How Urbit Failed with Adina Glickstein
In this episode, I talk with Adina Glickstein — Master’s student in Media Studies under Nathan Schneider at UC Boulder and editor-at-large at Spike Art Magazine — whose recent Compact Mag article, The Rise and Fall of Urbit finally gave me the excuse to talk about Urbit on the podcast and why its failing. We unpack what Urbit is trying to be (although many don't seem to agree), its creator Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug, philosopher of the alt-right), and how its governance structure mirr...
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Transcript
To casually say you're going to make a startup to make an a completely different Internet starting from the ground up, create your own programming language that I've heard also funny stories about your own operating system. It's like a very tall order. I was just exposed
to, like, the tyranny of web two platforms from sunup to sundown every day. So I was kinda seduced by this vision of the more beautiful computer that Arabic claimed to be building. Their political program was basically, like, instead of democratically elected governments, we should have a patchwork of feudal city states overseen by CEO kings that would solve all the problems of American society and other.
So somehow, this, like, weirdo goofball on the Internet writing extremely just kinda rage bait type of stuff and just, like, edge lordy type of things, We are in the timeline where his work has become important and where we can clearly see the influence in today with, like, major figures in the Trump presidency.
People were generally really smart and interesting. I met some people through Assembly who I still talk with. We kind of joke that the real Irbit is the friends we made along the way.
This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your Internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mix net to scramble your Internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mix net mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Pay in crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to z k powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at nim.com. Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist podcast, and I have a guest here today. Her name is Adena Glickstein. She's a master's student in media studies under Nathan Schneider at UC Boulder and the editor at large at Spike Art magazine writing about the intersection of tech and art for, quite a few years. And I'm having her on today because she recently wrote a piece titled the rise and fall of Urbit in compact mag, And I have been wanting to talk about Urbit for such a long time, but haven't been able to yet find someone who would be great to talk about this. So when I found this piece and I found Adina wrote it, I reached out so that she can explain a bit about what Urbit is, why it's so weird, how it connects to all the network state stuff, the weird connection with Curtis Yarvin, all these things. Yeah. I think there is a lot to talk about. So, hopefully, we can touch all the points during our, during our interview. But maybe just to start off, Edina, if you want to explain a bit what exactly is Urbit since yeah. I think it's it's it's a weird one to explain, so I think it's a good one to start.
Yeah. Thanks, Josh, and thanks for having me. So as you say, this is a bit of a hard question right from the jump. But in as simple terms as I can muster, Urbit is a tech startup, and their product is essentially, private personal cloud computer with, an ecosystem of applications all kind of linked together across a decentralized network. So one can kind of liken it to the vision of Ethereum as a decentralized cell phone owned world computer. I think that they're trying to build something similar, but it's been around for about twenty years. And no one who is currently working on Herbit can quite seem to agree on what it is they're building. So within this already quite ambitious vision, there are a lot of competing ideas and priorities about what what it is and what it should be.
Yeah. So, like, if if I if if I can take a stab at what it is as far as I can understand it, it's like an attempt to make a new Internet, just a different Internet that doesn't necessarily rely on the specific, infrastructure that we normally rely on, to use the Internet like HTTP and etcetera etcetera, everything that that goes underneath that, and instead use almost similar in the idea around blockchains, a distributed or decentralized network of computers to host everything and then call that use that as a different Internet,
more or less. That's really well put. Yeah. And it has its own operating system and its own programming language. Like, every aspect of the stack has been reinvented from the ground up, but it is. It's an attempt to create a new Internet or as as its founder has described it, a new operating system that was designed with the use case of networked computing in mind, which none of the operating systems like Mac or Windows that we use on the day to day, really were. So it's a really ambitious reinvention of networked computing.
Yeah. And so it's taking on a a really big, problem space. It's not Mhmm. To to casually say you're going to make a startup to make in a completely different Internet starting from the ground up, create your own programming language that I've heard also funny stories about your own operating system. It's like a very tall order, and it is one that ostensibly you know, a lot of people are attracted to in some way, including myself when I when I first heard about it just because for a lot of people, I mean, the current Internet, I think just people are are are disappointed by what we have right now and are looking for something different. But, yeah, I guess I'm curious for you as, like, like, choosing Urbit as, like, the thing you study for your masters. I'm curious what was what was it that attracted you to it?
Yeah. So I I first became interested in Urbit around 2020 in large part because as you say, the current Internet really sucks. Mhmm. There are a lot of problems with it. These problems especially came to the fore in my own life around the first wave of pandemic lockdowns when a lot of my social life was cattled online and my work was all on a computer. And I was just exposed to, like, the tyranny of web two platforms from sunup to sundown every day. And my frustration with the state of what's sometimes described now as, like, techno feudalism really came to a head. So I had a real hunger for alternatives to the Internet as it existed. And around then, I was starting to become interested in web three, specifically the vision for Ethereum of building, like, a new user owned Internet that we create together, this idea of new infrastructure that Urbit also proposes. So when around that time, I met some people who worked for Tuan, and they described to me what they were building using the rhetoric that was kind of baked into Tuan's marketing at that time of building a more beautiful computer Mhmm. I was really sold on it. It seemed like a very needed and an elegant alternative to the, like, frustrating stack that I hadn't really known how to extricate myself from up until that point. So it filled a need, and it was a need for for privacy, for protection from surveillance, and ad tech, potentially a way out of the attention economy. At that time, there was some talk about, like, users seeing upside for the value they created in networks. And a lot of these really resonated with me as, like, appealing alternatives to platform capitalism. So I was kinda seduced by this vision of the more beautiful computer that are they claimed to be building.
Right. So just to maybe also add that Talon, like, t l o n, is a Talon Foundation is the, I mean, I guess, the main entity that creates Urbit, if I'm not mistaken, or something like that?
