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Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

I think this is by design.

Prior to the current stellar analogy the founder described this using terms from feudalism.

> In one design sketch for Urbit, Yarvin made the link between monarchies and the platform more explicit, classifying users as “Lords,” “Dukes,” and “Earls.” The design behind the titles, he writes, “is standard Lockean libertarian homesteading theory.” At the end of the sketch, Yarvin indicates that he’s reserved a special title for himself: “The prince (because he spent 8 years working on this project, without being paid), has reserved 32 duchies for his exclusive personal benefit."The founder is an alt-right philosopher that believes we should replace democracy with a corporate structure in which some residents in a country are shareholders and have voting rights.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14671978/alt-right-menciu...

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I can't find that quote by searching the text of the linked article. I was looking for it because I'm skeptical of the claim that Yarvin supports a society with multiple shareholders of political power. I read the archives of Unqualified Reservations when Urbit was first released, and I was left with the impression that Yarvin supported the rule of literally one person. This is the closest quote I've found so far, but I bet there are more specific ones (lacking the however-selected clause which invites without requiring the possibility of multiple stakeholders) in the archive:

> And all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive. Hence: royalism. However he or she is selected, the title of such an executive, in a sovereign capacity, is King or Queen—or, at least, anything else is a euphemism.

Emphasis his: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/02/from-mises-...

I accidentally omitted a newline between the quote and my commentary, and it's too late to edit now.

The Verge: "In one design sketch for Urbit ... has reserved 32 duchies for his exclusive personal benefit."

Me: "The founder is an alt-right philosopher... are shareholders and have voting rights."

If you search for the first sentence of the quote you'll find it.

Aah, thanks for the clarification.

Moldbug (whom I would distinguish from Yarvin as you would a comedian's stage persona) in advocating for neocameralism proposed rule by a CEO-king. This person like a conventional CEO would hold great personal power in their organization. Unlike a king the CEO would be elected by the board and responsible to the shareholders. You can read more in the posts about Patchwork.

>Emphasis his

If you mean to emphasize the ruler's gender, I don't think that is right. Moldbug is rather fond of Queen Victoria.

As in, emphasis original; the words italicized in the preceding block quote ("royalism", "King", and "Queen") were italicized by Yarvin/Moldbug, not myself.

Why exactly would one need to subordinate one's self to such bizarre ideologically machinery just to run a device-independent OS? I could run space on the cloud somewhere and log into my server from whatever local system? It's kind of a 1990s model but still.

You don’t, and the article is outdated and “titles” no longer exist.

The words changed from feudal to stellar. The concept is the same.

One of the core concepts of Urbit's naming schemes' origin and systemic ethos is that by naming a thing (or by reusing an existing name for a perhaps closely related thing) you confine and constrain the newly created thing in ways you may not have anticipated.

Why for example in Urbit terms you may have "gates" and not functions, "battery" and "payload" instead of methods and objects, or functions and parameters, because these things do not work exactly like the familiar constructs from your well-known languages that you're perhaps already familiar with.

It would then also be tempting to make them work more like the things they are being called like, or "anthropomorphize" them into those things, for lack of a better word, giving them traits which they don't innately have in spite of being part of a perfectly workable functional system.

There is also certainly a difference in concept between an aircraft carrier and a galaxy (although both may invoke imagery of energetic nuclear processes powering them, it's hard to argue they are the same or even similar), or differences between a destroyer and a planet, submarine and comet, although it's true that the addressing math hasn't changed, ...

I think you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument that IPv4 and IPv6 are feudally inspired, and they both use very similar maths to pieces of Urbit that we're talking about.

I'm not making an argument from math. I'm not making an argument from first principles.

First the names were feudal. Then the names were changed to not be feudal. This strongly suggests the design was feudal. Yarvin's other writing make it clear it's plausible he'd design a feudally inspired system, as he writes they are superior to democracy.

I'm arguing based on Yarvin's demonstrated intent.

(Citations not repeated because they're exactly the same as my original comment earlier in the tree)

The original Urbit system also included a scheme of political "banners" so that you could avoid speech which was unpalatable to you, in order to allow conscious self-organizing into groups of like-mindedness, and as I recall also wrote about the idea that political speech being shared across these boundaries was necessarily violent (and as such clearly undesirable, as all violence.) edit: this system was removed, I should have mentioned, although I'm not sure it substantially changes the design of the overall system at all.

Some of Yarvin's writings are at best eccentric, but as he has not been a part of the project for some time already, I think it's fair for today's contributors to the project to ask you to set aside his intent, or your impressions of it.

I don't want to make any enemies here, but I'm not sure how one can objectively establish that a design is feudal, or what that would mean. I'm going to take a stab at it, as I don't want to simply dismiss your argument out of hand.

