from yours truly, ~sarlev-sarsen
If you are reading this, you are probably aware of the turmoil in the Urbit ecosystem, so I won't describe it too much further here. Check out this twitter thread from ~hassun-hassel for a reasonably accurate overview of things. Instead, I want to take the chance to share my perspective (it's not perfect, he is basically a journo after all).
I've been known to be a bit verbose in my writing, so I'll start with a TL;DR:
My stance is fairly simple:
The current board has objectively failed in it's duties, thus my ~rus vote (as 1 of 3 of the owners) goes to replacing it.
The correct vehicle for ~sorreg-namtyv's 'Moses' traction strategy is as a traditional equity company, separate from the Urbit Foundation.
If that satisfies your curiosity, feel free to stop reading here. For those looking for more, read on. What is the path forward? Are we stuck in coups forever? I hope not. Instead, I look to a future of Urbit as a hyperculture.
I found Urbit when I was looking for a place where people could build their businesses on strong digital foundations. I had worked as a propogandist for MEGACORPs, doing go-to-market for entreprise SaaS, adtech, and huge global firms in the 'tech' world (Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Cisco, etc) and gone through two acquisitions of my firms being swallowed by ever larger megaliths, all with net negative impacts on both employees and customers. In some sense, working on Urbit is my redemption arc for selling a whole generation of small business owners on “Digital Transformation”. Instead of making it so that people were more in control of their futures, I feel that I helped craft a future where your business isn't yours.
I have worked full time on Urbit in various capacities since 2022, when ~wolref-podlex hired me to run the Urbit Foundation's grants program. How did he recruit me? Was it status or treasure? Nope. I took a ~50% haircut to take on the role, because of one line, “You know Urbit yet isn't ready for what you want to build, right? You should come help us get there.” When Crypto winter came, myself and other urbiter's from the dalten collective raised capital to found Death to the, Corporation. You'll probably know it as 'Vaporware', where we worked on mechanisms to build viral financialized software distribution. Vaporware pivoted away from Urbit (nominative determinism strikes again), and I stayed. I used more of my blood and treasure to start ~tocwex.syndicate with ~sidnym-ladrut, ever reaching for the goal of a self-contained digital organization owned not by paperwork and frictionful middlemen, but p2p relationships and self-sovereign identities. Again, when the Urbit Foundation called, I answered. Taking a role as the Product Director to serve the needs as Urbit as a whole, rather than my own bags. Less comp. Less upside. But it is the best place for me to contribute to a future where individuals and communities can own and govern their digital futures.
Throughout all this, I completed hoon school and app school, hosted and presented at various Urbit events, contributed to the Urbit Systems Technical Journal, helped host the Subassembly event when the Urbit Foundation lacked the resources to bring the community together, and wrote my own syndicate contract ecosystem to interface with the Urbit ID Ethereum contracts. Nobody paid me to do any of these things, and my starbags are laughably small.
All this to say, I am first and foremost an urbiter because I want to build a future for my descendants to have computers that are theirs--and that will last. I will continue to serve that mission however I can. Presently, this importantly includes the fact that Urbit is not served by silence, or agreeableness, or cloak and daggers politicking. Many people have already heard my positions in conversations, or in part, and I am confident that whatever side of 'the issue' they may be on, they have heard the same story from me. If you feel otherwise, please sign in using eAuth and comment below and I am more than happy to clarify any confusions.
The way I see it, there are two tangentially related but actually plausibily separate issues at hand in the current Urbit Ecosystem. One is of governance: what is the role of the Galatic Senate in how it executes it's two sets of duties: onchain Ecplitic upgrades (ownership of the ecliptic.eth contract), and Urbit Foundation Board composition (oversight over the Cayman Non-Profit legacy legal entity). The other is of operational structure: What the form of any overarching 'Urbit Strategy' and the organizational design of the ecosystem ought to be.
The board has overseen four Executive Directors in ~12 months, and has absolutely bungled both major 'change of control' efforts. The first bungled change of control was a chance to learn. To understand how to properly handle the operational adjustments, the internal/external communications, and design the incentives of all parties involved to ensure a smooth transition in the event of any future change of control instances. Fucking it up a second time? Sorry, but in the same way that ~wolref-podlex may have had a fireable offense as Executive Director (losing track of burn and running out of money), so too is a second bungled change of control a fireable offense for the board.
