The Fight for the New Internet

Urbit: The Work and the Network

The following is a bit of a departure from my usual subject matter, yet still appeals to the oft-stated mission of this blog; to tell stories that resist fear. The first sections of what follows will lay out some context for those who have never heard of Urbit. So I would urge anyone who knows what’s going on to make their way past the first two sections.

CURTIS YARVIN

Curtis Yarvin is best known for his opinions. Recently, he has gained widespread attention through his ideological association with JD Vance. This summer he’s pitching an idea to earn a spot on the American team at the prestigious Venice Biennale. Among his most controversial views is the belief that the United States should reject democracy and take up a monarchy in its place.

While some might dismiss his ideas as online, fringe, or reckless, Yarvin has developed them and argues them intelligently with serious historical analysis and recontextualizations that are both perceptive and unflinching. His views and writing have been gaining significant traction, especially in this political climate increasingly tolerant of controversy—amplified recently during Trump’s second term and Musk’s takeover of X (formerly Twitter). I am a casual reader of his work, and though I may not endorse all of his views, I respect the man tremendously for looking at what authority would rather remain unspoken.

This kind of career is innately fragile though; if Yarvin had crossed a line in 2017, his greatest asset—the reach which allows his ideas to be of value—could have been swiftly cut off. I find that Yarvin has done a good job of capitalizing on his soft cancellation, but digital censorship could have taken away the opportunities for his livelihood. When I listen to those who respect him and the circles where his words have real purchase, it seems evident to me that his opinions and the social capital he’s earned through them, have primarily relied and benefited heavily through their dissemination, shared person to person, online.

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF URBIT

Truly abbreviated, but if you are interested you can find a much longer and well-written one here.

What Yarvin is less known for is his foundational role in building Urbit—a radical project to remake our networking infrastructure; A New Internet. In 2013, Yarvin spearheaded this wildly ambitious project to rearchitect the invisible anatomy of humanity’s silicon nervous system. The Internet is a sprawling web of channels, and like any construction, it reflects the processes, sequencing, and motivations that begot it. The Internet as we know it was originally built for institutional use, and so its structure favors the centralized organizations it was made for. Its construction advanced as the tools and ‘equipment’ to build it were being made themselves. So what you get is something akin to a medieval city, an unplanned organic growth, guided by path dependencies, and added to in a patchwork manner that is haphazard at times. As new uses, like social media or video streaming emerged through market demand, these functions had to be adapted to on the fly, on top of pre-existing foundations, and usually in a mad max race to market. Because the Internet evolved within the selection pressures of the Military, the goals and priorities of the Academy, and then the incentive structures of its commodification in the free market, everyday acts—the digital equivalent of borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor—are today heavily mediated by third-party systems, corporations and governments. On the internet as we know it, you own nothing, and Cloud computing and SAS applications have only exacerbated this. It favors large platforms, intermediaries, and centralized control. This system makes censorship easy and privacy difficult.

Urbit envisioned a more human alternative: a ‘clean slate’, peer-to-peer network of personal servers—akin to a settlement of houses, where online interactions between micro-servers are direct. When you speak to your neighbor on Urbit, you speak only to them, directly. It’s a space in which you own your own digital property and the data you create, free from corporate or institutional gatekeepers, so that when you step out into the digital public your data can’t be silently altered or erased. Urbit aspires to be a computing and networking infrastructure purpose-built for human life above and beyond just corporate or political life, something enduring and free to be lived in at the discretion of its inhabitants. Urbit’s vision is to reclaim digital space for individuals, rather than for the masses that they form.

Any vanguard technology, which cuts at the bleeding edge of what is possible, has as its advantage being of great interest to humanity’s brightest independent thinkers. But, it also has as its disadvantage all the stultifying pressures of those most comfortable in the world as it is. Cultural change has always been forwarded by vessels of concentrated cooperation, and the Greek hoplite is a darling online meme-image of this truth. Vessels of this kind require strong boundaries (shields and spears) and a communicative integrity (agreed-upon commands). Like the flourishing of intellectual, cultural, and technological achievement that precipitated inside the Florentine academy, these satellite groups can achieve far more than the larger society in which they form. A startup works much like this. And Urbit is a great example. In 2019, Yarvin stepped down from his executive role—if Urbit could continue without him, it meant he had created something with a life of its own. The Urbit Foundation took shape, with a board of directors that was thought of by many in the community as more of a formality. There was a lot of excitement around this time, many different companies spun up and spun off of the older cohort.

