I ate something I shouldn't have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work.
One of Urbit’s problems is that we don’t exactly have a word for what Urbit is. If there is such a word, it somehow means both “operating system” and “network protocol,” while somehow also implying “functional” and “deterministic.”
Not only is there no such word, it’s not even clear there should be one. And if there was, could we even hear it? As Wittgenstein said: if a lion could talk, we would not understand him. But heck, let’s try anyway.
I love the smell of Moldbug in the morning.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.