So yeah. Kind of. So Talon Corporation is a private company that was spun off from the Urbit Foundation, I believe, twenty nineteen to accelerate Urbit's development. Before that, Urbit was being built by a nonprofit foundation on much the same model as most open source software projects. There are still developers working under the Urbit Foundation to build on Urbit today, as well as other private companies acting in the space. Part of the complication is that Urbit is somehow both, like, a tech startup and an open source project. And there are people supported by and housed under a number of different entities contributing to its development. But Tlon Corporation, t l o n, which takes its name from, Jorge Luis Borges' story as does Urbit itself, was cofounded by Urbit's creator, Curtis Yarvin, yeah, in 2019.
So, yeah, I think so the the in case people, you know, unsure if they heard that right, like, yes, Curtis Yarvin is the founder of of Hermit, the original creator. He I mean, like you mentioned earlier, started it twenty years ago, but I think it, in particular, gained a lot of attention at the same time that you were getting into in 2020, which I think co of course, coincides with the rise of web three as well and the narratives around web three, around a user owned Internet. So a lot of people that I knew who were involved in the crypto space were also, having at least a bit of interest in Urbit and were buying kind of the Ethereum NFTs that were used as, like, placeholders for having a space within within the Urbit Internet, if you want to call it that, the Urbit, galaxy, I think maybe it's called or I think they're anyway, I'll I'll let you explain the the the hierarchy actually a bit later because I think that's also really fascinating. But, yeah, do you wanna explain a bit actually for context the relationship to Curtis Yarvin and maybe for really quickly for people who may not know who is Curtis Yarvin?
Yeah. Absolutely. Also really fast. I just got a date wrong. Sloan was founded in 2014 to support Irvin's development so much earlier than than I became aware of any of this. But I think, like, starting in 2002 or '3, I've read, like, was when
he claims to have started Yeah. Working on
the official timeline on urbit.org, they claim that Urbit started as a, quote, open ended personal project or an independent study PhD by Curtis Yarvin in 2002. Independent study PhD, though. And, yeah, so Talon was founded in 2014 to better support its development. But up until that point, to the best of my knowledge, it was mainly being worked on in isolation by this guy, Curtis Yarvin. It is, for all intents and purposes, Yarvin's brainchild. And Yarvin is a Berkeley computer science PhD dropout who has been toying away at this, yeah, very ambitious project for something on the order of twenty years, with the idea to design a new operating system that's better suited to the world of networked computing. And he, Yarden, is maybe better known in some circles for his pseudonym, Magis Moldbug. He wrote a blog under that name in the late two thousands or early twenty tens called Unqualified Reservations, which was a thought leader in the neoreactionary online space. He was involved with what's sometimes called the dark enlightenment alongside thinkers like Nick Land espousing this kind of bonkers fusion of, like, monarchism and libertarianism, sometimes called neocameralism. That was Yavin's term for it. Their political program was basically, like, instead of democratically elected governments, we should have a patchwork of feudal city states overseen by CEO kings that would solve all the problems of American society and other society today. And this, like, neo reactionary vision gained a lot of traction in certain online circles around that time, but also got a lot of blowback. You know, rightly so. Mhmm. And in part because mold bug is notoriously really anti democratic. He's famous for introducing phrases like rage, retire all government employees, and was influential on people like Peter Thiel, who sort of notoriously claimed that he views democracy and freedom as incompatible or on people like Steve Bannon. So Moldbug's influence has, like, seeped into the mainstream of the American alt right over that time. And the identities of, like, Curtis Yarvin and Mencius Moldbug are in some ways distinct, but in other ways kind of inextricable. So that's the the mind that Irvut is springing forth from.
Right. Right. So the one, you know, kind of point I would love to a connection I'd love to make, of course, is when you the this term, neocameralism, for people who have listened to all the episodes around the network states and, our critiques of it, it sounds a lot like network states question mark. This was a a a connection that I had made back in I can't remember if it was 2022 or 2023, at Suzallu when I was there. You can find there the presentation that I gave at Suzallu from that time where I explicitly made the connection between network states and Patchwork by Curtis Yarvin and this neo cameralism term. So somehow, this, like, weirdo goofball on the Internet writing extremely just kinda rage bait type of stuff and just, like, edge lordy type of things has somehow we are we are in the timeline where his work has become important and, where we can clearly see the influence in, now today with, like, major figures in the Trump presidency. He's getting interviewed by the New York Times and whoever else whereas before he had been kind of ignored. Yeah. He's also and he's also the the founder of Herbert.
Yeah. No. Exactly. And just to tease out that connection, I think, between Herbit and network states a little bit more, and we can get into it more later if you want. But Mhmm. Just to make this point really explicit, I think both adopt this vision of exit as, like, the mode of politics, which I know you've talked about a lot in your critiques of the network state. But, like, as as you and Primavera spoke about, like, there is no internal politics within the network state. There is only geopolitics. There's only conflict between two opposing network states because I think the ideal form of governance in a network state as in Irbid, and as in Yarden's writings as mold bug it's just that if you don't like how things are going, you can fork, you can hit the road, you can vote with your feet and exit. He's not a big fan of democratically accountable governance or, you know, voice. He sees that as politics derogatory. And Mhmm. That instead of, like, internal discourse and consensus building, the way to make change in one's community is to leave that community and start a new one if you don't like, you know, what's happening. Right. And that comes directly from a lot of his blogging on unqualified reservations in, like, the late aughts.
Right. Right. So let's, you know, move oh, so we've talked about, you know, like, abstractly kind of these large high level critiques about things, but, like, what was it actually like being on the inside a bit, I guess? I never went to an Urbit event before. So you wrote in your piece, you know, your the process of falling in and out of love with Urbit and being, like, an active participant in the Urbit community. So I'm curious if you can kinda give us the the the TLDR of that of that whole experience.
