> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist.[1][6] He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.[7]
Thanks for the heads-up. Although I'd like to evaluate the technical merits of this project independently of the political ideology of the people behind it, knowing this I won't be sending any money their way for "planets" or such, which I might otherwise have done. Not one cent.
I'm not going to ask you for a citation about that (as I don't know what part of Urbit you imagine embodies the political philosophy that you are in disagreement with, and I don't imagine that I want to know) but I will let you know that Curtis Yarvin has nothing to do with the Urbit project anymore, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread.
It's been pointed out to you elsewhere in the thread that his ideas of hierarchical, feudal society are writ large in the network organisation. Plus the comments he made about address sizes etc.
I guess it's in your interest not to see/admit this, but it's pretty fundamental to the whole thing as far as I can tell.
My understanding of the design is that scarcity and hierarchy facilitates a scalable network, with respect to reputation and spam prevention. If the cost of an identity is non-zero and non-negligible, and the supply of permanent identities is gated through individuals (who don't want to be associated with bad actors, lest their own reputation as good actors become negatively affected), then aren't the actors all incentivized to maintain a collective reputation, positively?
The definition of "feudal" that I found when I went looking for it depends on the definition of feudalism, but also on subjective measures like "outdated" or "old-fashioned."
If you want to argue that scarcity is an outdated mode of thinking, then we can have a different conversation, and I think one that is perhaps not suited for this thread. But perhaps we can agree that if a fixed supply of 4.3 billion Urbit planets ever represents a true scarcity, we should be having a different conversation altogether, as it will have become a runaway success, surpassing far above either yours or my own expectations for it?
Other people would like to be able to judge for themselves.
Of course the extract is about the founder (who incidentally is not part of the project anymore), that's exactly why it's controversial and politically charged—i.e. the exact situation when Wikipedia is least reliable.
Edit: for instance, the linked article has "Semi-Protected" status because:
> "there is a significant amount of disruption or vandalism from new or unregistered users, or to prevent sockpuppets of blocked or banned users from editing, especially when it occurs on biographies of living persons who have had a recent high level of media interest."
I'd say unix generally. There's a slowly evolving set of laws (POSIX) made by broad consensus; people roughly follow the laws most of the time; and the whole thing just about works. Everyone agrees the whole thing is deeply flawed, but can't agree on a replacement.
You can read his blogs yourself to find what he thinks but ultimately, as a non-white person, I did not notice any odd behavior from him. We were able to talk tech without any weirdness.
I’m not prescribing anything here, like how you should treat him etc. just describing that he’s capable of talking tech reasonably despite the political stuff he posts.
Wikipedia has an unfortunate habit of labelling anything as "far right" that is described as such by left wing or gullible journalists in left of centre mainstream publications.
Mencius Moldbug may be far right, but he may alternatively just be a thinker not afraid to challenge liberal received wisdom.
It's ok to disagree and fervently oppose but it's unfortunate when we descend into soundbite mud-slinging in service of that opposition.
I'm on the left. I think Urbit is quite neat as a technology. Yarvin has very unusual political views, so I'm not sure where to put them, or if you'd consider this "sound-bite mudslinging" (if you do, please suggest a more palatable way of providing evidence:)
He seems pro-monarchy:
Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.[29]
but anti-democracy:
When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism:
He seems to regard political power as property, which makes a sort of sense with his monarchism:
Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.[40]
Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason.[41]*
(He also favors property ownership as a requirement for voting, which aligns with Urbit's governance but seems... dated, politically.)
And he seems to view slavery as a potentially healthy relationship:
Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family
It's hard to classify Yarvin anywhere politically, but given some very extreme views on slavery, democracy and dictatorship, I think "far right" is as accurate a label as any. His views are expounded upon in the Dark Enlightenment article in the summary.
His views are all just hand wavey fascism. At no point does he make a tractable argument.
As a counterpoint: take all countries today that have functioning (i.e. non-figurehead) monarchies and compare them with democratic, capitalist countries. You can use prosperity, GDP per capita, average literacy - whatever as a metric and monarchies will fail.
They demonstrably do not. Look at any competitiveness index, or standard of living index, or anything measurable.
The article you’ve linked is banal. It talks about how monarchies are good at protecting established property rights. Duuuuuh. That’s their entire purpose.
Thinking that stability of property rights is equal to economic performance is moronic. So either you think that I am one or you are one.
Here’s a quick test you can do: look around you and count how many items around you are produced in the Kingdom of Lesotho? Or Kuwait? Or Madagascar? Or Bhutan?
Such post-industrial powerhouses of economy those must be.
I don't need to look around, a quick Google on monarchies and GDP before your initial post would have given you the information you needed to not post it.
You peddling horsesh*t is unhelpful. Your fluid goal posts don’t help either.
Obviously any U.K. style “monarchies” and republics with a figurehead. Your best bet therefore would be Middle East monarchies, which are obviously a product of the extraction industry. So even that is not an argument.
Remember how China realized that the communist system isn’t sustainable and introduced elements of monarchy? No? Me neither, because they went with (very light) democratization.
But my favorite part is when I suggest you to look for immediate evidence in the real world and you’re like: “No, here’s a cherry picked article”. This disregard for facts is just plain offensive.
How on earth is the first link in a Google search "cherry picked"?
At least half of those states in your own link are monarchies!
Placing quotes around the archetypal monarchy seems like an act of last resort tbh - as do the repeated insults; so I'll consider this particular micro-debate conceded to me.
Mate, what good is a monarchy if the monarch doesn't have any power? It's just a monarchy in name. Following your logic, North Korea is a democracy, because it has the word "democratic" in its official name. This is a crap level of discourse and hence you are getting all the smacktalk. Don't think that you are entitled to people letting your stupid arguments slide. This is not the USSR.
This is why you are cherry picking. The original comment that you are replying to specified "actual monarchies, not figurehead states": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674965
What's so difficult to understand? Does UK fall under that category? No. Material power is with the parliament and PM. You are disproving your own point, when you bring them in as an argument!
I even gave you a hint. Saudi Arabia might be a stronger argument. Monarchy has power and they have economical clout. I mean, their GDP is only slightly higher than Walmart's annual revenue, but hey - at least you would've had a fighting chance.
I'm also on the left and found your comment very useful and informative. Again tho, my reference to mud-slinging is in the Wikipedia quote I replied to; I've no idea why you would think I might categorise your comment equally.
As for his categorisation as far right; I've already acknowledged he might be (I haven't read much by him), but being prepared to discuss right wing ideas and challenge mainstream thinking should not mean either him or his technological projects are classed as not to be dealt with.
> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born June 25, 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist.[1][6] He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin