Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
distributedweb.care
distributedweb.care
The terminology is a shell game of confusion and deliberate obfuscation. They pretend that it's a network, and a server, and a virtual machine, and an operating system, but it isn't any of these things -- you still need to provide all of them yourself.
It's just a program that sits on top of all your "real" infrastructure, that then emulates its own shittier "make believe" infrastructure, where you're expected to pay for shitty fake IPv4, shitty fake DNS, and are expected to write UDP applications in an esoteric programming language.
That's it.
There is absolutely nothing redeemable here. Please just let this tire fire of a project die the lonely, obscure death it deserves already.
I've been following Urbit for a while now (maybe 6-7 years?), and over that time, it has gotten clearer about its goals and motives, I believe because initially they wanted to speak to a very small group of weirdos who saw what was on it and were intrigued to learn more. Starting from a small clique of like-minded people.
Now it's possible to understand what the idea is (some sort of VM running an esoteric set of languages to build an operating system that, among other things serves as a 'digital identity' of sorts). This is the point in time when they want people such as HN readers to understand it, so they make it so it can be understood (more or less). I also think the esotericism of the programming languages is also to prevent anyone from having a go, and to limit people who can program in these languages to just those who are heavily invested in them.
But as others have pointed out (including the author of the post), the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets), because Yarvin is a neo-reactionary who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.
He does this at the same time as wanting a clean-slate programming environment, because computers these days are very complicated and buggy or something.
All of this speaks to a desire for things to be simple. Simple politics, simple computers. Democracy and computing these days are not simple, but that's because _humans_ are not simple, and if you want humans to have an equal voice and standing, then that's probably going to result in not-simple systems, in politics as in computing.
We should resist it, for the same reason we should resist anyone trying to agitate for feudal revolution.
> But as others have pointed out (including the author of the post), the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets), because Yarvin is a neo-reactionary who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.
> All of this speaks to a desire for things to be simple. Simple politics, simple computers.
I'm not sure if that's exactly true. If he really had a desire for things to be simple, then why the obfuscation? IIRC, his writing about his ideas is also highly obfuscated: extremely verbose and prone to unnecessary redefinition. The talk of simplification may be just a lure to hook some followers.
It all feels more like an attempt to bluff his way into some kind of elite status. There's at least two ways to be seen as brilliant: actually be brilliant or say impenetrable nonsense and hope people assume you're brilliant (because sometimes brilliance is impenetrable to the layman). I'm also sure some actual elites are tickled by the idea of feudalism and are willing to patronize him.
That’s what we have today, except it’s profoundly more disturbing.
Urbit would be like if you were under the care of Facebook, but you genuinely owned your data. Facebook just routed connections for you if you weren’t already connected to someone. And you retain the ability to move from Facebook to twitter for that service if you choose.
Meanwhile today you live on facebook’s land (you don’t own any of your data or identity), and you can’t leave unless you blow everything up.
> who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.
Yarvin actually does not believe that. His whole project is more about not resisting the inevitable, which is that humans will organize in hierarchies no matter what. So it’s better to not pretend otherwise and just be honest.
Again, this is better than what we have today. Do you even know who your “lord” is today? Vaguely Zuckerberg. Who is under him? Do we know who to be upset with if a decision is made that we don’t like? No this is all a mystery because it’s anti-hierarchy theater. It’s there but they tell us it’s not.
Here is an article where Yarvin basically endorses Urbit without mentioning it by name: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/how-to-regulate-the-tech-p...
> Yarvin actually does not believe that. His whole project is more about not resisting the inevitable, which is that humans will organize in hierarchies no matter what. So it’s better to not pretend otherwise and just be honest.
This is exactly what bothers me the most. You say "just be honest", but are they? Like I mentioned, all they're trying to do is break down the existing hierarchy and create a new one, while being the aristocrats of the new order. If they were truly honest to themselves, they wouldn't sell the idea of sovereignty, because for the most people it would be no different. They would be ruled by these urbit real estate owners. In fact it's worse than Facebook because at least Facebook can be regulated by the government (as it's about to be done soon) if it abuses its power too much, whereas the whole premise of something like Urbit is that even the government cannot mess with the Urbit land owners. Talking about honesty and neglecting to address these issues is the ultimate dishonestly and hypocrisy. At the end of the day, what they and the urbit real estate owners want is for Urbit to go to moon and they make tons of easy money.
A Star or Galaxy can’t delete your planet. Not like Facebook can. You are a true “land owner” on urbit.
There’s a lot of people that got unpersoned by Facebook and others today and the damage is done. Government regulation doesn’t undo that damage.
Planets will likely not increase in price, nor do they want them to. If any money is to be made, it’s through the sale of Stars. But even then, they seem pretty consistently priced, not fluctuating much.