Yeah. No. Totally. So I started going to Urbit meetups. I went to a couple in person when I was living in Berlin and met really, like, kind, cool, interesting people. I was active on the network and had some nice chats. There's a great, super vibrant experimental music community on Erbit. A lot of people making really good DJ mixes, great, like, ambient music scene, which is one of my side interests. Sounds like some of the nicest things to see are you. Like Yeah. Very much so. And I think that connection is, like, is in people's minds. Yeah. You know? People see themselves in that lineage for sure.
I I respect that. I've heard, like I don't know if you've you've seen I can't remember who said it, but, like, they claimed that Nick Land didn't do that much for philosophy, but he did make some good music or something like that in the nineties.
Yeah. No. Fair enough. And my my my own interest in the CCRU, and, admittedly, I fell a little more on the Marc Fisher side than the Nick Land's side. But I I studied abroad in London and university and became really enamored with the CCRU and a lot of these kind of nineties ideas about philosophy and cybernetics and jungle music. So that probably conditioned my interest in urban. And I, yeah, I did. I connected with other people who shared that profile through the urban community. So in in 2022, after I had been active on the network for a couple years, I attended urban assembly with the intention of covering it for Spike, a part magazine that I was working for full time at that point. And my experience in the community and at Assembly was by and large really positive. Like, Urbit definitely feels like, at least at that point in time, it was a shelling point for really, like, smart, interesting, thoughtful people, many of whom had political leanings that were very different from my own. But I think, like, the tenor of discourse was really respectful. People were generally really smart and interesting. I I met some people through Assembly who I still talk with. We kind of joke that the real Irbit is the friends we made along the way. But, also, I think at assembly in 2022, I started to realize that the broader vision for the project or the direction that it was heading raised some some ideological quibbles for me in that a lot of the work being done at that point was trying to align Irbid explicitly with the network state. Like, Balaji was the keynote speaker that year, and there were some other panels, including, like, people who had architected the DAO laws in Wyoming or who had worked on the legal team involved in establishing Prospera, the special economic zone in Honduras. And, yeah, a lot of these movements that really sought to advance, like exit as a mode of politics.
And I I have some some issues. Did you know about a lot of these things beforehand,
or was it there listening to them then you're like, oh, I don't know if I agree with this? I I had a vague awareness of some of this stuff beforehand. Like I knew about, I knew about, like, sea studying and some of Peter Teal's, like, failed exit movements in the past, but I wasn't that intimately familiar with it. And I remember a moment when I was sitting at a panel at assembly, at a panel called forking the American code base. It was a And the sales pitch of this panel. No. Blondie was not on this one, but it was like the warm up to the network state keynote. Yeah. And Justin Murphy was on this one. Ah, Okay. And, like, I I just remember sitting there thinking, like, they're just advocating neocolonialism. They're literally just saying, like, go take your Bitcoin bucks to Latin America and build what you will with no concern for, like, the ways of life already being lived there. And it felt really like I don't know. I had a good, like, lefty liberal arts education, and I was, like, indoctrinated in the post colonial critical thought cabal. So there was just a lot of stuff that I was, like, shocked by how how on the face, however it was Right. That they were calling for this kind of thing.
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That is another thing, like, especially somehow I mean, I don't know. I guess, like, one of the the big things that I try to bring when I talk to network state people is just the critique that it is neocolonial. But I also find that a lot of people don't even know what that means or if they they I mean, they just kinda, like, justify it as, like it's, like, so like, it is so on the nose. Like, they they don't they may not know about it, and then they, like, say the exact things to look out for when you're trying to, like, assess if something is neocolonial. We're bringing them jobs. You know? We're bringing money into their country. Like, we're really helping them out. Like, it's, yeah. I've gotten it's I had very frustrating conversations with people about this, I just say, to keep it short. And did you find that, like, was any of this kind of developed in, like, Trumpism as well or with, like because I what I feel like they're kind of in the lead up at least of this election, there was I've it feel like almost like this and I feel like it probably has, like, some relation to do with Urbit and some relation to do with, the ladies' NFTs and stuff of, like, this kind of undercurrent of, like, intellectual, quote, unquote, right wing people that I that I find just, like, so strange. But, anyways
No. There was totally that contingent at Assembly that was present. I didn't touch it that much. Like, I was peripherally aware that some of those people were in the room. Fair. Fair. And so,
I would love to talk about how exactly Urbit works, a bit at least. We don't have to go into, like, that deep of technical detail, of course. But maybe to, like, preface this, what I think is really funny that I I read and I believe in in your article, that Mars review, if I understand correctly, was a publication that was meant to cover Erbit and, like, the Erbit ecosystem. They were hosted on Erbit at first, but then they had so many technical difficulties, it sounds like, that they just switched to Substack eventually. Now they have a Substack, and I don't know if they're on Urbit anymore.
So no. I believe they are they are still somewhat active as an Urbit group. And the initial conceit was for it to be a literary magazine, you know, on the model of, like, the New York Review of Books. And they were publishing content that was sometimes about Irbit, sometimes more just general, like, outlet especially because that demographic was interacting with Irbit a fair amount around the time that I got interested in it. So they were publishing, yeah, book reviews and, like, literary essays in addition to kind of tech criticism that spoke to the need for platforms like Urbit. The editor of the Mars Review published a book about the history of Urbit on Urbit. But then as their readership grew and I think as they especially kind of gained cultural purchase with, like, quote, unquote, nontechnical users, it just became prohibitively challenging or limiting to publish exclusively on Herbit. So they launched a Substack, which is now, I think, where most of their engagement probably comes from. And, yeah, it's kind of a a funny irony that speaks to the problem that I think a lot of creators who were drawn to Urbit really quickly faced, which is that it was being marketed as this platform for artists and writers who could, like, monetize their creative work through these new pathways. I think much like the sales pitch of Web three. But then in reality, like, the infrastructure was really buggy. It was frustrating, and the audience just wasn't there. So they reverted to where the audience was. And it's like, you know, a microcosm of, I think, what's happened with Urbit at scale.
