The Stars, From the Ground Up: While Supplies Last (Part 1)

2022-05-07

An Urbit meetup is being held in Kansas City, MO this weekend. It began yesterday evening and continues through today. Many users from all over the Midwest, and some employees at Tlon, are in attendance, many from the St. Louis area. This is the first Urbit meetup I've ever attended, though I was only able to join yesterday, and I felt like a little kid going to Walt Disney World. While I was there, though, I overheard a spirited (but not heated) discussion about the nature of planets in the network.

Urbit's core consists of 256 galaxies, the backbones of the system and a type of governance hub; each galaxy can spawn 2^8‐1 stars, community-level instances, and each star can spawn 2^16-1 planets, individual-level instances that still have a high degree of independence. This leads to a total of 4278124800 possible planets. Each planet can then spawn 2^32 moons, satellite entities that are highly dependent on their host planet.

Urbit has a vision of one day being able to network any device in the world, and perhaps all the people in it as well. To that end, planets are viewed as personal identities in the network. The overheard discussion pointed out that Urbit only allows around four billion planets to be spawned. How, then, can Urbit planets serve as individual identities for everyone in the world, if the world already has well over four billion people in it?

I've heard this point raised against Urbit before, and I must admit it's a compelling one.

The most common answer usually given by proponents of Urbit is an argument to pragmatism. Can we realistically expect four billion people to use Urbit anyway? Facebook and Twitter don't have that kind of reach, even with all the bots and fake accounts included. Why should we expect Urbit to have more growth than them?

I find this rationale weak and self-limiting. It's true that neither Facebook nor Twitter have a four billion-strong user base, but there's nothing in the codebase of either that imposes a hard limit on the number of users they can have. And unlike Urbit, neither Facebook nor Twitter want to eventually have the capability of running the digital infrastructure of the entire world. If Tlon want planets to have a one-to-one correspondence with personal identity, then they must concede that the network will one day reach its growth maximum and stagnate there forever.

Another type of identity in the Urbit ecosystem is a comet. These are free to spawn and are virtually unlimited, with a total of 2^128 available. However, these are not full participants in the Urbit ecosystem: they do not have a sponsor, they cannot receive over-the-air updates, they cannot spawn moons of their own, and they cannot change their network keys. At present, comets are primarily meant to be used as "try before you buy" ships, or for testing purposes. Some groups on Urbit block comets.

While the limitations of comets are due to their absence on Azimuth and not an artificial restriction, comets are still in practice an "lower class" of citizen in Urbit. Planets are, in contrast, and "upper class", implicitly trusted by their peers and in control of a space with room for billions of private sub-piers. Thus, if everyone in the world were to have an Urbit identity, some would be members of the planet-owning upper class, and everyone else would reside in the comet-dwelling lower class.

From what I understand, such a social stratification seems to be in line with the philosophical proclivities of the founder of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin. While Yarvin left Tlon in 2019, he helmed the project for a whopping 17 years, and his design choices are inseparable from what Urbit has become. I think if advocates of Urbit are going to be honest, they must admit to this inevitable "class divide" in the network.

I actually think about planets a different way--a way that still gives planet owners greater agency but helps to mitigate some of the stratification problems of comets. I will elaborate further on those thoughts in part 2.

=> Part 2

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