Just a few blocks from where this tantalizing promise floated above sunbathers sipping piña coladas, the second Urbit Assembly took place—not in a pixelated dreamscape, but on the seventh floor of a parking garage, converted into an open-air event space. The four-day gathering brought together programmers, developers, and investors directly involved in building on Urbit with a motley group of hangers-on, including filmmakers, artists, academics, and writers—me included.

The aesthetic of the affair might be described as “tropical startup with cyberpunk characteristics.” Raw concrete mingled with palm and bougainvillea; participants sat on folding chairs and makeshift furniture constructed from pallets, sipping coffee or Spindrifts earlier in the day, Coronas or margaritas as the brutal afternoon sun bore down in the afternoon. Neon signs enumerated the event’s sponsors and participants: the entities currently building, or building on, the new digital realm that is Urbit, with alien-sounding names like Tlon, Holium, Sia, and Uqbar.

This was the third such gathering in a year: The first assembly convened in Austin last October, followed by “Urbit week” in New York City in May. The first of these brought together in “meatspace” the insular, but geographically dispersed, community that has formed around Urbit, a tech ecosystem often compared by its denizens to the Galápagos Islands for its serene isolation from the continent-sized systems that make up the mainstream internet. The New York events, conversely, lured outsiders and non-tech people into the Urbit sphere, and tried to attach the project to certain ambient cultural energies emerging from the so-called Dimes Square scene.

The Miami summit combined these two approaches. By all accounts, it was the largest Urbit gathering yet, and it doubled the size of last year’s Austin assembly. It did so in part, it seemed, by drawing in curious parties from the broader cryptocurrency world, and in part by attracting influential people from outside the tech industry who sympathize with Urbit’s critique of Big Tech dominance and its effects: in particular, the expanding coordination of surveillance and censorship between state and private entities.

At one point, I overheard a fragment of a conversation in which someone stated his ambition to be the “tech bro Georges Sorel.” The phrase captured something of the spirit of the event. Sorel was a heterodox Marxist: Contrary to Marx, he argued that revolutionary change wasn’t inevitable. Instead, the revolution had to be willed into existence with acts of the imagination that would forge powerful myths; these, in turn, would provide the animating force for political change.

The Urbit crowd, like Sorel, rejects any doctrine of historical determinism: Neither the internet as it exists, nor the one they hope to usher into existence, is inevitable. The old internet, many speakers implied, was built on myths it could never fulfill, myths about freedom that soon came to legitimate a centralized, hierarchical architecture. The new internet, the message seemed to be, needs not only to be built in the technical sense; it also needs to be memed into existence by powerful mythmaking. This sensibility is evident in the sci-fi language of planets, galaxies, and stars, but also in the attempt to attach the project to broader cultural trends, such as the backlash against Big Tech censorship.

In his main-stage speech on Day Two, Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, the company mainly responsible for building Urbit, juxtaposed two timelines of personal computing. The first was the one we know, beginning in 1969 and ending now, with a widely disliked but adamantine regime of surveillance capitalism overseen by monopolies or oligopolies in collusion with the state. In this version, the personal computer had turned out to be a “failed experiment.” If we continued on this path, he told the audience, the future would look like this—and he projected an iconic scene from Blade Runner (derived, like Total Recall, from the visionary imagination of Philip K. Dick), a film in which sinister corporations lord it over a humanity reduced to hi-tech servitude.

In defiance of today’s tech monoculture, as Wolfe-Pauly explained, Urbit aims to rebuild not just the internet, but personal computing, from the ground up. “The future is long,” he intoned. “We can still start over.” His alternative timeline begins now and ends in 2072, at which time Urbit’s model of networked computation has prevailed in the form of a matrix of “computers we can trust” and over which we have ownership—or to use the term preferred by Urbit enthusiasts, “sovereignty.”

It is on this point that suspicions might emerge around the enterprise. Ownership, put simply, means you must buy into Urbit to get a piece of it. Unlike an email account or a social-media profile, an Urbit “planet” must be purchased (or in my case, given to me by someone connected to Tlon). Given Urbit’s rudimentary functionality at the moment, its success relies on people buying into it because they believe in its future promise—a promise that can only be realized by getting people to buy into it. A detractor might ask whether the whole thing amounts to a Ponzi scheme—the same question often asked about cryptocurrencies, to which Urbit is technically as well as ideologically linked.

Both speakers and participants I spoke to privately tried to allay such concerns in two ways. First, they noted that Urbit’s immense technical challenges and exceedingly slow rollout made it no one’s idea of a quick-buck scam. Second, they asked, in effect, what isn’t a Ponzi scheme—or rather, to what extent is a successful institution simply a Ponzi scheme that succeeds? Certainly, if the designation applies to cryptocurrencies, it might apply just as well to the many overvalued, unprofitable companies to emerge from the more respectable corners of Silicon Valley in recent years.

But given the libertarian leanings of many at the gathering, it was unsurprising to hear the standard adage that fiat currencies are more of a Ponzi scheme than cryptocurrencies, and so are plenty of other institutions built on people’s confidence in them: universities, bureaucracies, and so on. The question, from this perspective, is not how to avoid building or investing in Ponzi schemes; rather, it is how to build something out of nothing that eventually becomes more than the sum of its parts, and thereby evolve into a self-sustaining system. The options are: fail, or become too big to fail.

One influential version of these ideas is found in Silicon Valley kingmaker Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, where he distinguishes between “zero-to-one” and “one-to-n” innovation: the latter sort merely scales up or iterates on an existing model (as with the startups that try to be “Uber for dogsitters,” “Yelp for airlines,” and so on), whereas the former tries to build something entirely new. Urbit is decisively a “zero-to-one” enterprise, attempting to route around the entire existing architecture of the internet and restart networked computing from scratch. (Likely for that reason, Thiel has been one of its investors.)

Source: compactmag.com