"The essence of any 21st-century reaction is the unity of these two forces: the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought. The adept, to achieve reactionary enlightenment, observes that both yield the same result. What can it be, but the truth for which all good men seek? Armed with this sure and fearless faith, the Reaction conquers all."
- Mencius Moldbug, "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations"
This continues along the lines of my previous post about Urbit, which I happen to have only just now really properly discovered and processed as what it is, over in the past couple of days. And it certainly is unique, visionary, involved and shaping/conditioning of a particular kind of a connected world, putting it in the category of undertakings and projects of the likes of Ceptr, Holochain, perhaps also IOTA and nothing much else I can quite think of. :) What these projects have in common seems to be that they're all very much informed by philosophy and motivated/driven by bringing about some vision of possible/potential worlds to be and futures to come beyond the horizon. They make an impression of being more erudite and educated, more inter-disciplinary in their approaching and methods and understanding of what exactly is it that they need and don't. Most crypto-related projects, in comparison, are fairly bland, fairly clueless, mostly unimaginative and usually not at all particularly innovative or creative, tending to be most commonly motivated by money, profits, status and reputation. (Or, as Sturgeon's Law states, 90% of everything is always crap.)
So anyway, another unique feature of Urbit is to its goal of making the internet, in the process of completely overhauling the existing one, more like real life where you not only own all your data, but also the data you interact with and cannot be easily separated from your stable immutable identity with your reputation following you everywhere. Urbit does that by integrating one's whole digital life as a single web service, with every user given a personal server with a unique address ID which defines their entire online presence. These online selves are meant to be indivisible from our actual selves and our sense of self, allowing one to retrieve or distribute any data on their own terms, same way they would/are in the real world on a daily basis. So, Urbit tries to naturally converge the two, real everyday life and the networked online presence, work spaces and communication channels.
Much of the buzz surrounding Urbit does derive from the infamous and somewhat peculiarly outlandish reputation of its founder, Curtis Yarvin who rose to fame with his writings in radical political philosophy under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug when he launched a biting critique of modern day liberalism in an uncanny style of discourse, using an overwhelmingly dense array of obscure references and little known/seemingly arbitrary facts (among other things). This work of his is said to have inspired and given birth to the Dark Enlightenment movement (also called the neo-reactionary movement) which in turn is considered to have provoked/fueled/led to the "alt-right" and anti-globalist movements.
Nick Land picked up on Moldbug's writings to further expand and elaborate on them, giving the Dark Enlightenment momentum. Land is himself a well known controversial academic figure considered "the father of accelerationism".
Even though his perhaps strange body of theory in which he argues for the replacement of so-called democracies with some kind of a neo-monarchic regime of some sort or another, in his conception and creation of Urbit he seems to be pushing towards the very opposite direction, in doing away with the feudal and control structures of contemporary web 2.0 and establishing areas of personal and collective autonomy in which altogether different law and rules apply (translating to a completely different experience of it).
where he argues for the replacing of so-called democracy with some form of a neo-monarchy, in his conception and development of Urbit he seems to be pushing for something else, towards doing away and liberating oneself from the feudal structures of today's internet in the web 2.0. Yarvin had realized as far back as the late 1980's that the unplanned ad hoc nature of the internet's underlying infrastructure would eventually/inevitably develop to become a serious problems, so he began to sketch out and develop the early ideas for Urbit as early as around 1994. He thought that Unix (*NIX) and HTTP would eventually have to be overlaid with something else:
“What I want to do is essentially pave over this industrial infrastructure. The layer is going to be totally sealed off. Then we can basically design our software stack like we’re building on bare metal. This is the answer to the question of how we compute in the 21st century.”
Below are just four of the problems that Urbit is designed to address which Unix and HTTP did not quite so.
1. Namespace Mutability and Data Corruptibility
Stable, reliable systems - including much/most of what we deal in the real world - are generally immutable namespaces. That is, they don't change, disappear, mutate, shift, halve, etc. Permanence and predictability is much more preferable (psycho-logically and otherwise) in every way wherever it could be set and guaranteed.
2. Feudal Ecosystems and Data Silos
The internet is largely occupied by a few established large mega-parasites mostly doing as they please behind the scenes of what they project on our screens and tend to behave as the feudal overlords of cyberspace, seeing end-users as nothing but manipulable, exploitable, disposable biomass of dumb illiterate peasantry, conditioned and experimented upon with a "technology of behavior" in the very spirit of well-known behaviorist psychologist and creep/freak B.F. Skinner.
