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by pavlov
1045 days ago
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Do they work on it because they hope it will be useful, or because they hope their crypto-fiefdom will be valuable and make them rich? Behind the impenetrable jargon, Urbit has always put a lot of emphasis on this "digital real estate" aspect. For example: "Urbit IDs are property, and we think of the entire registry of Urbit IDs as a vast territory of digital land."
[https://urbit.org/overview/urbit-id] It's not exactly an altruistic open source project if your fundamental motivation is to become a member of the digital landowner upper class. (And if you scratch the surface of Urbit, you'll find the creator is a reactionary extremist who has said he prefers feudalism to democracy. Those ideas are embedded in the platform design that makes lip service to decentralization but actually concentrates control to the very few.) |
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Thirty years ago I would have been on this train. No question. It's giving me early 90s internet optimism techno-utopia feels. Now I'm older and a lot more jaded, I think I'll give it a miss and set my sights lower with something like Gemini for my weird niche internet protocol needs.
The deliberately impenetrable jargon reminds me of 90s-era Wired's reader-hostile graphic design. We're so cool, we can put barriers in your way and you'll clamber over them to get to us. That's a marketing technique - I've heard it called challenge appeal.
All federated solutions need some kind of trust model. Money is not, at first glance, a terrible answer to that problem (hashcash for email, and some web forums charge a few dollars for accounts just to keep the spammers out). Mastodon delegates trust to the instance admin, Scuttlebutt limits its web of trust to two degrees. But this elaborate tiered model is just unnecessary - they must have considered, and rejected, proof of work or many other possible solutions. It's sad that I assume bad faith because of someone's political position, but so it goes on the post-enshitiffication internet. The trust has already been eroded.
Isn't it interesting that a piece of software can be the concrete embodiment of a philosophy?