Some thoughts on how curiosity can make us fall for schemes and give passive support to projects we'd otherwise wouldn't.

Today I received an email newsletter from #Urbit. I'm a subscriber, because many many years ago, I became very curious about the technical aspects around it. This was roughly during Bitcoin's early days, when the fascination with projects that defeated Zooko's triangle overcame the concern with consequences that had not, as of yet, become manifest. I also was not aware to what extent urbit's designer was not only a fascist, but someone who had wilfully embedded feudal logic into the protocol. After acquiring a couple of free planets (I think they were called spaceships back then), I fiddled some with it, and became disappointed with the extremely weak typing system and the fact all the "down to principles of computing" sale was a scam, in the sense that anything practical can't run on Urbit other than by calling non-Urbit code (jets). The prospect of having a system that slowly freezes into perfection is a good one, but without proofs it is all arbitrary. Likewise, the choice of language made it very hard for me to program with it: by chance or not, Hoon and NOK are almost custom-designed to be tough for blind programmers. After a while I lost interest and the promise of a system that lasts forever didn't take long to break, so my credentials became useless.

Now in this newsletter I got offered a free planet, and yes, a big part of me said, "try it, take it." Curiosity and perhaps the fear of missing out on something good prodded at me, and I did open the website.

But this time I stopped myself in time. I may agree that computing as it exists is a bad model, and that we need something that individuals can understand, that is deterministic, legible, and hardens into an optimum system. But Urbit isn't that. Urbit will never be that. It's a fascist political project wrapped in a technical vision that, while having a couple of good ideas, is ill-conceived in its means and ends. I don't really want to touch that again.