OUR OWN PRIVATE TEXAS
urbit is sort of like a remedial math class that takes place in an airplane hangar
In October I went to Urbit Assembly 2021 to meet up with a few friends I met on the network, which I’ve been using for around 4 years now, as ~tocref-ripmyr. I was perhaps expecting to find a Dev Job Lead. That didn’t happen, but I don’t really mind much.
I was sleep deprived from excitement since day 1. This continued during the entire conference. I don't really think that mattered though. I came in looking for a frontend dev job, but I also don’t think We were all vessels for something else, I think. At the beginning of the event we were told by the company’s CEO during the opening talk, that we're allowed to say what happened at assembly, but we're not allowed to namedrop who did what at assembly. I'm gonna work in abstractions, because the people were the most beautiful thing here, and the only way I could make this article good or interesting is to try to convey their energy.
Day 1: Registration (Walled Garden Opens)
Wait in line at 3:30 sharp, show documents, recieve standard issue one-time-use wristband and reusable Baggu™️ tote containing a made in USA T-shirt, QR code linking to an informational PDF and Group Chat, and a smaller Baggu™️ tote containing a variety packet of wildflower seeds chosen for their ability to attract butterflies.
Bouncing around. People I knew from online for a long time. People I never saw or interacted with before who I knew, or at least believed I did. There's a lot more people that are obviously into fashion here than I expected. I'm going to piece together some archetypes, shoutout @spinalfluid.fits on instagram for the visual aids. Many of us changed between these costumes multiple times a day. It felt more seamless than we expected.
[A1 - Rightbrain] Probably went to school for Design or Architecture. The person you'd imagine an "Urbit Person" to be if looking at the marketing materials for the conference. Probably into electronic music. Interested in speculative “design fiction”, though they often deliver on the fictions.
Got into urbit typically through a combination of the UI/UX research that went into it and an attraction to the "lore" surrounding it. Short-term they view the future of urbit as the best platform to run basic social/productivity tools. Long-term outlooks are diverse and range from "What if we were all contributors to CYBERSYN" to some sort of transcendental computer fully integrated with the earth's biosphere.
[A2 - Leftbrain] Hacking together hardware. Hacking their own bodies. Members of the "maker" scene. Often burning man types. Surprisingly complex relationship with spirituality and religion.
Got into urbit via being on the cutting edge of new developments in DIY technology. Views urbit as a resilient "makerspace" and is often running their instance on a raspberry pi under their desk.
[A3 - Traditionalist] What came to mind when you asked someone who knew what urbit was yet wasn't using it to describe an "Urbit Person". Often in the "Investor" class. Right-adjacent politics.
Got into urbit as a way to "digital seastead" and avoid Gov-Corp overreach into their personal computing, using a "private compound in the woods" mental model to explain urbit. Often building small businesses and applications on urbit with Historicists.
[A4 - Drifter] Skews younger. Not affiliated with "the culture" – at least not at first glance. Seemingly preternatural ability to be in the right place at the right time, from a combination of real empathy and simply being too tapped in. Some got flown in "as a joke". Some just heard there was something going on in town.
Experience with urbit and computer science varies widely, some have never coded in their lives, some could easily converse with a Historicist. Visions for the "future" of urbit are all over the map, but members of the group that currently use urbit tend to be completely happy hanging out on it in the "discord clone" form it exists in today.
[A5 - Historicist] REALLY knows how to code. Been performing computer science activities since before most of the people reading this were born. Into esoteric programming languages. Bylines in the 90s hacker zines that Leftbrains and Drifters collect. What most "urbit people" looked like before 2015.
Probably got into urbit by going to the original meetups in the early 2010s. Might have a galaxy (most valuable piece of address space, 256 in existence) from when the founder was giving them out to anyone who could write a function to add two numbers in Nock, one of urbit’s programming languages.
[A6 - Affluent] Post-2010s Tech Type. May or may not code. Usually very personable, is often attempting to start a business. The least likely of these archetypes to know who Mark Fisher is, but the most likely to know who Peter Thiel is. Often works/worked at a large VC-backed startup.
