Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy

I don’t really want “donations” from “fans," I want contributions from stakeholders in the Other Life mission, and I want those stakeholders to see upside in the continued growth and success of Other Life. Some people are already doing this with token-permissioned Discord servers, but Discord is obviously not the endgame.

...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.

Urbit is a new kind of networked operating system that turns your computer into a “ship” that can network and exchange data and computation with any other person or group on the network (like the current internet), but without requiring any trusted third parties like Facebook or Google to mediate these exchanges (unlike the current internet). In a ... See more

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

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.

Why send your blog posts or videos to a middleman, asking them to kindly post it from their server, so that they can send it to people who signed up to hear from you? The main reason, frankly, is that even many smart creators don't understand the current internet's architecture. But people learn fast when there is a large degree of money and power ... See more

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

The client-server relationship is arguably the crux of the worst problems with the contemporary internet. Examples include having to manage many different login credentials, being exploited by algorithms outside your control, the inability to own your data, the inability to customize interfaces, and constant political battles over what servers shou... See more

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