Yeah. So maybe we can so could you explain a bit about how how it works? Because Urbit, I think, when you hear when you when I kinda, like, started learning about how it worked, I was kinda like, this is very it was very strange. I mean, it was like a different it's a different economic model compared to to how the Internet exists today, but I don't know if I would necessarily call it a better model or not like a a particularly one that I find that exciting. And I say this as someone also who was very close to buying a a a planet, I think they're called. But, yeah, I'll let you explain it.
Yeah. So, like, at the at the interface level, it's basically an app that you can run on your computer that has its own UX that has, like, a forum y group chat kinda thing, which is what most people talk about when they talk about Urbit in addition to some other apps, like a radio station, like an anonymous gossip platform, a bible verse a day app. And it's running on its own operating system and keyed into its own decentralized network. An address space on this network is apportioned as as Ethereum NFTs. So there there are three tiers of address space in Irvin's identity system called planets, stars, and galaxies. And planets are the smallest and cheapest form of permanent address space. Each planet has a host star, and then each star in turn is housed under a galaxy. And galaxy owners have governance power over Urbit as a tech project, basically, through what's called the Galactic Senate, which is something like a corporate board of directors to the Urbit Foundation, which is one of these many entities that's overseeing the project. Although I believe the Galactic Senate is a distinct entity from the actual board of directors of the Urban Foundation, which is a Cayman Foundation. And the disconnect between those two will become important. So, yeah, tracing the project's governance structure is, like, really a challenge. But, basically, it is a peer to peer network with a federated hierarchy of different types of address space where your power over the way that the network is run and the way that the project continues to be developed is directly proportional to the amount of digital real estate that you own.
Almost sound sounds a lot like neocameralism, if I'm not mistaken.
Uh-huh. In fact, I think has, like, gleefully referred to it as techno feudalism. This is his his desire
for the way that things proceed. Have a planet, then you have to, like you're ruled by your star who is ruled by their galaxy. And a galaxy has several stars, and a star has several planets.
Yeah. And the way that I've heard people describe it in the past is that as a planet, your relationship to your star is basically like a user of the normal Internet's relationship to their Internet service provider. So it's unclear to me how much, you know, project level governance power stars are really meant to have. But as far as deciding what is Erbit, which aspects of this extremely ambitious vision are gonna get realized and in what way, that decision making power comes from galaxy owners. And then, of course, each of these, like, parcels of digital real estate has speculative financial value as Right. An Ethereum NFT, which has been
hugely important in capitalizing Right. The project. And so with the plan as well so, like, if I'm thinking as if I'm a individual user, do I need to own a planet or something like that in order to use Urbit?
I think there are temporary forms of address space that you can launch to, like, access the network. Yeah. Temporarily Mhmm. Like comets. I don't know if those are still around or how they work, but I remember at one point, there was a way of getting on the network without owning Right. Permanent address space. But, yes, basically, to participate in Irbid, one
should own a planet. And the do you remember how many planets there were? If I can't I think there was, like it was less than the amount of people in the world or something like that. It wasn't it was, like, maybe a couple billion, I wanna say. Maybe maybe you'll find it.
Yeah. Billion. It's about 4,000,000,000. So address space is, in theory, limited, which is Right. Right, related to to in value. And so 128 bit identity space. So 256 galaxies, about 65,000 stars, and then about 4,000,000,000 planets Right. And comets under the planets.
But no one knows how comets work. No one talks about You don't matter if you don't own a planet. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. But it's true. It's like, go away. And then each each of these things, if I understand correctly, have, like they have, like, code names as well, which are, like, you may you may have seen them if you traveled in the Internet, like, and been around orbit circles. There there's, like it has the the tilde on either side of them or something like that, and they're kind of like you can pronounce them in English, but they don't mean anything type of words.
Yeah. It's called a pat pee, and it's derived from the, like, the bit identifier for your planet. So my old one, my planet that I lost access to a couple years ago, very sadly, but that I was the most emotionally attached to was called. And at, you know, assemblies and meetups, you hear people calling each other by their app fees instead of their government names sometimes, and it's really Right. It has a real, like, sci fi cast to it or, like, fantasy Yeah.
I think it is interesting how they use these little tricks to kinda make it cute and to kinda create some amount of culture within, you know, the cohort of people who are who are using Urbit. There's something there's maybe something to learn from that. Everyone needs a cute little name Yeah. That they can call their friends. That's not their real name. Yes. Everyone needs a little nickname. Yes. But so yeah. Talk so, like, clearly, like, Urbit is a technical instantiation of what we can probably say is, like, dark enlightenment politics, political theory, what they believe ideally how the world ought to be run. They're doing it in this almost, like, what's it, like, playground type of setting or using the digital digital space to kind of play around with it so we don't have to deal with, you know, perhaps some neocolonial aspects to it because nobody actually lives on the Internet. There's no one living on your planet. You can simply just buy it. And so it it mimics this kinda, like, digital terra nullius, but also provides this, limited supply to where there's ostensibly, you know, some upside to be gained from it. But, yeah, why do you think what what kind of, like, something I've been wrestling with for a while is that, like, the right has been generally a lot more proactive with building its own technical infrastructure. I don't know if it's so simple as simply, like, there are more tech guys on the right, and they're more willing to take on insane projects. But, yeah, I'm curious what what your thoughts are since you were, you know, being there in person. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So I think there are a number of possible reasons for that.
