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Boosted by jwz:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:
Urbit announced its summer acceleration program. Being made of smarmy edgelords, they called it "u/acc".
I mentioned this and someone asked wtf is an Urbit. So!!
Urbit is the OS founded by Curtis Yarvin, aka the creator of neoreaction Mencius Moldbug.
Urbit is a new paradigm for computation that combines functional programming with what happens when libertarian anarcho-capitalism goes so right-wing reactionary that it openly turns into Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s vision of neo-feudalism. And that sentence needs a Wikipedia article per jargon word.
Think "what if networked Lisp machines, but for Nazis."
Urbit isn’t useful for anything. The apps don’t work, and the ones that do work bypass the language that the functional programming vision of the system is supposedly based on.
I would call Urbit "TempleOS on the blockchain", but that makes it sound too interesting.
Urbit outdoes bitcoin for the degree to which it combines "interesting" in the sense of "what the hell even is this" and "I'm not even mad, that's amazing" with utter unfeasibility and utter uselessness.
This is what gives Urbit what little life it has: it's technically technically-interesting, but utterly unusable. Other functional programmers think it's trash. The only FPs who take it seriously are also techfash.
So Urbit has no technical merits to succeed on, and only its political cult. So it leans *hard* into that cult. Urbit's only function is as an identifier to fellow fash. Which it's serving admirably.
Only one kind of person has an Urbit. If you see a string of the format "~abcdef-ghijkl" in someone's bio (tilde, six letters, hyphen, six letters), they're that kind of person.
If you really want to understand "yes, but *why* Urbit?" "why the *fuck* Urbit?" then the answer is still Elizabeth Sandifer's book Neoreaction a Basilisk. I believe the approved method is to libgen it and *also* buy the paperback.
As we all know, the use case for social media is to get laid. So I wonder if there's pent-up neoreactionary passion just waiting to be unleashed on Urbit. I expect the incel forums there are a delight.
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EDIT: "e/acc" is short for "effective accelerationism", a condensed version of Nick Land's bad "Dark Enlightenment" ideas.
This became trendy with neoreactionaries, who tagged themselves with "e/acc". It's a reasonably reliable way of spotting incredibly blockable little shits.
It's dumb enough there's a KnowYourMeme on it:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/eacc-effective-accelerationism
so Urbit is riffing on the meme.