Oxford defines feudalism as:

> The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

If that means: a system where we carve all the land up into /8 and dole them out, then divide those tracts into /16, and further into /24 and /32, and so on, then sure, Urbit is feudal. I think that's as far as the point can stretch, though. Planets are not "beholden" to their stars, as far as I understand it, they are mostly independent entities after the initial bootstrapping process is over. There's no planet tax or military organization, protection, etc.

Did you have a somehow different interpretation that you were trying for?

There's also the voting power for sale. It's not completely clear to me what the power of the senate is, but it seems more than deciding the size of the namespace from the voting info on Github

Sale is one way the power gets more concentrated or distributed, perhaps unfortunately universal truth in today's world, not only for Urbit galaxies.

I am a galaxy holder and, as the record may show if the record remains intact, all I did was show up and keep coming back, at a time when lots of people were not coming back due to technical issues or whatever other issues.

I'm also not sure what actual power I have as one of these senators, for whatever that's worth (it's not clear to you, it's not clear to us!) although I have heard these galaxies keep going up in value, I will note second that at least as of today, I have not benefited in any way financially from this notion of value that I received.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I think we can all agree it would be great if the internet became more private, secure, accessible, and decentralized. I hope Urbit provides that because I hope anything provides that. Whether it lives up to its promises will depend on so many factors I'm not interested in getting involved, but I wish you the best of luck. I'll be cheering if you succeed, for what that's worth.

Likewise! And thanks to you too!

> Some of Yarvin's writings are at best eccentric, but as he has not been a part of the project for some time already, I think it's fair for today's contributors to the project to ask you to set aside his intent, or your impressions of it.

"Some time" is pretty vague. He left the project earlier this year, and the project is still named after his fascist blog. I asked one of the Tlon employees in this comment section why the project is still named after Unqualified Reservations (UR), and so far haven't gotten a response. I think it's fair to expect a project with this history to address it head on and actually denounce the views of Yarvin/Moldbug if they are trying to be viewed as non-fascist. A project can be apolitical, but a project with a political past doesn't get to act like it's apolitical just because the founder steps away on good terms and nobody else is blogging a racist and anti-democratic ideology. If the current contributors don't agree with Yarvin/Moldbug's intent, it seems fair to expect them to actually make that clear.

When I was made aware of Urbit, there was someone prominent related person, a friend project of Nock or something, who had developed another competitive functional OS of his own, some kind or other, if memory serves, who had also parted ways with the community over some controversy which nobody wanted to talk about, and at the same time nobody else on the outside of it evidently wanted to ask about.

I don't want to mis-attribute anything, because I am light on details, I won't try to recall his name, or what it was over, being from the outside myself, but I distinctly remember some part of the controversy being about someone or other "refusing to put up [some kind or other] sign in their window," (I inferred that it was metaphorically speaking.)

It was a metaphor for something I didn't know, but I distinctly remember coming away with the feeling that I also didn't want to end up displaying that sign in my own window.

To restate what I'm dancing around, in no uncertain terms, it seems to me that you're asking for a sign in the window. "No Moldbugs Allowed."

I see how I could come off that way. FWIW I don't personally wish to exclude people from contributing to projects based on their views and conduct outside of the project; I would accept pull requests from Jeffrey Dahmer. But if Jeffrey Dahmer started a decentralised social network with dog whistles towards cannibalism, I would wonder whether other contributors to the project supported cannibalism. If the project removed some but not all of the cannibal dog whistles, Dahmer stepped away on good terms, and the current project maintainers didn't make any statements for or against cannibalism, I would still wonder. It's not that Yarvin/Moldbug contributed to Urbit, it's that he purposefully associated it with his ideology from the beginning. That seems different to me, and without explicit clarification to the contrary I think it's fair to associate this project with that ideology.

Why do you have such a bone to pick on this? So one eccentric political commentator has a pet project - do you need to go piss in his cornflakes?

Moldbug is not a fascist (and he'd make the claim that most folks like yourself have no idea what that even means). He's a neoreactionary, which seems to be a mostly dead movement usurped by traditional Catholics of all things these days. Moldbug himself moved on from Urbit a year ago.

It's time to stop evaluating the software (well, _all_ software) based on whether you're in some kind of complete ideological harmony with its authors. It's not like you apply that same rubric to the food you eat or the clothes you wear, at least some of which came from totalitarian regimes implemented in modern reality that are far harsher than anything Moldbug's internet commentary seems to be after.

The "denouncement" crap you're after never appeases people like yourself, anyway, so how about you move along with your life and stop preventing someone interested in the actual technology from potentially joining up based on your witch hunt?

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