Since its formation, an eclectic community of future-minded young tinkerers and visionaries has rooted out the project like a truffle. What attracted these individuals cannot really be captured or maneuvered by the incentive structures that built the current internet. I have had the great pleasure of getting to know many of these people and what has brought them together is the promise for the future—Informational sovereignty and a global nervous system that isn’t always stuck in fight-or-flight—but the thing about promises is that they need to be kept. I originally found the project in 2021, and I began meeting members of the community purely out of interest.

There’s nothing more invigorating than being brought into the field of a community trying to defy the immediate. I signed up for Hoon School Live without any coding background because it gave me the very rare and precious experience of feeling like a kid again. I recalled that when I was a child, I had this big book on Leonardo Da Vinci. I could look at all the pictures, visions of beauty that I had never seen before, and I laboured with all my might learning to read, just so I could decipher the opaque blocks of text next to the photos. This was Urbit to me; the mastery of symbols in service of a vision of invention, one that sought to fit the beauty of real human life inside it. It was the thing I wanted from my education and never really got—It's the thing I wanted from the world and never really got, so I felt wonderfully at home inside the project’s ionosphere.

We would all like it if success felt ever more assured. But archetypically, the path towards it often requires pushing through a challenging period—a "dip"—where effort increases but rewards seem scarce. 2024 saw funding challenges serious enough to prompt Yarvin’s return. There was a great shuffle of leadership and staffing at the Urbit Foundation, and the last year has seen four different Executive Directors. During this period, the community as a whole has been fraught with infighting. The Foundation lost the focus of its team members; the integrity of working in cooperation towards one goal. As competing visions worked at cross purposes, the urgency of a passing opportunity forced a breaking point where indecision and the gridlock of discord could no longer be sustained. Just last week, Ryan Kneer, the then Executive Director and board member of the Urbit Foundation, fired its founder Curtis Yarvin. Simultaneously, Yarvin quietly lobbied the other two board members to have Kneer fired. In response, Kneer has initiated a vote of no confidence in the board and appealed to shareholders (In this ecosystem called “galaxies”) to vote for its substitution.

CONFLICT AT HAND

Yarvin is a dreamer—a rare and powerful type of man who could conceive of an intricate beautiful unreality, against the deafening noise of all that already is. But as with any project, getting something off the ground requires more than just its vision. It requires someone who can take the raw material of the actual world and cleave an unreality from the real. The schematic phase of this project is over, the plans have been drawn and the earth has been broken. And like any architect knows, this is where the danger begins. Executing a strategy for real labour and real capital, changing the world in material ways, is a risky business with no undo button. This is the phase of a project where corruption creeps in, where opportunists can siphon funds and vanish with ill-gotten gains, leaving a half-built dream with communities and patrons abandoned.

The tech industry loves its founder mythology—the idea that visionary individuals single-handedly conjure world-changing companies from nothing. But myths, though powerful in their own right, are not histories. Take for example the Man who Yarvin wants to stand up as the CEO of America. Elon Musk was not the founder of Tesla Inc., he joined the company as a major investor and was largely hands-off for many years. It was not until his investment was jeopardized by a period of internal issues that he stepped up as CEO to provide the operational leadership that had been missing. Great companies have to become great, and they often start off messily with multiple contributors, conflicts, and course corrections. Leadership can emerge at any time, not just at the start. Often, to overcome “the dip”, relentless and responsive execution trumps a storied or fated plot. Anyone capable of holding an organization in an organized state, and aimed at its original goal. This is often the more valuable, if not the literal interpretation of an ‘origin story’.

Kneer is an investor—a man who built his success through a careful observation of the world’s chaotic currents and an iterative model for calculated choices. And he has leveraged that success to become more and more involved in the Urbit project first and foremost because it’s something he believes in. Notably, Kneer has been most involved in the project when Yarvin was most absent from it. So the two have taken very different routes to find themselves together at the Foundation’s helm for the last 8 months.

RYAN KNEER

In this past ~week of controversy, I have observed the community's response from a particular vantage, because unlike everyone involved I knew Ryan before I knew about Urbit. So through all the discussion, I started to question what he might look like if that had not been the case. As an investor, he was never in a figurehead or development role. He’s never been on the cover of the New York Times, nor the subject of any enigmatic op Ed.s like Yarvin has. I saw people asking questions of him which I have come to know just by osmosis, and I thought for what it’s worth I could at least declare what I know most surely about this situation, and that is my confidence in Ryan Kneer.

I have known Ryan for over a decade. He’s the person who introduced me to Urbit. I remember his excitement in those days, he told me this technology could change the way the world talks to itself and I took his enthusiasm seriously because as I’m sure many have noticed, he’s a man of few words.