Fair enough point about the French Revolution. Did you get that take from reading Yarvin? :P
Personally, I am on the fence about true decentralization. I support projects for these networks, but I also have in my mind that anarchy may not be desirable at all. But we just need to see different ideas and different projects play out and explore, in my opinion.
And yet, for all the indignant posts about how it's performance art, a scam, or the ravings of a madman, it just kind of keeps on keeping on. It gets a little more stable and adds a few more features every year, like a regular old open source project.
My position on it has remained unchanged for 5+ years: I hope it succeeds because it aspires to solve a use case that I genuinely want to use, I don't care about the (ex-)founder's politics or his old blog, but seeing as the existence of the latter seems to have destroyed any chance of the former coming to fruition so I'm kind of hoping Jeff Bezos decides to build a clone (presumably, one that has much lower ambitions and elides most of the weird stuff).
I've been casually following urbit for 3 years now.
And by "casually following" I mean "every now any then, they have some crypto meetup in San Francisco with free drinks, a tech talk, and stuff and sometimes I accidentally end up there".
And of the half dozen or so meetups that I've stumbled upon, for the free drinks and to meet people for fun, what I know about Urbit is as follows:
It is something related to crypto and also some new programming language, and also there are solar systems, and planets, and somehow that has something to do with people controlling their own code.
And also, there is something about Monarchy, or kings? No idea what that monarchy thing is about.
Pro tip for fellow people who are running community based projects or advertising your product through meetups:
You should tailor your pitches and tech talks to be understandable by a software engineer who is a couple drinks in, and only half paying attention to the talk. Because guess what, that's what the majority of your audience is going to be!
Then there's a mesh routing protocol built over current infrastructure so that any identity can figure out how to contact another and have the routing be correct.
Limited address space, spammers can just be blocked.
That's the best I can do off the top of my head. Criticize the execution all you want but I think the idea is really interesting.
Edit: imagine dealing with the fookin IRS using all this cool stuff. I can only dream
> Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human
> A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults.
> If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine.
WTF!? What is their definition of "independent adult" !? (Is it car ownership ?!?) This is IPv4 all over again...
If they had picked e.g. 10 billion, then the population would still eventually (all going well) rise above that. If they had picked some number so large there would never be that many humans (or if there were, we'd need new networking solutions anyway), it would defeat the point of identity scarcity. And the whole 'disincentivizing trolling' idea had better damn work during the early phases of the network, when adoption is most important, or you risk the whole thing burning when it didn't need to.
The motivations are, of course, still suspect.
Gab's example seems to undermine the author's previous arguments, as Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab.
> Obviously, exit in a digital context is logistically simpler than in a physical one, but it is still not easy. People critical of Twitter’s policies still use Twitter, not because they are hypocritical but because it’s a lot of effort to migrate to a new platform and re-establish connections from the former.
The migration part is because Twitter is a centralized network, which has been ever more draconian with its APIs. Federated and decentralized networks shouldn't have logistic issues with exiting. Again, see Mastodon.
There's promising work in this area, but as yet none of the major implementations support separating 'hosting' from 'identity' the way (eg) email has for at least 20 years (probably longer, I wasn't there).
Just because Gab and other Mastodon servers run the same technology, means little without federation between them. Signal and Whatsapp share key technology, but they are worlds apart regardless because they will never federate with one another.
Not in practice. Most "official" Mastodon sites will block you if you federate with instances of which the mainstream Mastodon community disapproves.
I think you missed the whole point of the paragraph. The reason "exit" is not easy even on "decentralized networks" like Mastodon is because of the economics of doing so. Even though it's technically more feasible than closed sourced social graphs like Facebook or Twitter, people rarely have enough incentive to fork off with their own network.
For this migration to work correctly, it should be effortless and without much cost for every user. That's not the case as the article explains clearly. No matter how federated Mastodon instances are, they are equivalent to running a city. Most people don't want to run a city just because they are sick of some policies. They have other better things to do in their real lives. OP explains that in these federated approaches or Urbit like approaches, technically you're free to fork off, but most people will choose to live a shitty life because it's too much hassle.
If Scientology was based in the trappings 1940s and 50s pulp sci-fi, Urbit is based in 21st century web culture, crypto/blockchain/libertarianism with an (un)healthy dose of feudalism and fascism thrown in.
All the signs of a cult are there, including arcane terminology and symbolism known only to an elite few, re-definition of commonly accepted terms (false==true etc), and a way to make the founders fabulously wealthy at the expense of newer initiates.
While some of the ideas are interesting, and empowering people to take back their digital lives is a noble goal, swapping digital serfdom from a company like Facebook to the bunch of lunatics behind Urbit doesn’t sound like a good trade.