Experience with urbit varies, many are brand new to this and took the weekend-long opportunity to learn urbit's programming language stack from a real Computer Science professor, often with Historicists and Traditionalists. My interaction with this cohort was limited.
Of course, there were interlopers that fit none of these categories, just vessels and mirrors (which we all also were, of course), that flit through this tapestry or let the threads fall onto them, they constantly rewired the atmosphere and made it look fucking easy.
Open Bar. Vodka Lemonade is the only cocktail they offer. I recognize some people in the walled garden. Some of them recognize me from Twitter, Discord, and urbit. More than I expect. People ask me if I am one of the "New York City People" a lot. I'm not sure why. I’m from Florida.
On this first day, service workers are handing out hors d'oeuvres. After introductions I'm talking to Rightbrains for a little bit before hanging out with the Drifters. Academic electronic music composer Mark Fell is playing over the PA. It feels like we're all supposed to be here, if such a thing as "supposed" exists.
We're ushered into an air-conditioned airplane hangar. An introductory talk is given – the important points are:
The "big update" coinciding with this event was the release of urbit’s application distribution tools. People were creating GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications that ran on someone's urbit before this, but now it’s just as simple as searching for an app and clicking "install", or having someone send you a link.
We are allowed to discuss what happened here, but not Who Did What
6:30 PM – Panel: DAO Stack
People are on stage talking about new governance structures for DAOs. Some run art DAOs. Some run finance DAOs. One of the finance DAO guys talks about how voting is sort of wack, and nobody really wants to vote on every single small issue in a group, especially once it hits a critical size-mass, and that people want to delegate their extra votes to someone trustworthy, with the understanding that if the delegate keeps messing up, they can Exit at any time. Sorta sounds like they're re-inventing representative democracy to me but I'm too tired to get up and ask questions. Might not really be that because the internet moves faster and there's more transparency because it's crypto. Whatever.
We are given a 15 minute break before part II of DAO Stack. Most people don't return for part II. I hear somebody say everyone here looks like an extra from HBO's show Girls.
I wind up running around downtown with the Drifters, who are discussing the re-enchantment of society after the hyped-out whirlwind of the 20th century, I then then lose track of the inital group at a packed western-themed bar, meet up with what I believe are Traditionalists, and wind up at a sprawling nightclub where they are playing Boasty (Feat. Stefflon Don, Sean Paul & Idris Elba).
Day 2: Welcome (There Should Be Only One Book)
Spent the night in a fugue state, came to – I lost my juul last night. Leaving 7/11 and looking at the clock. I'm late. I wind up catching a train to the venue. When I was on the train, I thought it'd be funny to post "running late for urbit in the big suit on the train feeling like a japanese bubble economy salaryman frfr" to the attendees' group on urbit, so I do that.
I show up and there’s a gathering around the stage, but nothing's started yet. [COMPANY CEO] gets up on stage. We are walked through a simple "What is urbit?" talk that included both technical and design inspiration, touching on Xerox PARC, Log Cabins, and simple tools. We're not discussing any far-reaching elon musk-y speculative tech stuff, the questions asked were more like "how do I make the things I already do online not horrible?"
During the talk we are given a short rundown on the Japanese Bubble Economy, and how Muji emerged from it and created a long-lasting business based off having the opposite vibes of the Japanese Bubble Economy. You can just wear a bubble-economy era oversized japanese navy suit and people on stage will start talking about the bubble economy. I thought it didn't work that way but I guess it does.
[COMPANY CEO] explains urbit again, this time as "what if Muji made WeChat, but it was a full Operating System, and also you owned it 100% and could use it however you wanted". For the unaware, WeChat is a chinese chat application that allows you to interface with nearly every part of Being Alive In China (Buying train tickets, paying bills, talking to friends, shopping, work stuff) in a single application with a relatively unified User Experience.