The first change of control I only saw from the outside. Hot heads got heated, gathertown coups were made, and I spoke directly with ~master-malwyl and ~bitmep-faswen at the time about the failure in comms, what needed to happen to fix what was still salvagable, and how to avoid these situations in the future. Don't get me wrong, the return of a controversial founder, the fear of running out of money, and the ensuing chaos is not an easy thing to deal with. But in spite of all that chaos, nobody stopped working on urbit. People quit and kept working, flammed out and kept working, or stuck around at the UF with docked pay and promises of the future. But they kept working on Urbit.
This second change of control I've seen from the inside, and suffice it to say I've been even less impressed. I've asked the following questions in various forums with what is effectively minimal direct response in return (responses in public forums provided here; I will edit if additional public statements are made or I am specifically permissioned to share private statements):
Does the board think that it should continue to serve in spite of having 4 eds in less than 12 months?
What is Curtis' time commitment going to be as ED for the UF?
Was there a quid pro quo for the Urbit Foundation to buy Red Horizon if Curtis was installed as Executive Director? Would the board be open to this decision going up to a senate vote since ryan already explicitly declined to purchase it and it presents a very concerning potential conflict of interest?
What is the list of non-a16z investors that Curtis pitched on buying UF galaxies post-return?
Where does Galen sit on all of this? what would it take to get us to a place where we could see both galen and curtis on a call together? (~malmu-halmex's statement in response to this is a cryptic 'Tlon has traditionally voted with the majority')
Why is the “Moses”--Curtis' single-page forum + wallet urbit client idea--effort not happening as a separate equity company? Given Conway's law, it doesn't seem like the Urbit Foundation as a non-profit foundation as governed by the senate is structurally equipped for building it.
Will Curtis contribute to core dev on a regular basis going forward? (The loose answer to this seems to be 'he does not plan to')
To me, these seem like straightforward questions that should have straightforward answers regardless of where you stand on any of the other possible directions for Urbit to go. Not being able to answer them directly and forthrightly is concerning to me.
There were, let's call them 'factions', during the first coup that said that governance has failed. That the Galactic Senate was corrupt, and that Azimuth was a stain on Urbit. I was not convinced of this at the time. I still want to believe in the strength of Azimuth and basic governance as a way to bootstrap an identity system and network topology. If this board stands this time around, though, I feel will be forced to fill out a '~hastuc-dibtux apology form'.
Over the past few months I have read this piece from 2018, originally written by ~sorreg-namtyv (republished here by ~master-morzod), called “Casbah, a Hyperculture”, many times. Contained within:
Humanity's future is one shared global computing fabric. It is not one shared global culture. We believe that the death of any culture is a tragedy, and the birth of any culture is a miracle. The mission of Casbah is to support every culture that exists, and nurture every culture that's ready to be born.
~sorreg-namtyv's desire to return to Urbit as a savior is understandable. Justified, even. 'The Chart' for star prices look horrendous. The list of naysayers is a long one. Perhaps even he is the savior that Urbit needs.
Yet he is not actually a part of Urbit's current culture. Many (most?) Urbiters feel his 'return' is a false one, given that he doesn't use his Arvo ship to communicate over the network. He is not using Tlon's Messenger app (instead favoring to send people DMs or group chats on signal), not partaking in %kibbitz, or even joining into the %pals gossip network. After a brief interlude of posting on twitter as @sorreg_namtyv, even that fell away to more regular posting as @curtis_yarvin. The more gracious interpretation is that ~sorreg-namtyv is back to create his own culture within the Casbah. But this cultural creation ought to be a birth of a new culture, not the death and skinsuiting of an existing culture.
To many, myself included, returning to Urbit to create a new culture and taking over the Urbit Foundation to direct it's assets at a different culture, are different things. The latter feels disjointed and out of touch, while the former would likely be welcomed with enthusiasm and excitement. I suspect it is why there has been such a recoiling of the exisiting Urbit culture to the current board's decision making. It comes off as apathetic, or even actively hostile, to the mission of the Urbit Foundation as a non-profit which “exists to advance the interests of the Urbit Network through education and ecosystem development” and more specifically to:
Assist with the development and adoption of the Urbit network through business building, developer outreach and promotion;
Operate the Urbit Grants program, which grants Urbit address space to developers building on Urbit;
Work with other organisations to host events and further the interests of decentralized identity protocols and the Urbit network;
Assist with the operation of urbit.org and related websites;
Coordinate the core developers, and manage kernel development of the Urbit protocol;
Do all such things as in the opinion of the directors are or may be incidental or conducive to the above objects or any of them.