When I met Ryan he was a fresh college dropout renting a 100-square-foot room next to the furnace in an unfinished cottage basement. In ten years he has changed his circumstances considerably, but his habits haven’t changed at all. He is disciplined, methodical, and boringly ambitious. He is thoughtful and deliberative, he sees the things he wants until they are clear enough that he can just grab them. He doesn’t make promises he won’t keep, and he sees things through. To my fellow Urbiters, you may not have had the chance to talk to him because he tends to lie back. As far as I can tell, he takes great pleasure in just observing others. But beyond this slate visage, I have been very lucky to get to know someone with an exorbitant reserve of ruthless drive, fierce purpose, bold resolve, accompanied by a shocking depth of intelligence and a talent for being able to change himself.

One of his best qualities—which aligns well with the present need to orchestrate far-flung visions and plant them more firmly on the ground—is that he has a keen and excellent sense of meta-rationality. He’s highly perceptive to his own fallibility. I watch him constantly confront himself—whether the roots of his motives, or the reliability of his intelligence. He’s an expert at searching for his own bullshit in a way that Yarvin seems fatally incapable of. On top of that, when he grows suspicious of his own relative incapacity to reach a desired outcome, he diligently seeks the perspectives and talents of others, with a purposeful self-abnegation. He listens. He listens for the best answer and he does not care whose claim it is. He is willing to be proven wrong, and thus happy to course correct without the inertia of pride.

When they joined forces last November, Ryan was very excited to face the challenges at hand with the guidance of the project’s founder. I know he had been an avid reader of Yarvin’s work for a long time and was honoured by the opportunity. He anticipated that all he needed to do was to work hard and be the engine for Yarvin’s rudder. Even though Yarvin’s return had ostracized some of the community, he still believed that this was what was best for the core mission of the project. And that ultimately Yarvin was exactly the person who could unify its efforts. He faced the collaboration in good faith, but through careful observation, he has remarked of late that unfortunately he has been proven wrong.

Perhaps, during Urbit’s ~five years of independent growth, it became more real than its founding technomancer bargained for. Yarvin’s return found him confronting something with a will of its own. And his inability to work with this now-reified fact seems to have fractured its life force under competing visions and internal strife. In a rather storied manner, the creator of a peer-to-peer network has alienated himself from many of his peers.

AFTER STRIFE

What is at stake in the recent coup (the fourth, in fact) is two different paths forward.

Currently, out of the 64 galaxies, 19 have cast their votes: 18 in favor of Ryan's proposal, 1 opposed.

I suspect this is a tense choice for those voting. Votes are not anonymous, and for many, the issue is tied to their employment, friendships, and personal wealth. There’s a clash here between high and low time-preference priorities.

Overlaid on the vote is a story about people. On one hand, the issues are all too human. We want to be seen acting in accord with the right people. We fear failure and how it will condemn or define us. There are temptations—for money, recognition, and society. And in any conflict, there is a tendency to identify with previous actions. Letting what you have said and done define your sense of self. A kind of personal path dependency: what I think and have thought is who I am. What I do and have done is who I am. What side I am on is who I am amongst.

The stickiness between these things—between the image of the self and who we truly are—is a hard thing to recognize as malleable without some religious discipline. And that discipline is usually held at a distance from our work life.

On the other hand, there’s the human meaning and values the Urbit story tells—and how these two EDs interact with and embody those values. At this level, story and representation become powerful forces. Founder mythology and the gravity of fame take hold. And then you think: of all the men whose names we remember a century later—names which may be more widely circulated now than in their day. A person’s conduct matters. Certain traits are enduringly effective. Fame may last only fifteen minutes, but character resounds.

I know many of you have something to lose—and something to gain—materially and socially, right now. You may be afraid of making enemies in this contest of power. Maybe you already have. But if you’ll allow me to speak from bias, I believe you are much more likely to find a real ally in a YEA vote.

I’m not the most technical or entrepreneurial among you. So this is neither operational nor financial advice. But it is personal. I’ve spent years among you. I know this community. And while I can’t assess the technical viability of each fork in the road, I am uniquely qualified to speak to the character and good faith of my old friend. I don’t just think Ryan has more skin in the game. I think he has a better orientation toward the future.

The crypto and tech world has already had its share of genius failsons. Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone—someone with no interest in endorsement or denunciation—had spoken up about SBF’s character before it all collapsed?

We can be intentional about the stories we tell ourselves. If we must hold onto an imaginary, which is always the case when dealing with the future, then we can choose to do so with purposeful faith. Not because the myth is likely—but because by holding onto it, we make it more likely.

There is a kind of faith we can hold for ourselves and for one another, regardless of past strife, mercy opens up the future. Forgiveness is the engine of time.