This is followed by a more technical talk by another employee. We're given a rundown on the difference between "Simple" and "Easy", followed by a description of the absurd amount of Bloat web applications have picked up over the last 40 or so years, exemplified by picking apart a Hacker News post about "How To Build A Modern Website in 2021", which involves like 150 software packages. Discord (the gaming chat application) is involved in the deploy pipeline for some reason. Making something on urbit in comparison, involves zero dependencies out the box, although some can be introduced for say, a complex browser frontend, or an application that interfaces with a non-urbit tool or platform.
1:45 PM – Assembly Track: Day 1
This is the first day of the "Assembly" activity, where you work in groups on a list of projects ranging from a program to onboard non-technical people to urbit, to improving the already-existing video chat application, to prototyping an “urbit for kids” app. I chose a group where we were to conceptualize a new application for writing. We began with a technical discussion of urbit's mutable data types and discussion of an already-in-development "substack for urbit" that allows people that aren't using urbit to recieve your blog posts via email, complete with substack-style payment gating (without any fees being charged).
We then discuss the current ways people write and cite information, ranging from self-referential bidirectional-hyperlink note-taking tools such as Roam Research, opinionated "building block" tools like Notion, and sending blown-out screenshots of tweets via text message. It's brought up that typically the "easy" way to do something with a computer isn't the correct way – which is why people screenshot things on Twitter and post them elsewhere, despite it being impossible to reference that text in any meaningful way.
We discuss a way a person, or group of people, could potentially take a group conversation and select pieces of the discussion, pull those messages into an essay that automatically references back to the messages as well as references any other source material discussed in those messages. Someone else in the group says that they've been thinking for a while about how there should only be One Book, that contains every other book, and is our social network, our compendium of science, and contains all of our art. On some Finnegan's Wake 2 shit.
One person has to leave because he is an Employee of urbit and has Related Obligations, discussion among this group splinters.
I get up, get a drink from the open bar. A young Drifter is trying to hand out business cards to everybody on the compound but like, as a "bit". The day is still so young, and nothing is scheduled. People are leaving and returning. The current group stratification seems to be less by "archetype" than it is by "level of not being there, due to exhaustion, drunkenness, and mental strain that we gracefully push through." Self-assessing on this metric, I rank highest.
My body, brain, and mouth are surprisingly in sync for how dislocated I am. Everything takes no effort to react to. I can feel exactly how much energy my body has left before it begins to shut down. If I try, I can almost visualize it as a digital clock display, counting down in milliseconds. I push it out of my head for now.
Two Traditionalists and I go out to purchase caffeine and nicotine, we poke fun at the "quick-fix" ideology behind a certain class of "tech-bro" and its trickle down effects on the city of austin, the murals on the bars, app scooters, "premium" prefab condos, marvel movies, a performative childhood regression that permeates every aspect of their life and fools nobody. We are opening a fresh pack of cigarettes and immediately spilling the entire fucking pack on the sidewalk and picking them up one by one. It's fucking hilarious.
We're back in the courtyard, exhaustion sets in. I chat with a Tech CEO about the controversial and lore-heavy Milady Maker NFT Project. He doesn't like the art very much, but purchased a couple due to their proximity to urbit. Somebody else demonstrates to me an experimental display technology, a new kind of screen. I was honestly blown away by what I saw, and can't discuss it further out of respect for the privacy of the new device and its creator.
The exhaustion deepens, and I catch myself feeling delirious. I go to lie down on one of the couches inside the airplane hangar, and I set a timer on my phone for twenty minutes, intending to take a nap. I instead watch a full-color, high resolution amalgamation of every new face i've seen at this event stare at me through my eyelids. Guided by light, I come to and reach for my phone ~0.5 seconds before the 20 minute timer goes off, and I hit "stop timer" at the exact moment it appears on my screen, before the phone has a chance to make a noise. I stand up and I feel like I have slept 8 hours. As the recipient of a god-given moment of transcendence, I take it upon myself to stroll around in the sun and make sure all my new friends are aware of what transpired.
The afternoon stretches out, skies yellow. People are leaving to take naps, have birthday dinners, or are pulled away into clandestine recording studios. Details are fuzzy, Drifters and the Affluent Ones are sharing their conceptual universes until the Drifters decide to go get something to eat before the official afterparty. We wander the streets, more than 5 of us and less than 15 of us. It's very cold out, and we are occupying the entire width of the sidewalk, chatting about our personal lives loudly and at a rapid pace. The other groups we encounter seem to be old and wealthy, and they flash bemused, jovial, and distant looks.