(no, open sourcing your code doesn't make you a public good; all of ~tocwex.syndicate's code is open source and developed wholly in public but we are absolutely not a public goods company).
As ~sorreg-namtyv has said to me and others many times, we need to consider Conway's law:
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Taken strictly, this isn't the most helpful rule for Urbit entity organizational design. But interpreted slightly more broadly we can take is as a reminder to assess the the structure of Urbit ecosytem entities and how their construction impacts their purpose. This holds true both for the Urbit Foundation, Tlon, and any other entities building cultures on top of Urbit.
I wrote an internal piece approximately a month ago (pre-“Coup part deux”) about how the correct vehicle for the “Moses” work that ~sorreg-namtyv imagines as Urbit's traction opportunity is an equity company. I will refrain from posting the whole written piece here, but in spite of my still being a contractor for the Urbit Foundation I feel it appropriate to make my stance known as a contributor to the broader Urbit ecosystem:
The Urbit Foundation should inject a 'y-combinator sized' amount of capital into a new equity corporation, let's call it 'NewCo'
~sorreg-namtyv should be the leader of NewCo, supported by ~radnep-bolled who can bring his talent and experience generating user traction to the Urbit ecosystem
This organization should be specifically staffed and orieted towards serving the needs of the colloquially named 'Semafor Guys'
Doing this under a separate equity vehicle offers strong affordances I believed, and continue to believe, to be necessary for a 'user traction' effort:
Obvious pathways towards venture capital fundraising, and a clearer path for revenue or profit generation efforts
Clear focus on a narrow set of user pain points for which ~sorreg-namtyv's network offers a strong chance at traction
Not turning the Urbit Foundation into a Tlon Corporation competitor
All these things remain true today, and so really my position remains unchanged from prior to all of this coup/counter-coup/politicking. This is in contrast to the position of ~sorreg-namtyv as the present Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation, although I hope I have cultivated a sufficiently strong reputation as someone who can both be firm and direct, and who plays well with others such that my outspokeness is taken as intended: forthrightly and in good faith. Nothing of what is proposed by any potential leadership is 'Urbit, ~sarlev's Vision'...
I also say this because I think Moses is actually a good idea. I think ~sorreg-namtyv could actually ship it if given the focus and the hunger to be forced to make it happen. I say this because I myself want to use a single page forum with threaded tree-structure conversations. I want a culture of @p maximalism (perhaps with more vanity ID's that ~sorreg-namtyv is comfortable with). I want actually useful brainwallets. I want just a wee bit of pressure on Urbit companies who shall not be named to support markdown in their long form writing formats.
But Moses isn't Urbit. Moses is a culture built on top of the Urbit Casbah, and to ignore the fact that other culture's already exist on top of Urbit would be willful ignorance: Groundwire. Nockchain. Tlon. Moses. Offline Azimuth. Even the lost souls of Plunder and Uqbar. These are all their own cultures, presently with some overlap, but ever less so as the months and the years grind on. And shattering these cultures--via personal conflict, political machinations, or social fallout--and scattering the talented and capable contributors into the wind would be as much a death for Urbit as anything else. It is this fracturing that is represented by the signatories on ~master-malwyl's “Reclaiming Our Foundation” page, myself included.
Of course, it is important to note that I am not in charge of the Urbit Foundation (nor do I seek to wear that heavy, bloodstained mantle), so these kinds of things are not my call to make. But where I do have power, which is as one-third of the ~rus council, I will exercise it and vote to oust the current board. I shall also continue to do what I can to serve the Urbit Casbah and I hope the other players/factions/teams in all of this can find grace for one another.
People will feel wronged. Perhaps people have been wronged. But urbit is for everyone, and if that can't be true now, there is no way that Urbit becomes the computing standard for the next 10,000 years.
A culture with any plausible single point of failure will always be weak. It will be casual, fragile, and tentative. Even if it is none of these things, it would be even stronger if centerless.
~sorreg-namtyv, “Casbah, a hyperculture”