The most obvious one being because they have money for it and that people like Peter Thiel are really willing to invest in projects that advance their own anti democratic views. There are a lot of really worthy and important DIY tech infrastructure projects that don't have that right wing valence. Yeah. Thinking about, like, the perma computing movement. Mhmm. Right? But there's no money in that. Right. So it's not as high profile or it's not as sustainable. But I also think beyond just following the money, there's maybe a more emergent way in which anti democratic power creeps into tech projects. And it has to do with this whole, like, voice and exit distinction. Like, if people can't just speak up and weigh in on the things that they wanna change in their community or, you know, in a pure production setting, in a software project they're building is their only way of registering their difference of opinion to vote with their feet or fork it or start something else. If that's the case, then, like, just numerically, you end up having more tech projects led by people who believe in a politics of exit because they have to keep leaving existing things and building new ones because there's, like, no conflict resolution internally. I don't know if that is, like, provably true in practice, but this is kind of one of my hypotheses is, like, you just get more new things starting because people don't believe in working shit out. Right. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I I think there's also something there that, like, speaks to a broader problem within dev culture where people who might not, like, self identify as political in any particular way or set out to make something political end up taking up, like, a right leaning or at least highly individualist position, which you see some of when you hear Yarvin talk about his own childhood. Mhmm. It's like he didn't wanna work together with other people. He didn't wanna play outside with his friends. He wanted to be unbothered, like being a precocious math genius in peace. And there's this belief in, like, meritocracy that goes so far as to treat social relationships as, like, an impediment Right. To the, like, individual genius. And this, like, founder mythology Yeah. Can be really toxic and can, I think, lead people to over index on an idea of individualism that leads them into, like, right libertarianism? Or Coraline Ada Emke, who's, you know, responsible for creating code of conduct for open source contributors, has written really beautifully about what she calls the dehumanizing myth of the meritocracy in software development, which is this idea that, like, achievement and bootstrapping should be respected above everything, including, like, the delicate work of building relationships with the other people who we're making things with. And I think all of these kind of perspectives that fetishize, like being the best all by yourself, like, naturally lead one to take up a more right leaning or individualist libertarian position when in reality, like, intellect doesn't exist in a vacuum. But if you have to fight to believe that it does, then you kind of back yourself into that corner. So there's this, like, marriage of convenience between the situated norms of software production and certain right leaning ideas. And then, of course, this all ties back into the history of cyber libertarianism, the people like John Perry Barlow being really influential in the early days of the World Wide Web. The idea that cyberspace is this new frontier to be conquered. I think all those ideas will resonate with someone who has a certain perspective about, yeah, social relationships that has a little more of a right wing cast to it.
Yeah. Definitely, there is something to say for just the norms of software development and how, that just lends itself well to a lot of right wing politics, unfortunately. And just, like, the way that software development is taught and just the way that the the the culture has been produced within that type of work. For one reason or another, it really, like, focuses on the individual, like, hacker coder who can, like, build entire applications all by himself if he was just to, like, be given all the tools, that he could that he could possibly need. And so I think, like, with I think it's interesting to say with, like, this exit idea, this obsession with exit maybe, is that, because even if they're not political, if they want to prove themselves as someone who can make cool things, then they would go and get venture capital. Like, they can keep they explicitly keep making things that are investable, perhaps. And so there is always, like, money flowing in in that way because it also they they don't care necessarily to reject investor logic, you know, as much as VIN is wanting to be alternative and, like, create this new, alternative Internet through Urbit. Like, it it's it seems to be having the same kind of process that all these VC invested tech companies have had or maybe at, like, an accelerated rate because of its particularness or I mean, it has certain certain things that are very alternative to it, but they're specific to it. So, yeah, like, I think just the the plethora of things that a 16 z can invest in and Marc Andreessen being so over the right wing that maybe that's why they keep getting to go again.
Yeah. No. Exactly. Exactly.
So before the interview, you also shared with me some news from Urbit. There's a little bit of a drama that is ongoing at this moment that I would love I would love for you to spill the tea for us. What exactly is going on in the Urbit world? Are are people happy with it? Do they like the direction? Yeah.
