What Just Happened with Urbit?

Return of Yarvin. A Warning from Balaji. Plus: Three Recommendations for Urbit

Some quick admin:

• We’ll be awarding prizes to Ariana Reines and

  Delicious Tacos
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Nearly four years ago, I got involved with a project called Urbit. My first assignment was to write a book about it. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. Every week I would sit in on virtual All Hands meetings at Tlon Corporation, which was at the time the lone company building Urbit. These meetings were equal parts fascinating and inscrutable.

I didn’t know much about the so-called tech world at the time. I assumed that people who worked in software were mostly money-motivated, and mostly cynical about the products they were building. What I found at Urbit was the exact opposite. I found people who would say things like “de-bugging is a spiritual practice because it teaches you to have faith.” I found people who reminded me, more than anything, of artists.

Like artists, the main characters in the Urbit story (“core devs,” in the tech lingo) could be contemptuous of the idea that their work should have any appeal at all to the masses. Like artists, they could be wildly opinionated about small matters that most others would find trivial. Like artists, what they were building meant the world to them.

In some ways, this shouldn’t be surprising. Urbit was started by the only successful tech founder I know of who had previously been equally or more successful in the liberal arts: Curtis Yarvin, who achieved prominence as a writer before most people had ever heard of Urbit. Yarvin left Urbit in January, 2019. You can read his reasoning for doing so in the blog post “A Founder’s Farewell.”

Yesterday, he said hello again. In an impromptu public meeting featuring a who’s who of investors, developers, writers, and memesters, it was revealed that Yarvin would be returning to Urbit in a big way. The drama was high—it felt like something that could have come out of a Greek tragedy. I think everyone was a little stunned. So I thought it would be good to do a little unpacking.

Here’s what happened, what went wrong in the past, what it means, and three recommendations from me (hope you’ll pardon my temerity) on where Urbit should go from here: