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

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.

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.

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

...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 the only serious project trying to solve all of the above problems, by routing around their shared root. Urbit obviates altogether the client-server relationship. On Urbit, everyone is a server and servers communicate and network directly, peer-to-peer. Even if you consider the probability of mass adoption low, the expected value of solvin... See more

For at least a decade now, we have been observing what I call a prestige-defection dynamic (1, 2). The value of a prestigious affiliation is decreasing relative to the value of owning the authentic attention of an audience. Thus, New York Times journalists quit to write on Substack, professors quit academia to teach independent courses online, etc.... 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.

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