Look, I think Yarvin is a psychopath as much as the next reasonable human, but let's be clear - Urbit is garbage on technical grounds.
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.
A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan.
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.
> the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets)
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.
The point is, what Urbit is trying to do is create a new hierarchy while talking shit about the existing hierarchy. This is no different from how the French revolution participants overthrew the government, just to form their own toxic regime that was worse than before.
> 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.
You’re just mistaken about how the system works. That’s why you think it’s worse than Facebook.
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.
> A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan....
> 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.
If there's a good idea hiding in urbit, someone will extract it one day into a sane and usable project. If not... we can treat it as an esoteric art project and/or ignore.
My understanding is that TempleOS was/is regarded as a tremendous one-person achievement (although of course its author had some quite nonstandard beliefs). Whereas Urbit seems to be generally decried as fakery
Watching Urbit through the lens of HN comments over the last few years has been utterly fascinating. The hatred it attracts is unmatched - no topic has reached the front page only to be brigade-downvoted off of it again so regularly.
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 don't think I'm alone in not understanding what the fuck urbit even is supposed to be. I suspect Yarvin is lost so far up his own ass he's lost the ability to clearly communicate. Whatever urbit is meant to be, it's doubtlessly dead on arrival due to virtually nobody knowing what it's meant to be.
it's a secure identity system where instead of having to log into a bunch of different shit and put your data in a bunch of different places and keep it updated to do your day-to-day life stuff you can do everything using publish subscribe and hold all your data in one place. Suppose you use a lot of banks (and/or your friends' personal sites), imagine being able to update your address just once and automatically push that information to all banks you're subbed to and only the banks you're subbed to and have the push still go through "immediately" (on startup) if one bank is experiencing downtime. Could be interesting. This is part of the "personal server" idea...everyone should easily be able to create a personal server that's a pure function of its event history and that is logically consistent with the network (clients, other servers, routing tables, blah blah). You can make a personal server without having to worry about downtime because your server's event history will always be consistent with the network's.
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
The closest comparison I can think of is keybase. It's pretty similar when you cut out all the esoteric crap. Basically a chatroom, and other things, based on a distributed identity.
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!
I don't think any amount of sobriety is going to help anyone better understand Urbit, in fact I think the opposite is true. You'd have to be shit-faced drunk for Urbit to seem like a good idea.
I don't think any amount of alcohol would help. You need acid. At this point it's almost like scientology. It uses "tech" as a front to attract gullible people to pay up.
> 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...
Fairly sure there's more than 4bn legal adults in the world, so this is some weird supremacist thing where """inferior""" people are deliberately excluded.
I mean, whatever number they pick would have problems. The more planets there are, the easier (more economically viable) it is for spammers/fraudsters/trolls to buy new planets when the old ones get flagged/banned from everywhere. A big part of the professed point of urbit's limited address space is to add an incentive to be polite on social networks through this scarcity, so having more planets than stars in the sky wouldn't make sense.
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.
From a “decentralization” point of view, Urbit is equivalent to Facebook Messenger, but with enough arcane technical mumbo jumbo to make its users feel like The Chosen.
> We might ask then, is Gab a platform for free speech, or is it a platform for hate speech? Who’s speech does Gab prioritize? It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “free speech” that Gab deploys is not quite the same as what others see it to mean.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Gab is now running on Mastodon, whose founders profess values fundamentally opposed to Gab.
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.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I can federate with both Gab and "official" Mastodon if I want to, while there's no way to do that between Signal and WhatsApp (at least without third party hacks) ?
That's from the point of view of a server, a user, or both? (I guess a user can always have several accounts while still using the same client... for those clients that have not blacklisted Gab outright?)
Except they frequently do, because you don't own the domain your mastodon identity is tied to.
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).
I suspect parent is referring to how actual service backing an email address can transparently change from Gmail to Hey to Fastmail and so on. The hosting is separate from the identity.
As far as I can tell, Urbit seems to be the first true cyberspace cult.
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.
As far as I can tell from this (this is the first I've heard of Urbit and Yarvin), Urbit essentially is a form of social network that that tries to create a self-governing, "ideal state" in cyberspace. The author of the article credibly argues that the project is governed by a political theory ("neocameralism"), explained as "right-libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion". The network is described as based on a set of principles that considerably differs from common democratic principles ("one person one vote") and instead posits a hierarchical structure much reminiscent of a feudal system with tiered voting rights and privileges based on (in-system) virtual property. The anti-modern gist is underlined by Yarvin quoting lead Nazi theorists (at least once) in his writings.
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)
Some of the more interesting takes on this are GunJS and it's associated stack (sea, rad, dam etc - https://github.com/amark/gun)
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.
Most ideas in this article are not new (criticism of yarvin's ideas and how they are embedded in urbit), the article itself is from May 4th 2019 which may warrants us to ask whether all facts stated are still up to date (ie. does yarvin still in fact own sizeable address space in urbit?).
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.
Because its originally error codes. 0 is "all went well", != 0 is an error code telling you why it failed. I'd guess which then got things added like "programA && programB" as "A went well, so do B and check if B goes well", which kinda gives the logic value true to 0.
Thanks for the disambiguation, always been hard to read through their terminology without allocating a significant amount of time. I have always been curious about Urbit but now no need to waste time anymore. Moving on!
Love this comment, sure Urbit is shit in that way Solid is shit but somehow Solid is not canceled for being communist while Urbit is fascist. The Cathedral at work for you.
The prescriptive part of neoRX has always been retarded but the descriptive part is on the money.
I’m really confused about what any of this is. It seems people are getting caught up in accepting the premise of fringe elements and arguing against them on their own turf.
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.
I read some urbit.com post that said ~"We want people to be able have control of their data without having to be linux sysadmins".
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.
I think part of urbits argument against installing apache and wordpress is: it's hard to maintain by non-sysAdmins and not very portable (in case people want to exit). In theory, urbit can be updated seamlessly through the chain of sponsorship (galaxy > stars > planets) and if a start or planet don't like their sponsor (lord?) they can pack their bags and look for another sponsor (urbit is contained inside a single folder).
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)
These ideas are already being obsoleted as we speak by various edge computing approaches like Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, etc. It's not there yet and these are just the low level building blocks but I'm sure we are getting there, but in a different way.
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.
The article in question deals with this quite a bit. Even though he has retired, he still has a large amount of control over the project in terms of the virtual property that he owns.
> Dog-whistles have been identified in some of his writing about Urbit and its design, including his leaning on Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt for questions around Urbit’s governance.
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...)
> used as one of the essential thinkers in the legal teaching
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."
Yes, but you haven't answered my question. Is he or not considered as an essential thinker in the political/legal domains (in the sense that he is mandatory teaching in some professions)?
In the case he be "an essential thinker" you can rest assured that he is so mainly for his role in justifying the leader-cult of Nazi-Germany, just as Hitler might be mentioned as an "essential leader" in history.
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).
Honestly it is quite obvious that the writer of the article has issues with fringe politics and people of differing opinion not only that but they don’t even explain Urbit but instead waste the readers time on yelling “muh nathzees” look I disagree and dislike some of his ideas and don’t care about the rest of them and he has only said a couple good things from what I know but being dishonest about a tech project he isn’t involved on anymore is pathetic so perhaps the author should stop being dishonest and giving people he doesn’t like free publicity?
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.