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Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

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Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#31

Post by curtainsforus »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #21

https://urbit.org/blog/common-objections-to-urbit/#planet > 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-…

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.

The motivations are, of course, still suspect.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#32

Post by [deleted] »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #19

> 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 ? (Al…

[deleted]

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#33

Post by stareatgoats »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #19

> 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 ? (Al…

> 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."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#34

Post by viraptor »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#35

Post by bonchicbongenre »

andkenneth wrote: post #28
scotchmi_st wrote: post #17

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…

Just from what I can pick up from this thread it seems like this project is only a few steps more sane than TempleOS and it's creator.

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

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#36

Post by NetOpWibby »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #17

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…

Thanks for the ELI5, I didn’t know these details.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#37

Post by 627467 »

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.

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#38

Post by 627467 »

colechristensen wrote: post #6

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…

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)

Re: Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit

#40

Post by alexisread »

stareatgoats wrote: post #16

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…

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.

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