11.21.2021
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
Last time I wrote what I call a remix on the ever-relevant text “Meltdown,” the structure of the piece Mirrors that of the original and even copies its prose and expression. While Meltdown is often seen as a text that exalts the emerging online culture of the 90s and its emancipatory feeling of cyber-anarchist idealism.
[[ ]]Ascension is both a critique of this school of thought and echoing the ideas that are still important or should be emphasized.
Now the main topics of this Newsletter will be:
What is Urbit?
Why Urbit?
The Philosophical Implications and connections of Urbit.
Urbit: Computing for the Soul
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Urbit
In our current state of the internet, most people don’t have the time or the necessary bandwidth to understand our digital landscape. It may be a bit hard to comprehend Urbit at first. The current Internet (Web 2.0) can be loosely described as Digital-Feudalism. All content and data passed off, packaged, and inter-relayed within the most common web apps people use, from Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., are all centralized systems. This information, this data, is analyzed, indexed, and stored by these “trusted third parties” to facilitate everyday computational interactions.
All the information, your profiles, any semblance of digital identity are outside your direct ownership. The mediation of online interactions is packaged and sold to us as a service; in some cases, the software or social app is free to use but at the cost of all your inputs being tracked to target advertise to you, or learn your habits to keep you using their particular service to serve them instead of serving you.
Where does Urbit fit into this?
Urbit is an entirely new paradigm in personal computing. It’s a compact system for individuals to run their own personal server on any Unix machine connected to the internet. Urbit defines itself with this one line: “Urbit is a clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century.”
Now I must be clear; I won’t be diving in-depth into the technical intricacies of Urbit. This is primarily because the scope of this piece is mainly to act as a primer into some of the Philosophical implications of Urbit, and they are outside my area of expertise/understanding.
Urbit reimagines what the internet is or can be, Or better yet, what the layperson thinks the internet already is. Urbit sees the internet as a peer-to-peer network. The internet and its multiple media outlets and apps are usually seen as “decentralized” networks. In reality, the internet as we have it was a move in that direction to facilitate user interaction. Still, centralization took root to alleviate personal know-how for ease of use. Urbit proposes that only a new stack (building a tightly integrated Operating System) can realize a peer-to-peer web.
“Problems that are unsolvable without large-scale political centralization in our current internet – data breaches, spam, fake reviews, malware-spreading, harassment – become tractable when individuals control their computing again. You have one login for everything. You own and control all of your software and all of your data by default.” - Urbit.
Now, It must be said that Urbit is still in the early stages; it has not yet ripened into the OS that is to bring the future which it lays out, but it does exist, and it does work. Urbit is not Vaporware.
The model and the future that Urbit lays out carry a particular set of implications worth pointing out. It is essential to mention that although the apparent allusions would be to the cyber-anarchist movements and general notions of Libertarianism, I won’t be going into these as much as others have. Primarily because I find that this ground has already been tilled to a greater extent and much better publications can be found regarding these topics instead, I will be sticking to a more “Urbit-Esque” philosophy.
What is meant by this is that Urbit as an OS acts in a very abstract Meta-layer. Urbit is not trying to instantiate a particular dominant form of politics. In its language, Urbit is agnostic about this. Instead, Urbit is trying to establish the substrate by which the individual can instantiate their determinate self-governance from a computational standpoint. In a libertarian register, this might be designated as politics of exit; from a more communitarian register, this might imply a politics of community or auto-assembly.
Urbit has a very abstract yet cohesive aesthetic. One that is universal yet irreducible to the particular in which it is instantiated. This echoes some of the work by Simone Weil in her short essay, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties.” In this short essay, Weil goes into her politics which tackle a strong sense of party spirit. The erasure of the individual for the sake of the party. Now, this part of her criticism does not resemble what is outlined by Urbit, but when analyzing Weils, outlook on human flourishing, the overlap between Weil and Urbit is much clearer. For Weil, the transcendent is of utmost importance; if the institutions in place are not producing the conditions by which the pursuit of the transcendent is possible, then those institutions are to be held accountable as they are not providing their designated role. Weil argues that the role of the state and hierarchy is subjugation to a particular degree but not of tyranny and erasure. Weil was a big advocate of the importance of real education. To educate an individual to think critically and be pushed to the edges of self-reflection. In this self-reflection, one could then begin to understand the transcendent. When the material conditions are in place to allow an individual to flourish, those institutions are functioning adequately.
Similarly, Urbit is critiquing how computing is working for us. It is instantiating the conditions by which computing is not set up to collect and aggregate data for peak addictive use and targeted advertising. Still, instead, Urbit creates the Meta governance by which computing can maximize our flourishing eudemonia.
It would be naive to assume or believe in a post-computational era. Thus, it is of utmost importance to create the computational systems that can enhance our everyday social experience and not degrade those interactions into the interpassive-zombie technologies of capture cultural theorist Mark Fisher criticized.
-To be Continued
Next week: The Aesthetics of Urbit
“Being exhausted is much more than being tired.”
― Gilles Deleuze
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-C.N