Absolutely. So maybe a a bit of backstory to the t, is that for many years, Curtis Yarvin was pretty distant from Urbit. He was not officially working on the project. And this was the case when I became interested in it. Like, the year that I went to assembly, he wasn't there. He wasn't officially named on any of the project documentation. Some people speculate that he was, like, forcibly distanced from it as it approached market readiness because people were afraid that his association would be kinda toxic. But then in August 2024, as the Irvin Foundation was rapidly running out of money, Jarvin kind of unceremoniously walked back onto the project in some, like, unnamed leadership capacity. Then he notionally named someone else as the director of the Urban Foundation. But basically, Yarvin was pulling strings. He returned as the public face of the project. He gave a number of talks about the future of Urban, and he was really like he he styled it as, like, a founder's triumphant return to rescue his company from being run into the ground by the people who were leaving in the interim. And in the maybe last four or five months, he's been a little quieter. He stopped giving his wartime addresses and fireside chats, and a new acting executive director of the Irvit Foundation, a guy named Ryan Muir, has been leading things quite, you know, competently and quietly. But as of a couple of weeks ago, there was something of a coup as several members of the community have described it. One year attempted to fire Curtis, and the board immediately retaliated. So on June 25, the board of directors of the Irbit Foundation, which, remember, is not the same thing as the galactic senate, voted Right. To remove Neir as the executive director and to install Curtis officially in his place. So to officially grant Curtis the title of executive director of the Urban Foundation. And in response to that, NEAR has launched a proposal to maintain control, which is currently up for a vote in the galactic senate. And as of this recording, as of this morning, is tied 19 to 19 Oh. With about half of Galaxy owners still yet to vote and voting open for, like, two more weeks. So the Urbit community is deeply divided about whether, you know, this prior director who was a long time contributor to Irvit and is really aligned with a lot of the devs who have been extremely loyal to the project. Or, you know, the other side of the split is people who are loyal to Curtis, maybe people who really believe in his founder mythology more than in what Irbid is right now, or to the VCs who have recently invested in Irbid and who wanna push it in a more financially expedient direction. Mhmm. That really hinges on Yarden's persona as its leader. Mhmm. And the long time devs see this as a betrayal. They see this as promoting Curtis as a figure over Erbit as a project, which may once have been his brainchild, but is now the result of a lot of different people's work and could be something different or something more ambitious than this kind of compromised vision of what they see Curtis to be pushing today. So they're essentially, like, organizing against Yarvin. Mhmm. And I I don't think many people involved in the project would cast it in those terms of, like, labor organizing against capital. Right. But the split between the developers and then, like, the founder and his venture backers, that's basically what's going on. Right. And there there's now a petition where any users, not just Galaxy owners, but like planets or anyone with any amount of address space can sign in support of the potentially ousted director's, proposal. So it can sign in support of, like, the dev side, the labor side, which is interesting because, basically, this drama has created, like, an emerging mechanism for voice based governance in urban, like contravening the project's entire history and all of YARVIN's design intentions where the only way to make your voice heard is to fork and do something else. Like no voice which there have been efforts to do in the past. Like, no. Yeah. And now they're suddenly like, wait. Right? Suddenly, everyone's like, wait. We want voice.
Yeah. That's I mean, to me, incredible. But, like, it's kind of I mean, it's kind of, like, unsurprising, of course. Like, these things, like, always happen. It's just kind of, like I think it it's it's a a clear it's like a clear situation of when just the contradictions manifest themselves with dark enlightenment thinking and, like, trying to do things in groups and how those just, like, don't really align super well. But I looked I I read the like, they they made a website. The I guess it was the the the director and, like, I guess, supported by a bunch of the devs. And he says, quote, I was wrong to think working with Cardus was viable. That was really funny. I mean, it doesn't really go into, like, too much detail as to why it's not working if I'm not mistaken, but, like, interesting, to see that. Gregus, is the so there is also I think you were mentioning to me before, like, a part of it has to do with, like, the direction of the project that he wants to take it versus the developers. I don't think you would you mind explaining a bit, about that?
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think that in the last few months, some people have come to believe that Yarden is compromising on his initially very ambitious vision for Urbit and that because of the need to raise money to continue developing the project, he's, like, narrowed or specified his idea of what it should be. This could go along a couple different lines. I've seen him talking about trying to make Irbit like, the main digital identity standard to compete with things like Worldcoin. So, you know, understandably, a lot of the devs think that's a really bad direction for it to take. And one of the other fault lines right now is actually that a lot of people who have been working on Urbit are much more explicitly aligned with crypto than Yarvin is. And they take issue with his unwillingness to brand Urbit as a crypto project, despite the fact that it uses blockchain infrastructure. So part of the rift is that the developers want Urbit to be explicitly a crypto project. Yarvin is trying to trot out new ways of positioning it as like an investable venture backed, like, Silicon Valley startup that needs to become a profitable app. Whereas the community and the developers see it as, like, along the lines of many other blockchain projects with high, you know, ambitious aims, perhaps, like, I think what Ryan Neer, the outgoing or hopefully not outgoing, but the the contested director has said is as a revolutionary infrastructure for user ownership and coordination.
So that's the split. Which is quite different than all exit and no voice. He's your own Internet. Yeah. But it's super funny. I mean, in this case, you know, if we continue with your with your framing, labor has chosen crypto. But in in part, I mean, actually, when you when you say that way, it starts to make it more sense to me, I think. Like, by the the creation of the token, it they it's, like, a desire for, exposure to upside. Right? Like, to give you the the ones who are building it more exposed upside and not just the I mean, I don't know what their equity if they're sharing equity or have an equity split or something like that that does expose developers to up to upside or not. But yeah.
No. As far as I know, the financial model right now is just cut along the, like, planet star galaxy hierarchy where your exposure to upside is just tied to the value of the overall network and then the proportion of that address space that you own on the network. Right. So I think a token would in some ways, a token would be more equitable. With four like, with 4,000,000,000
planets, a person really only needs one, I guess, in order to use it. There's not that much incentive to buy. Like, a lot of buying has to happen before I would think upside happens within that the the real estate digital real estate model versus the token is, like, boom. You have if you have liquidity, I mean, you have upside, especially as a as someone who would be given tokens at launch, I guess.
Right. And perhaps unsurprisingly, has been really adamantly opposed to the whole token idea and has even said that that's why he hired the old executive director of the Irbid Foundation last summer because the idea of a token was coming up. Yeah. Right. That he I think he just thinks that it's a bad look. He thinks it would be, like, a trash. Which is which is interesting because he has a lot of fans in the crypto space, I think.
Yeah. So it it is funny. It's, like, almost like he hates he he dislikes the people who are his fans or at least one segment of them being crypto people.
Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I don't know. I mean, I I think one of the takeaways of this whole debacle is that it's becoming, again, abundantly clear that he's deeply individual, deeply idiosyncratic, and extremely hard to work with. Right. And it's funny because it's, like, to your point earlier, you know, oh, who could have possibly guessed that someone who holds beliefs like his is, like, at heart, a deeply antisocial person who's kind of uncompromising and you wouldn't want as your boss. Right. Like, who would have guessed? Right. It feels also like a manifestation of kind of, like,
type of thinking, like, effective accelerationist type of thinking, who are also very inspired by Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, these people. I mean, I can't what the guy's name, like, Beth Beth Jayzos. Like Beth Jayzos. He I remember he he said something that actually was interesting. I mean, it was horrible, but it was interesting of, like, kind of describing the corporation as the extension of the founder, like, as a technology of extending the founder and, like, getting employees to do your will is, like, the extension of yourself as a founder. It's like it's kind of an extreme another type of extreme version of the founder myth that is just, like, taking the logic of off the, you know, software development and the soft crypto technology world and just taking it to another extreme. But, I mean, it was interesting to to for me because in a in a sense, it's kind of like he's kind of right. In a way, he's right. Like, you can reframe a corporation as a technology that extends oneself as you can think of, like, you know, a baseball bat extending oneself in some way. But, like, you know, it's also it's also bad. Like, it's also it also it also, like, is a manifestation of, like, in this case, specifically, like, market based authoritarianism, I guess, is kind of how I would I I think about it.
Right. Or at the most literal level, what is a corporation? It is an organization of people who are, like, coordinating to achieve a goal. And if you tend to see groups or organizations as an extension of your personal will or, like, malleable according to your own desires and beliefs. Like, that's a particular view of social life, and it's not the view that I hold. But, you know, people people in this space, some some of them very well might. I don't know. I haven't read the Beth Jesus tweet that you're referring to. It was a while ago. For I mean, I don't I don't like to look at
his post, but sometimes they pop up, and that one in particular struck me. But has any of this, like, tied into, like, anything around Trump and, like because Curtis Yarvin there there are constant reports out there of, like, Curtis Yarvin being at the you know, being in someone's ear, that he has some connection with Steve Bannon, but unclear whether they like each other. He's connected with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is connected to JD Vance. Has any of this kinda come up? Like, I I can see in part investors being like, no, Urbit. We got invested this guy because this guy has, like, the ear of someone in the president's ears. And, like, that's a a good investment, you know, something to invest in. So it's almost like overt corruption, but other people can also see it as problematic, of course.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know because in some ways, his influence over a lot of the people who now hold power in the US government has been, like, so over. The it doesn't even really need to be justified. Like, it doesn't matter whether he's friends with these people. You know? They've they've clearly read his blog or his ideas have filtered down Mhmm. In such a way as to have influence kind of irrespective of his own persona or behavior at this point. There is some, like, disagreement about how close exactly Curtis is to anyone in the current administration. Like, some people describe him as a guru to JD Vance, but then, you know, in his New York Times profile, Yarvin himself says, like, we've met once or twice. He kinda disavows that connection. Yeah. And I think he's, like, played it up at certain times and then played it down at others. So it's there's a lot of hedging around how how close they actually are. But the, like, the ideological connection is pretty clear. And I think a lot of, like, all right enlightenment intellectual ideas that are manifesting more in the mainstream today are in some way downstream of Curtis Yarvin, you know, more or less explicitly. And that people who weren't familiar with him by name before
are now, like, looking back at what he's done and tracing that intellectual lineage. Yeah. Yeah. It's been really weird to know, like Yeah. Kind of more mainstream liberals also know about Curtis Yarvin. It's like you're like dark enlightenment, like Nick Lamb type of like, all these things have just been, like, a weird thing that I've obsessed over the years that now all of a sudden are, like, mainstream. I, like, random liberals, I just, like, never expected to to ever care about this. Now suddenly, they have to. No.
No. Exactly. It's it's quite wild. I mean, there was a morning where I was at my dad's house, and he was reading the New York Times in the other room. And he's like, oh my god. Curtis Yarvin. Is that the guy that you've been yapping about all this time? Yeah. That's the one.
Oh, that's that's great.
But I do I mean, I think yeah. Like, correctly, people even people on the left who weren't familiar with Curtis Yarvin before are now looking at what's happening in The US and trying to make sense of a lot of the insanity and are terrified. And also probably kind of, like, titillated or satisfied in a perverse way to see that stuff like Doge is, like, being ripped from this, like, Internet philosopher's playbook. But there's there's some history there Yeah. Is is interesting and maybe gives people some, like, context to grab on to. I I gave a couple of talks to some Tesla takedown protesters
trying to explain to them the origins of Doge or, like, the kind of political roots of it and just having to explain Curtis Yarvin to, like, you know, people who are just I mean, they just I mean, good for them are not as chronically online as I am. And then I have not read all of these things that I don't wish upon most people. Having to explain, it just feels so strange. It's just, like, if it sounds really dumb and weird, it's because it is. And for some now, we have to take it seriously.
Yeah.
But so, with, I guess, with this coup, any thoughts on what you any predictions on what you think will happen?
It's so neck and neck right now. I mean, it's tied. So I really I have no idea what the outcome of the vote will be, but I do think that whatever happens, the odds that Yarmen loses power in any meaningful or permanent way are pretty low. Mhmm. As we've seen throughout the history of Irbit Mhmm. You know, there are moments when he steps back. There are moments when he takes the reins. But I think in the long arc of Irbit, Yarvin will probably always be
the benevolent dictator for life. Right. Right. Even if he gets kicked out, I think I've heard that he owns very significant portion of the planets or stars or galaxies or whatever. So
I don't know if that's true. And, again, this is like he's he's played it up at some points and played it down at others. I know that when he left Tuan initially, he still privately held some amount of address space, but, like, gave back also a meaningful amount of decision making power that was, like, vested in his private address ownership. So I think it's unclear. And that's part of the issue is, like, no one actually really knows how much of it Curtis holds at a given time. It's and it's impossible to trace. Right. Right.
