I have spent zero time on the urbit-dimes-square nexus thing, but it does seem to be "imperceptibly present" in the water around my neck of the woods.
Conversation
There's a weird adjacency between the urbit scene and the erstwhile refactor camp scene I don't know quite what to make of. I would not have thought there was any harmony in the energies of the two scenes.
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Now of course the urbit scene has thiel-sized up and the refactor camp scene has wound down, so it's an academic curiosity
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But I think I've figured out why urbit leaves me entirely meh, setting aside my distaste for all things yarvin. It feels like the tech stack equivalent of an esperanto project.
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In initial look at it, to the extent I could get past what seemed like perverse and deliberate arcana, it seemed like a ted-nelsonian xanadu style vision. Except it wasn't vaporware pretending to be the One True Thing, but actually getting built. But it still struck me as similar
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Esperanto projects, unlike Xanadu projects, can and do get built. But their success factors resemble those of a church rather than a utilitarian building or bridge. The sacred architecture *is* the project.
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Sacred architecture is on my mind having just spend a couple of days at a major chola temple. Beautiful, but from any practical point of view a thoroughly unusable building. Except the point is not utility but signification of various cosmic ideas/vibes/feels.
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This isn't to say that things oriented towards constructing the sacred as opposed to responding to the real can't succeed wildly. After all, Esperanto failed as a language, but Klingon kinda worked.
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Esperanto has more actual speakers (around 2m apparently, compared to just 20 for klingon) but Klingon obviously has had more impact in the world
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Number of "active" speakers estimated at 100k so the rest of the 2m are...? Learning it for the lulz?
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The mystical optics are like 99.99% vibe noise that probably hurts more than it helps at this stage. It's an alt compute stack based on some theoretical conceits that later bolted on some cryptoish elements. The only other important fact is Thiel funding.
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Replying to @vgr
I love reading these pieces—and your thread as well. But I’m so remote from the scene described that they absolutely read as Borgesian speculative fiction about an imaginary secret society. (Tlön, Clandestino, Urbit Tertius.)
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There's probably a later stage of maturation where it helps to have a live "mystique scene" around an sacredness product like this, but if it emerges while the thing is unusable even to geeks but girls are posting party selfies proclaiming themselves "urbit girls" I go 👀
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But this is an interesting extreme data point on the spectrum between utilitarian design and opinionated design. Urbit and Esperanto are about cranking opinionatedness to 11 and making that the main selling point rather than a confidence signal of conceptual integrity
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Most products are 0/10 or 1/10. Purely utilitarian design-to-spec.
A 3/10 product is a routine enterprise SaaS product like say Salesforce that's entirely designed to practical concerns, so the company, despite its forced "fun" culture trappings, is basically a regular business.
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Roam is a 5/10 opinionated product. You may or may not agree with Conor's product-embodied opinions, but they do send costly signals about conceptual integrity and if you vibe with the product in use, you can trust the roadmap. But the product itself is categorically familiar
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Most blockchain things, bitcoin, ethereum and the rest, are like an 8 or 9 in opinionatedness. The product itself has a categorical unfamiliarity due to the underlying design opinions putting you in an adjacent possible alt reality
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I've heard this take before and I think it's wrong. A product like an alt tech stack is 90% the founding idea set, and even if the founder exits or is sidelined, whatever follows works pretty much within the scope of the vision or there's no point to it.
twitter.com/0xgokhan/statu
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Many things can outgrow their founder's intellectual conceits and dispositions, but some things structurally can't. For eg. Palmer Luckey is similarly controversial to Yarvin, but Oculus is basically an evolution in VR tech that is indifferent to the politics of the person
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A full tech stack is much more of a fluid medium of ideological expression. I got definite moldbug vibes from the design descriptions of urbit
A VR headset is mainly about biology and physics limits. Your opinions on politics can’t find easy expression in that medium.
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