3. Data Balkanization and Platform Fragmentation
As exemplified/manifested in nuisances/annoyances such as password fatigue, fragmented and lost data and/or login details, etc., etc. all of which Yarvin sees as strong evidence that the current internet was never meant to be integral to our lives. You should be able to shop, bank, plan, and share without having to enter and exit so many different UIs.
4. Trollability, Infantile Behavior and "Political Correctness"
Mutability together with the relative anonymity of cyberspace or ease of maintaining such anyway frequently causes people to just irresponsibly say, provoke or post whatever they want or feel like without any fear of consequences. In real life, we can't escape our bodies and reputations, but the social layer of the internet tends to be highly susceptible to trolls, manipulations, smear campaigns and whatever have you (for those nostalgic about the old times when USEnet and IRC had been the norm, check out this cartoonish catalogue of the various online kinds of trolls, flame warriors and personality/character types).
How Urbit Fixes These Problems in Forging a New Reality
Urbit's plan in tacking these problems is by building a new self-enclosed universe on top of the old Unix/HTTP infrastructure.
“One way to look at Urbit is like pavement. The old ground, essentially Unix, is just rocks and dirt. It’s incredibly difficult to travel over and build things on. Urbit is building a layer of smooth, simple asphalt on top of the jagged surface of Unix that will, first and foremost, make navigating much simpler and easier.”
Given Urbit's immutable namespace, the named entities in its galaxies refer only to static identities. Basically making you own an immutable version of any piece of any data you decide to retrieve via your Urbit, so there'll be no more broken links or deleted comments or adjusted/edited headlines, etc. Your Urbit and your spaces, channels, relationships and groups, collaborative projects and applications and whatever have you are under your complete control and there's no bloatware, spyware, malware, back doors and booby traps and trackers and uncontrolled data gathering and analytics and interactive ads, shiny buttons, click bait and Google SEO, optimized search results and so on and so fourth, none of that. Instead, a clean, calm tabula rasa insulated from all the noise and pollution for you to manage and organize as you like.
What Will It More/Less Look Like?
The closest working approximate analogy of what the Urbit UI (user interface) will look like is WeChat, the Chinese app seamlessly integrating entire ecosystems of user associated apps (banking, social, maps, etc.) within the unifying interface of its UI. Elsewhere in the West or the US it's impossible to have something like the Chinese WeChat for the simple reason that none of the companies associated with the app ecosystems would cooperate with each other (needless to say, China's WeChat despite that is still a centralized feudal ecosystem that owns all user data and maintains control over its users/populations). What Urbit does is decentralize the power of ecosystems by centralizing/concentrating power with individual users (in stark contrast and sometimes maybe even opposition to the business models and philosophies of many a Silicon Valley types, where the goal is exactly to innovate ways how to trick and screw over the end-user for everybody else's profit, like the stupid idiot that he is and doesn't even realize what's going on...)
The Urbit Universe
The Urbit universe is to be divided roughly into 255 (2⁸) galaxies, 65,000 (2¹⁶) stars, and 4 billion (2³²) planets, with 2³² moons for each planet. Each planet being an individual human while each moon some device attached to that particular individual. Stars are Urbits with the capacity to distribute planet Urbits to individuals, and galaxies are Urbits with the ability to distribute star Urbits. The system is going to be self-authenticating such that galaxies authenticate stars and stars authenticate planets. Stars and galaxies are simply individuals who have paid for special Urbits that possess power to authenticate other Urbits.
“Pretty much every project like Urbit tries to accomplish the goal of ‘reinventing the internet’ in the traditional 18-month startup timeline,” co-founder Galen Wolfe-Pauly has said. “Not only has Curtis been working on Urbit for a really long time, but we also aren’t moving too quickly. Before we can compete with WeChat, we need to host a community of crazy nerds who believe in a project like this: exciting for the kinds of people who think Mastodon is cool or Ethereum is cool. The near-term future for Urbit is more like Usenet than WeChat.”
Unlike the early internet, Urbit is more purposefully designed to hold up for centuries ahead and under the weight of various pressures and perhaps, somebody somewhere said, the first modern, intentional attempt to structure a whole-internet government centered around the user.
“This is cultural infrastructure,” claims Wolfe-Pauly. “We need this for society.”