We settle on the Chicken Sandwich Food Truck behind some bar. I've been eating at many restaurants during my stay in Austin, and ordering food at every single one required you to point a smartphone camera at a QR code, visit a mobile website, place your order through that website, pull out your wallet, and enter a credit card number. People are getting restless, the vibes are off. Some people leave and go to bed, others take borrowed cars to the afterparty. Saying goodbye took 45 minutes, in the way where it feels like you're arguing, but everyone's really just figuring out the logistics of who's going where.
Afterparty: Assemblage – 10:30PM
Backseat with some Drifters, Soundcloud is playing 150BPM rap music channeled through the stereo on this rented German car. Somebody's talking about the concept of a LARP and what makes someone's self-expression more or less of a LARP. For a moment the atmosphere is indistinguishable from being in my hometown age 17-20 and getting driven to a house party, except if you roll the backseat windows up for too long they automatically deploy a motorized nylon sunshade.
Pull in. There's like 200+ people outside this warehouse, I think a few aren't even from Assembly. Inside, the same bartender from the open bar is there, handing out cans and red solo cups. The inside is much less packed. There are about 30 people inside, all ages, all archetypes. This is my foreign friend's first time at a rave. He is very happy to be here.
There’s a lineup of DJs. I dance to the best sets I have heard all year, with ~5 other people. I have an epiphany while listening to a Lil Uzi Vert Gabber Mashup. I watched myself from the third person. [A1] through [A6] were not supposedto understand one another, these archetypes would likely never cross paths, so little in common aside from a vague interest in technology, yet a mutual legibility permeated every single one of us. I'm writing things in my phone's notes app on the floor for a few minutes.
The language that served the purposes of traditional politics seemed to have lost all its use value in the mouths of these young people; the members of the militant groups felt like they were ‘spoken’, traversed by a speech that didn’t transform them and couldn’t translate their new uncertain situation.
... This movement isn’t there to reveal the exceptionality or the superiority of one group or another but to unmask the whateverness of everybody as the open secret that social classes hide.
- Claire Fontaine – "Human Strike Has Already Begun" – Pg. 38-39
I step out into the crowd out front, and carry my body, and a conversation; moving from the southwest to the northeast. Discussion moves from earrings, to New York City, to 2 people discussing common relationship issues and how a Freudo-Marxian lens is a good viewpoint to help resolve them. I overhear someone excitedly say "It's not his company anymore, it's our company now!"
People are talking about someone named “John Blow”, apparently a celebrity considering how many people know his name, and ducking away from the main crowd. I find out what the commotion is about and it’s pretty enlightening stuff.
I'm talking to a Rightbrain about how this afterparty sorta feels like the CHAZ but in a good way, then I try to draw a parallel between the urbit foundation's current corporate context and some historical precedent, after discussing the idea of "corporation as art project". On the adoption curve it sorta feels like Juul did in 2014, but it's more like a spiritual successor to Bernadette Corporation, updated to respond to the consequences of everything foretold in Bernadette Corporation’s 2004 novel Reena Spaulings coming true. The corporation is poised to undergo mitosis for every new function, new cells serving one body, almost like the legal structures of Comme des Garcons or Ikea.
1:00 AM, things wind down, I am sharing cigarettes with Leftbrains and Historicists, we decide to take an hour-long walk home. I'm talking about how I've found god recently, someone else says they had a big christian phase but believes Nietzsche's will to power is the thing that's helped them keep their mental health stable, because "there are times when god leaves you". I find out more of the attendees than I anticipated received monetary aid from The Corporation to cover travel costs. We're also finally discussing how this whole thing is taking a toll on our bodies. Some of us have been overworking ourselves, or partying all night.