Strip away the mysticism and deliberately obscurantist language, and I’m not sure there will be much remaining.
I'm sure I've missed something (but, I deliberately skipped the technology as that just seems like an outgrowth of the ideology), it is what I've gleaned from a quick readthrough, but my main point here is not so much what Urbit is and wants to accomplish in detail (which seems "a bit" over the top tbh) as highlighting the category of systems that Urbit belongs to: by the users self-governed cyber-networks with internal assets that need to be distributed and ruled over in some way.
I expect this to be an increasing area of study moving forwards - at least I think it should be. What are other examples of this? (not counting corporate owned systems)
It tries to come from a different direction ie. Local database with distributed sync upwards. It's only at the higher levels that it makes use of blockchain to ensure network QoS (axe).
Croquet didn't focus quite so much on the infrastructure but looked at the collaboration aspect. Written in smalltalk it has some interesting ideas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project
Discoverability in both is an issue but I think an eventual project will have to take ideas from both.
The central idea here seems to be that, regardless of the project goal and merits, help improving urbit means benefiting Yarvin directly due to his stake in the address space. Seems like a too lengthy post for an idea that could have fitted a tweet.
There are so many others involved in building urbit today (and for the past 2-3 years, even before yarvin left the project). Maybe someone can write about the aspects of Urbit that drive these other people.
> I do regret making 0 true and 1 false.
For the love of God, why would anyone do that ?!?
[true.c]
int main() { return 0; }
[false.c]
int main() { return 1; }The prescriptive part of neoRX has always been retarded but the descriptive part is on the money.
What is urbit? Some strange projections of vague societal goals on to unnecessary technology abstractions. Like if somebody took the idea of a cryptofascist webring circa 1997 to a quite... imaginative conclusion.
If you want control of publishing your stuff get a decent internet connection and install apache and wordpress.
There's a societal cost to everyone having all their data sit one facebook's servers, and I can get behind the stated goal of building an easy-to-use alternative. I'm skeptical about Urbit being that, of course.
(The 'fringe elements' thing just seems like great marketing, especially for a potentially pseudonymous system. A: No such thing as bad publicity, B: There's a broad swathe of people newly few up with the last decade's trend of calling everything fascist.)
If this all leads to a working system and change towards people owning their data, yarvin will have earned every pompous essay he's ever written. I'm still 50/50 on it being a pyramid scheme, though.
Maybe an personal server running a single app can have a similar experience (I remember urbit crowd comparing themselves to sandstorm) but it would be harder to migrate (in theory)
Whereas aforementioned companies are working hard to actually solve people's problems without a pyramid scheme cult, Urbit has been mostly focused on engineering a cult following, so I won't miss them when all of what they are saying they will achieve will be completely obsoleted by a combination of multiple emerging technology trends that are actually useful.
Hmm, I might be mistaken, but Carl Schmitt seems to have made a valid critique of liberalism (just as Marx made a valid critique of capitalism). I've heard that he's being used as one of the essential thinkers in the legal teaching ? (Also, the most anti-liberal "SJWs" seem to apply his theories in practice...)
https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/04/terrifying-rehabilitati...
It is ironic that you link to an article that defines Schmitt as one of the main architects behind Nazi political theory. Then again, irony seems to be in vogue these days.
The article admittedly goes on to find some "prescience" in Schmitts thinking but the purpose of the piece is above all to reveal and attach a brown aspect to the Brexit movement, nothing else.
Wikipedia says it more clearly [0]: "Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Within days, he supported the party in the burning of books by Jewish authors, rejoiced in the burning of 'un-German' and 'anti-German' material, and called for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by Jewish ideas. In July Hermann Göring appointed him State Councillor for Prussia, and in November he became the president of the 'Union of National-Socialist Jurists'.(...) He presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship and a justification of the Führer state concerning legal philosophy, particularly through the concept of auctoritas."
and
"In 1945, American forces captured Schmitt and, after spending more than a year in an internment camp, he returned to his home town (...) . He remained unrepentant for his role in the creation of the Nazi state, and refused every attempt at de-nazification, which barred him from academic jobs."
But since "essential" as a standalone adjective has positive connotations it is misleading to say the least to leave out the "Nazi" adverb when describing either gentleman, i.e. they are both primarily essential Nazi thinkers/leaders.
He is a topic in academia in all essence since he is an academic and an essential Nazi, and has produced literature (even pre-1933, with clear autocratic leanings) and has drawn conclusions that is of interest in a "survey of the landscape" type of inquiry [0].
Finally he continues to be of seeming essentiality because he continues to be propped up by Nazis and their ilk (like this Yarvin figure).