Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

This is a silly way to engage with a thought experiment. It's like if you responded to the popular "what if the allies lost WW2?" thought experiment with, "well, they didn't". Yes ... but you've missed the point.

I agree that this particular thought experiment about the best form of government is very silly because of how ridiculous the premise is.

But one thing that's slightly interesting about it is that it actually illuminates this difference of opinion I have with these people. Even if I accept the premise that it's possible to always have a benevolent dictator, I still don't agree that it's good!

People who imagine that they'll emerge victoriously from the chaos are really quite childish; odds are that the accelerationists will suffer like all the rest -- or worse. They're like children who read medieval history and imagine themselves princes and dukes, rather than dirt farmers laboriously clearing woods and plowing fields.

When I say that there's no way out but through, I mean that things are bad and getting worse, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than develop the skills to survive by any means necessary. (For some that means survivalism, or moving to Fiji, or just hanging out here and making lots of money.) Do you think we can vote our way out of this mess, with representative democracy? The way things are today? lol, lmao even.

As to the second part of your comment -- I'm reminded of what Jack Womack wrote in the 2000 reissue of Neuromancer: Has "the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"

> "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand.

> "Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger — every campaign, every ship at sea — must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilized or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many, as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king.

In general, I think that those experiments in autocracy that have taken place between 1850-Present rather disprove this notion. (One of the rare things old Schop was wrong about!) The Athenians were right: The affairs of state must be the affairs of every citizen. England's problems won't be solved by a restoration of the Stuarts (I think that the current Stuart heir is a 50 year old banker who is exceedingly uninterested in the job) but they can possibly be solved by dispensing with parliament and enabling qualified citizens to vote directly on laws and regulatory matters. I dare say you won't end up with butter knife bans this way.

I have this feeling that Nock, effectively the bytecode of Urbit, is inspired by Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay: https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html – for instance Nock only defines minimal math operations, as proposed in the essay.

The thing is, Paul's ideas in that essay were quite bad, based on a mathematical aesthetic that is both inefficient and aesthetically a poor fit for computing. That's fine for an essay, you throw some ideas out there and maybe they work or maybe they don't.

Then in Urbit Yarvin actually built the thing. And it's _terrible_. Hilariously bad. Some of the worst architecture you'll ever see. As a minor example they have a hexadecimal integer type... I understand i32, i64, etc., but a hexadecimal type is something you come up with if you don't understand how numbers work. There's literally a hundred other things just as embarrassing as that in the design.

It's fine to take a bad idea and explore it. But he didn't just try out the idea, he got people to invest, to develop the system, emotionally commit to this thing. Seeing community posts is sad, it's naive folks hoping to find a home and seeing some phrases that connect with them, and they don't know enough to see Urbit for the fraud that it is. The obscurantist terminology helps maintain the fraud, since people think there must be something there if only they could understand it... but there isn't, and most of them will never understand it. Every cool demo is just a regular web frontend with a half-assed Urbit backend.

All of which is to say, I think this is Yarvin's schtick: grab onto some ideas, explore them in a way that is so confusing that it hids how moronic the ideas are, while successfully appealing to some latent desire in the audience.