Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy

An under-appreciated aspect of the crypto-economy's flourishing is that it's a massive redistribution of wealth from old, mainstream institutions toward independent thinkers. There are now about 100,000 Bitcoin millionaires, and there will soon be quite a few crypto billionaires. We’re going to have a new financial elite, competing with the old, an... See more

Why build on Discord when you know with near certainty that within a few years you’ll have to move to the next hot platform? Or worse, get kicked off as soon as you become powerful, as happened to WallStreetBets. I’d rather be early on the platform aiming to be the platform-to-end-all-platforms—where the probability of mass adoption is unclear but ... See more

So long as information processing power continues to increase, returns to authentic public communication will continue to rise as returns to prestige affiliations continue to decrease. Yet the firms that are capitalizing on the facilitation of defection—Substack, Patreon, etc.—sell a basket of features, not least of which is a kind of ersatz presti... See more

...the social welfare loss of so many brilliant engineers duplicating effort by perpetually re-engineering the same basic application structures, all managing databases, user login credentials, etc.

But if the benefits of an alternative networking paradigm were to increase over time, and the cost of joining decreases, then eventually the most intelligent and ambitious creators must find it in their interest to become their own server, exactly as Substack writers realized they could become their own publication (instead of working for one), Ins... See more

Dominant systems locked in by strong network effects always appear invulnerable to disruption, until they're suddenly not. The current internet is a particularly massive network lock-in, but given its technical debt and increasingly painful aspects (more on this below), there is no reason a disruptor at the full-stack level cannot or should not ari... See more

I say it’s just crazy enough that it might work.

Some critics say Urbit will never scale, some say it’s just an art project, others say it’s too hard to learn, and still others say it’s just too crazy to take seriously.

More generally, we are living in a context where power laws and non-linear takeoffs already reign supreme. NFTs were close to nothing a few months ago, now Beeple is worth more than most fine artists in the world. Redditors were never able to manipulate stock prices even slightly, until they were suddenly able to overpower a whole hedge fund.