Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit
A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I&#x27;m pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan.<p>I&#x27;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 from a small clique of like-minded people.<p>Now it&#x27;s possible to understand what the idea is (some sort of VM running an esoteric set of languages to build an operating system that, among other things serves as a &#x27;digital identity&#x27; of sorts). This is the point in time when they want people such as HN readers to understand it, so they make it so it can be understood (more or less). I also think the esotericism of the programming languages is also to prevent anyone from having a go, and to limit people who can program in these languages to just those who are heavily invested in them.<p>But as others have pointed out (including the author of the post), the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets), because Yarvin is a neo-reactionary who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.<p>He does this at the same time as wanting a clean-slate programming environment, because computers these days are very complicated and buggy or something.<p>All of this speaks to a desire for things to be simple. Simple politics, simple computers. Democracy and computing these days are not simple, but that&#x27;s because _humans_ are not simple, and if you want humans to have an equal voice and standing, then that&#x27;s probably going to result in not-simple systems, in politics as in computing.<p>We should resist it, for the same reason we should resist anyone trying to agitate for feudal revolution.