I get to my room, and once I'm in bed I start to cry. I'm not sure why, the tears just come out. I realize the reason we're all here is that we believe People Aren't Fucking Living Right and yet some of us aren't really living right either, everyone is under this intense psychic pain all the time, yet some of us made it here, and we're all on some level actively moving past bare survival instincts to try and fix this. Looking back on it it felt like the long 20th century was ending and it was so horrible and beautiful all at once. I'm texting and freaking the hell out. I'm calm by the time the sun rises.
Day 3 – Assembly Track: Day 2 (New World Energy)
Enter the garden. The crowd seems to have thinned out, many people seem hungover from last night. I grab a seat at a table in the Hangar-Auditorium with a few friends. A series of Podcast Hosts and a Rapper/Artist/Music Producer take the stage. Two are Drifters, and look so. They open by saying “Hi, we are the CEO and Co-Founder of Tlon”. The ensuing discussion touches on nearly every topic of discussion that has been had by the affiliated scenes over the past few years. The event organizers had to run out to cut the speakers going to the garden, which were running during every other panel.
It had an air of finality to it. Like it was the last time any of us were going to talk about these things, like a distorted parody of every never-ending discussion about AI and institutions and Catholicism and Sovereignty and Community Formation that have gone on for the past 5 years or so. Nobody on stage was really having the same conversation. There was an audience member interlocutor calling people out. Audience was laughing the whole time. Some fluctuated between tears, cringing at others, and laughter. An end to the culture war was also negotiated here, somehow. Very astounding stuff, and probably the best structured experience at this event.
11:15 AM: Assembly Day 2
The garden again. I’m chatting with last night’s DJs, lying on the grass. I’m a little afraid the second day of this notes app discussion is going to start so I look for the group.
I run into the one employee organizing our group, and explain to him that I forgot to bring my laptop today. He decided not to bring his either. We both return to the grass. I introduce a Traditionalist to a drifter, who brings him to a backroom at the warehouse, where people are being brought to record a podcast episode.
One person talks about how people want urbit’s holding company Tlon to be like one of those 500+ year old japanese corporations that make one thing and make it well, another talks about how he thinks NFTs are a pointless scam. Outside that room, It feels like everyone already did what they came here to do, and enjoying each other’s company in a sunlit grassy field is all that’s left. Many of us get drunk enough to the point the room spins.
At around 5:30 PM, another talk is held in the hangar. Jon Blow, who is one of the first "auteur" video game developers and inventor of the modern "indie" game genre, best known for creating 2011 alt-platformer Braid has been called on to give an emergency panel. The originally-scheduled speaker got stuck in Europe due to COVID restrictions. One of urbit’s devs told me that he found out about urbit like 3 weeks ago, when guests on his twitch stream tried to walk him through running it. He never got to running it because he got stuck trying to navigate the prerequisite "web3 ecosystem" tool MetaMask.
Jon leads the audience through a brief history of the relationship between San Francisco, Anarchism, and Technology, chronologically from Hakim Bey to Craigslist to Bitcoin to Yarvin to Urbit. It was well researched and speaking to people afterwards, they all seem to have learned something new. It felt like a calm and re-affirming symbolic counterpoint to the morning’s schizophrenic panel discussion.
I’m told there’s a second, unofficial afterparty being organized at a local bar. My new friends and I uber there. What follows: we flow through various bars in austin, never staying for more than 15 minutes in a space. I come to the realization that there’s no such thing as an “Urbit Person” anymore. Sorority girls and rappers are using urbit right now.
A Traditionalist is complaining about how his peer group won’t shut up about how The Right lost the “culture war”. I remember how just a few weeks ago, people from leftist internet spaces I’m in were concerned that The Right won the “Culture War”. Crazy how that happens. I think to myself that perhaps, modeling the events that transpired in the last decade as a “war” is a completely incorrect way to think about them.
I’m in the chair in the backyard of a small house, with about 8 other people. Archetypes [A1] through [A6] are all there. Someone is making sexual jokes while another is trying to assemble the most disgusting pantry meal imaginable. The countdown in my head reaches 00:00:00, and I blink again and fall asleep instantly.
I’m available on Urbit as ~tocref-ripmyr and on Twitter as @UShouldPostThat.