“There are some kinds of effort which defeat their own object…
Others are always useful, even if they do not meet with success.”
— Simone Weil

WORKS AND THE SELF

Funnily, a big part of this conflict seems to emerge from the very thing Yarvin warns against: presentism. This irony is deepened by the fact that he is such a history buff—and that his political project advocates monarchy.

But monarchy means something, it’s not just an arbitrary syntax of power. A King is representative of God’s will on Earth. A monarchy requires religious subjectivity. The King is not merely a ruler, but a symbol of transcendence. A CEO on the other hand has no such responsibility, he has personal goals and gains personally, in many cases he doesn’t even go down with his ship. He requires no such cosmology. In the secular world, scientism and the social contract have replaced religious sentiment. And since the royal lineages were hunted out, or decapitated into “figureheads,” the monarchy has become an unworkable form. The days of the Sun King are over, and a company is not a kingdom.

Throughout this essay, I began asking myself if Urbit is a company. The Foundation is of course in the legal sense, it structures itself as an organization in the form of a company and it has the mandate of business to provide value to its investors. But so often Urbit, internally and externally has referred to itself as a cult. A light-hearted joke, but usually jokes should be investigated for their deeper truths.

At the end of the day, there is a bigger choice at play, not between Ryan and Curtis, but between Urbit or what we’ve got. The current internet is here to stay, and if you’re technical enough to understand it as a system you’re probably intelligent enough to know what kind of world that system will continue to allow. This is alarming because what we inhabit changes us.

There’s more at stake than just an opportunity to profit—though I wish you all fat bags till the end of days—the potential of the Urbit project is not far from that of my own professional duties in Architecture.

We are building the world.

It’s not as simple as just making it look nice, what we inhabit molds our lives, our relationships, and our subjectivities. A clone-world condo functions as a shelter, but as our environment it holds us in an embrace of quality and meaning, that impresses upon our enculturated life in every moment. With a bit of wealth, you can find beautiful living neighbourhoods to live in, but there is no alternative to the Internet.

An Architecture firm isn’t just a company. It’s a profession. Like law and medicine, there are oaths we take, and there is a code of ethics we hold up. This means in addition to holding ourselves responsible for the interests of our company and the interests of our clients, we ought never do this at the expense of the public at large.

This sense of duty—that the way we design things designs us back—does not seem to be recognized or appreciated in any other corner of tech or crypto. And I see this sense of duty and moral imperative, as the reason that Urbit mistakes itself for a ‘cult’. Urbit is not a cult, it’s a culture-sustaining technology. The early history of professional guilds may well have looked like cults themselves: dawning robes, uttering oaths, wearing rings, etc.

There has been more than a shadow of this distinction at play throughout the last year of Yarvin's return.

BEYOND THE SELF

“~master-malwyl” (Kneer’s Urbit id) was my first pal on the network. I remember thinking, ‘what a sinister name, why did he choose that?’ I didn’t like it and it doesn’t suit him. I’d joke that he was like Sauron, living up in a tall tower, a power-lustful ‘master’, one of malicious will, whose malintent would be amplified a thousandfold in the rings of power he wrought. It was a light-hearted joke, but I think, again, it reveals something important.

Don’t we imbue a bit of our own essence in the things that we create?

A diamond-hard, Kelvin 0, 100-year computer. Lasting things are not inconstant. Lasting things are made of stone. But Shakespeare tells us that only beautiful things are eternal. Beauty defies the battering of days by slipping outside of it.

Perhaps neither plan really works, it could very well be that the future of Urbit isn’t as a company or a profession, maybe Stars (Urbit tokens) will go to 0 and no one will have anything to do or sell. If Urbit as a construction, as an organization, crumbles then what will any of us have? It could very well be that the only future of Urbit is what was beautiful about it. Maybe when we’re 80 all that will be left is the fraternity it could muster, and a 30,000 line sonnet that only a few of us can read.

I care deeply about Urbit’s success because it represents a promise few technologies offer: digital ownership and methods for privacy. For anyone thinking and writing online—myself and Yarvin included—this is revolutionary. These are the stated values of Western life. But they are not yet practiced values.

Echoing Ryan in a recent letter to the Galaxies:

“Urbit is the home that cypherpunks have always needed. It brings sovereign ownership to social capital, just like crypto did for financial capital. It makes censorship technically impossible, not merely promised. We’re building for those betrayed by centralized platforms.”

Staring back at us from the future is a better world that our hearts know is possible. And in that way, the Good holds a kind of sovereignty of its own—one that transcends our opinions. What matters now is whether we build bridges to that world.