marx. And the advantage of Stallman's approach is that it doesn't seem to devolve into mass murder when you try it in the real world. Yet. Although the mailing lists are a sad counter, that's a risk, we have to keep an eye on it. So, once you get it into your head that Stallman is responsible for Wikipedia, he's the first person to propose it, right? He's responsible for the free software movement which gives us open sources, this kind of bastard apoliticized stepchild. He's responsible for the very vision of software as speech in a human right. If Stallman was not so incredibly good at offending people, he would be enormously higher profile than he is, right? But nonetheless, Stallman is Stallman, we have to live with him, please be nice to him. Just keep passing him from nerd to nerd to nerd to nerd, read the handbook, it actually turns out to be important, don't laugh at it. You know, that 70 page writer, it really is what he needs to function. And he still gets all of this done, right? So, firstly, Stallman no joke, right? Not to say that the Torvalds and all the rest of these guys are not super important, but Stallman lays the groundwork. We're actually winning in software, and I think we all know that, open source 70% of the phone market, it's actually going pretty well, operating systems, Ubuntu and the rest of the modern Linux's are fine, Mac and Tosh, it's still BSD underneath, we won in software. We're now rapidly going on the crusade for gadgets, right? Phones, badges, little solar powered things, all the rest of this little bits and pieces, all of that stuff is getting built super quickly. We're beginning to operate on freeing the supply chain. You know, Fairphone, right? Fairphone, very nice idea. Next step, Fairwaptop, somebody will eventually get around to fair consumer goods. You know, all of this stuff is good progress. There is no reason that we can't win on gadgetry in the same way that we won on software, right? But we've got to take the next step, which is going after basic physical infrastructure, which is housing, water, solar panels, wind turbines, toilets, and all the rest of this kind of stuff, right? Because you can have perfect gadgets, perfect software, total intellectual freedom, and rent that is 65% of your income, and you will still be a slave. And at the point where you decide that you can't pay the rent anymore and you get kicked out of your house, they will criminalize the fact that you're illegally homeless, right? You still have a collar around your neck and software will not fix it and neither will Bitcoin, right? And if we are in this for the free, right? Free as in freedom, not free as in software, right? You have to think of software as the thing that we could do because we had relevant skills. It was not the end of the process, it was the thing that we could reach first. Now, does this make sense or have we completely left contact with the ground? All right? Okay, because this is, you know, in a hacker context, this is a fairly bold perspective. It involves an awful lot of nail guns and hammers, right? Not our typical toolset. So once you take that step to saying that the goal of the free culture thing, the free culture movement was to produce freedom, given that we've done so well on round one and round two, we're now in round three. What we have to make sure of in round three is that if we are going to get this kind of spotifyization offer, we do not take it en masse. Let me explain why, right? I think it is pretty clear to just about anybody that if you had to build a house and you had 20,000 hackers on the internet helping you, you and your friends could do it. How complex can it really be, right? If you look at the people that make their livings in construction, they are very big, they are very strong and they are generally speaking not software engineers or PhDs, right? So if ordinary Joe's with 7.0 levels can manage to build houses without breaking their brains, I think we could figure out how to do this. And if we could do this for ourselves, we would have taken another industry and we would have opened it. Here's a plan for very nice set of three bedrooms. I've downloaded it from the internet. I've made some changes. This looks fantastic. I've run it through the structural engineering code. That looks great. Let's go out and build it. Great, what are we going to do? We're going to have a two week hackathon at my house called Build Me a House. And this is how housing used to be done. Barn raising. You threw an enormous party, you fed all your friends, they helped you put up a house, you lived in it, there was no mortgage. Amazing, right? No, really, that's what we used to do. In England, before all of this building code stuff, we built our own houses and we lived in them and our friends helped us and there were no ludicrously expensive professions that would block us at every hand and turn using regulatory capture with things like building codes. No mortgages. Where are you being screwed? Mostly the mortgage, right? Yeah, yeah, oh, you got crazy. What do you mean, build our own houses, right? If you could save 60,000 pounds over the course of your lifetime for the sake of a few weeks of hard work with a collective of friends, you'd be making three grand a day. How does that compare to your consulting rates? Right? Oh, right. Housing is the world's last truly inefficient industry. The mortgage, it's 150,000, 200,000, 250,000 euros. At least half of that in most places is paying for people to use close imitations of 18th century building techniques. It's like having somebody come round to your house in the loom they took out of a museum in the back of a truck to weave you a suit with a shuttle. That's what you're paying for in the housing industry, right? So let us consider the possibility that we could use a free hardware approach to housing. The hex here is basically an alternative to tents. It's by no means the be all and end all of the housing thing. There's a guy in the States whose name escapes me and where's my timer gone? Five minutes, great. So there's a guy in the States whose name escapes me who's working on a thing called house slits. And house slits is grid beam for housing. Very simple, potentially you could do multi-story. It's funny looking little cubes. Great idea, no problem with it at all. Go out, take a look at it. It might set your needs better than a hex here, right? But we've only got two or three credible teams that are working on housing as a thing. And this doesn't even begin to approach the other problem, which is land rights. So we talk very briefly about land rights and then I will try and tie this thing off on time. In the UK, we have 10 times the number of people that it is possible to house, say an American population density. We are jammed in here like sardines by American standards. That makes everything to do with land very difficult, particularly given that the inheritors of the Norman conquests still own most of the land. You know this guy called the Duke of Westminster, right? One of his ancestors was given most of Westminster, Mayfair, all that area of London, by the king or the queen of the time. And they've lived off it ever since. We just gave them the land, the crown said here, have a part of land. It's very unlikely that we're gonna be able to make a breakthrough on land in the UK because we've got a feudal society which walks land as a matter of taxing the population to concentrate wealth in the hands of the Normans. O peasant mine, right? But we have European Union passports. So imagine if you will, a radical proposal. Imagine that there was a nomadic hacker festival, right? Comes in a bunch of sea containers or very large truck. You unpack it, it's a bunch of really nice domes. It's got a couple of big tents. It's got excellent Wi-Fi, off-grid composting toilets using an open source design, solar panels, wind turbines, water purifiers, the entire shebang, and it houses about 500 people, maybe 200. In the summer, it's in Norway or maybe Finland, Sweden, somewhere nice up north, see a bit of the world, maybe Estonia, as it gets a little colder late summer, you might move it somewhere nice like Devon. When Devon becomes a little frigid, you go to say Portugal. Move the thing four or five, six times a year. How many people do you think in Europe might take that as an offer so they could work from home and basically live in a hacker festival year round? Yeah, we got one, I do, five, all right. So if there are 10 or 15 in this room, I think that the kind of European hacker culture footprint could have a nomadic year-round hacker village without even trying, right? And that nomadic year-round hacker village could be the development ground for an enormous amount of R&D in open source housing and open source infrastructure. And if people were to go and find little corners of, oh, I don't know, empty villages in Portugal or chunks of say Tunisia, where you could take one of these villages, clone the infrastructure and then set it up permanently, I am not sure that those places would mind. Because you've suddenly got a whole bunch of extremely advanced technological thinkers living in your society, helping your folks get oriented to the 21st century, helping them learn how to make real money, all right? Sounds kind of crazy, might be worth a try. Hex year, it's a very plausible technology as part of that, but it's not about the hex year. It's about simply taking the next step. We got freedom in software, we're getting it in gadgets, we get it in houses and infrastructure and we walk off the map. How does that sound as a proposal? Yeah, good, right, lovely, thank you. Wow.