So after all of this that we've talked about, I'm curious if you have any thoughts because in in in your, writing in the article, which I highly recommend people to check out again, you know, the kind of framing that generally and, like, also common in crypto, has a libertarian, root to it. The framing of all of, like, building technical infrastructure is through the frame of sovereignty or declaring or just expressing sovereignty over one's well, self sovereignty is usually the the the word, that's used. Is there anything there to salvage from Urbit for a kind of, like, more solidaristic movement tech movement? I think you you mentioned in the in the article that you were looking for solidarity actually instead of sovereignty. But, yeah, if if there's is there anything to salvage? And maybe if you could rebuild Erbit's governance, how would you how would you change it?
Yeah. So I think Urbit's point of departure, which is that we all need more sovereignty than we have under the current web two paradigm, remains totally correct. And it's just a question of how do you actualize it. And the conclusion that I've come to is that using Urbit as it presently exists does not grant me the kind of sovereignty that I am the most interested in, which is not necessarily, like, individual liberty, which I'm not even sure if it grants that Mhmm. To any meaningful measure. But, like, I I'm I'm given to see sovereignty as a matter of, like, strength and interdependence, And that's still something that I want from my experience of network computing. And maybe there are, like, little tendrils of projects that have started in the urban community that could lean towards that. One area where I see that being possible is some of the work being done around privacy. There's a lot of really interesting privacy related stuff coming out of the Urbit space, including, zero knowledge layer one blockchain called Nockchain, which recently launched and I find really interesting. And I think that there's a lot of important application for privacy tech on the left and in building solidarity movements. Of course, it all comes down to how it's deployed and the manner in which people use it and educate others about it and work together to steward it. But I think that there's a lot of potential there. Anne Brody is doing some really interesting work right now, both around, like, the rise of zero knowledge and also around alternatives to, like, the sovereign individual or the idea of, like, kind of libertarian anarchist sovereignty as it's been privileged in tech circles. And the answer that she offers instead is, like, relational autonomy, which is this kind of strength and interdependence instead of the fantasy of, like, the total independent self sovereign. So I hope that those ideas could find more realization through some of the privacy tech coming out of the ecosystem. Then to answer, I think, your second question, if I could rebuild Erbit's governance, how would I change it? I would structure in more pathways for voice from the outset, like, more for a for the kind of collective decision making and transparency and discourse about how the project is being steered that we're seeing now with stuff like the petition. And there have been attempts to do this over the years. Like, there's a GitHub page for urban improvement proposals kind of in step with the governance model that a lot of open source projects use for making more transparent decisions about development priorities, but it's, like, barely utilized. And I think that's probably because this wasn't structured into Urbit's governance from the outset. So I think, like, if I were to design it right now, I would bake in more accountability mechanisms like that. Mhmm. But I I think that the petition supporting Nir's proposal right now is a very cool thing. And, you know, who knows how different of a position Erbit would be in today if there had been more opportunities for the people who are closest to the metal across all tiers of ownership to exercise more voice and weigh in like that around other, like, pivotal development moments earlier on. Because I think a lot of those decisions have been made fairly unilaterally, whether by Sloane leadership or by Yarvin. Mhmm. Yeah. So just more more pathways for democratic accountability, which Yavin would dismiss as politics. But I think to anyone who's ever contributed to, like, a successful software project, this is just the kind of, like, frustrating but necessary work of consensus building that needs to be done.
I mean, you know, the way that he has it now is clearly not preventing politics. So, I mean, it's like that this I think this is what's like because this is something I've, like, repeated so many times with the network states that is just like, as as much as you don't want there to be politics, like, it's always there. You like, it's all political. It's not that people are politicizing things. It's that, like, it's just it it's just in the air. It exists, You know? And you gotta engage with it somehow. And it just ratchets
everything up instead of having, like, a nice civil discussion about where things should go. You have to have a coup. Like,
it's But in many ways, I think, it's a lot of people who fit his, you know, politics in many ways. Like, in in in feudal in the feudal times, like, there would be just continuous coups of, you know, assassinating a king or whatever to put in a new one or, you know, like, they're doing the thing that actually Curtis Yarvin has I think pretty explicitly has said, like, is the way things should go anyways. So So it is kinda funny when it's happening against him. He's all of a sudden like, woah, guys. Pump the brakes.
Yeah. Kind of gotta hand it to them.
Yeah. You would one one would think that networked networked computing would lend itself well to a form of collectivity that that does not that does not fit like a a libertarian politics or you would think would fit more a a politics of solidarity. So that's definitely something that, I'm also interested in, and I think a lot of people who are listening into are listening in. And we're hoping what crypto would become, but I think it's still taking some time, for us to get there.
I'm still waiting. But in the meantime, I'm still, you know, listening to your podcast and scheming about how that still may may yet come into being. One day. One day, comrade, we'll make it.
Well, thanks so much for coming on and for sharing, about Urbit. It was a weird one. It's a weird project to to talk about. I appreciate that you are doing your thesis on it and sharing the the type of ideas that are that were going on in that space and criticizing it appropriately. Where can people maybe read more about your work, if you like to point them anywhere?
Well, thank you, Josh, for having me and for bearing with me through a lot of the weirdness that I think inevitably arises in conversations about Irvette. Where can people read more of my work? Well, I write a monthly tech column for Spike Art magazine, which is called user error, and I think that might be of interest to some listeners here. I recently revived it after taking a little bit of a hiatus. So that'll be publishing monthly in the future. And I also occasionally write for some other places, mostly about art, And regrettably, the best way to keep track of what I'm publishing is Instagram. Mhmm. But, yeah, user error is, I think, the the plug that I would throw the most weight behind right now. Might be of most interest to folks around here. Yeah. Sure. I'll I'll have those plugs in the show notes.
But, yeah, thanks again, Adina. And, yeah, I'll catch you later. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you so much.