During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the privately owned realms of the internet became the obligatory venues for public life. As Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google saw their stock prices soar, I became more frustrated with how much of my time and attention was absorbed by Big Tech platforms. Even before the pandemic, group chats had grown into first-rate gossip venues and Zoom calls were displacing in-person meetings. Tech companies promised increased “connection,” but the reality was isolating.
One evening, my eyes aching from screen-strain, I shut my laptop and met up with some friends in a Brooklyn park. Sitting on the damp ground, I made small talk with someone I hadn’t met before. He wore head-to-toe black and thin wire-rimmed glasses. He worked for a startup whose mission he described as building “a more beautiful computer.” The startup was called Tlon, a name I later learned came from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” tells of a secret society that conjures a new world by describing it.
The Tlon Corporation employed a handful of my friends-of-friends, mostly people I’d met through my nascent interest in blockchain technology—the cryptographically secured distributed ledgers that are the basis of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. What appealed to me wasn’t the monetary use of blockchains but the idea that they could provide the basis for a more user-centric alternative to the unpleasant state of affairs known as Web 2.0.
Murmurs circulated that Tlon was doing something edgy, provocative for reasons that I did not yet understand. At the time, the name of the company’s founder, Curtis Yarvin, didn’t mean much to me. Now it is inescapable, splashed across headlines in The New Yorker and The New York Times. The “more beautiful computer” under Tlon’s development was part of a broader project called Urbit, originally conceived by Yarvin some two decades ago. Urbit’s stated goal was to rebuild networked computing from first principles. The idea is an appealing one. The internet, as it has developed, forces users to rely on the services offered by a handful of private companies that wield increasing power over our day-to-day existence.
Yarvin’s stated aim for Urbit was to create a decentralized network where each user owns all his data: a private virtual machine, protected from surveillance and attention economy ad-tech. The network’s address space—its virtual real estate—is divided into a federated hierarchy of “planets,” “stars,” and “galaxies,” each unique according to a 28-bit identifier connected to the Ethereum blockchain. A casual user might purchase a planet, the minimal permanent parcel of address space; their host star serves as their infrastructure operator, akin to an ISP (internet service provider), which in turn is housed under a galaxy—the network overlord, ostensibly vested with governance power. If an individual at any layer of the hierarchy disagrees with the order they are subject to, they can exit: download their data and migrate to another host star or galaxy.
I liked that Urbit aligned itself with peer-to-peer networking and open-source software. It promised to safeguard against the spying, exploitation, and lock-in I had come to expect from Web 2.0 (or as Urbit promotional literature calls it, “MEGACORP”). Using a decentralized network structure, Urbit enthusiasts believed, would lead to a more equitable social life online. What was missing in my relationship to the MEGACORP platforms, I realized, was sovereignty: I was a serf, a voiceless and expendable user at the base of a virtual fiefdom. The longing for sovereignty over my networking stack was connected to deeper desires. I may not own my own home or feel that I have much say in the direction of the country, but online, at least, I would have both freedom and agency.
“What’s mine is mine, right?” reads the headline of an advertising graphic designed by Tlon employee Romina Malta, whose aesthetic direction has shaped Urbit’s brand identity. “The connected world anticipated by Urbit is a much friendlier one,” the graphic goes on, “much like the earlier internet, where collegial discussion and collaboration was the norm.” A selective vision of the internet’s history, to be sure. But an origin myth worth believing in. The ad went on to promise that problems that seem unsolvable without large-scale centralization on the current internet “become tractable when individuals control their computing again.” Human-scale computing for distributed coordination: This was the pitch that drew me to Urbit.
Urbit’s vision of self-ownership and conviviality, of coordination without centralization, is shared by other efforts to “re-decentralize” the internet as a response to Web 2.0. This includes a number of projects associated with Ethereum, a blockchain developed by the programmer Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Buterin believed blockchain technology could become the infrastructure for “Web 3.0,” a new, user-owned internet. Urbit, relies on Ethereum’s technology, and shares its vision of securing greater individual sovereignty and new distributions of power as a consequence of decentralization.
The dream of a radically decentralized internet harks back to the cyberlibertarianism of John Perry Barlow, whose 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” viewed the nascent World Wide Web as a realm of liberation from the constraints of offline life, “a new home of the mind.” Barlow and other cyber-utopians of the era took the decentralization of social power to be an inevitable effect of the internet’s decentralized architecture. The assumption was that individuals accessing the network from their personal computers were autonomous agents free to set the terms of their relations with other users.
Yet as the internet became more established, this vision collided with economic realities. When users increased and operating costs rose, network effects took hold. With the rise of Web 2.0 through the aughts and 2010s, power came to be concentrated in the hands of the small number of corporations operating centralized platforms. The early prophets of online decentralization had failed to stop these trends. But maybe, Urbit’s creators reasoned, a new wave of resistance could reverse the centralizing trajectory.
“Yarvin modeled Urbit’s design sketches on the early online social spaces he adored.”
Yarvin modeled Urbit’s design sketches on the early online social spaces he adored, like Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems. He made his first designs for Urbit in the early 2000s, meaning that Urbit arguably pre-dates Web 2.0. He worked out his ideas in relative isolation until 2013, when he co-founded Tlon Corporation. His co-founder Galen Wolfe-Pauly, a Cooper Union-educated designer with ties to the New York art world, was instrumental in reaching the cool-kid user base they hoped to attract as the network grew.
By 2016, Urbit had a website; the following year, the network was formally launched through the deployment of an Ethereum smart contract where identities—plots of virtual real estate in Urbit’s cosmos—were sold as NFTs. The sale of address space helped capitalize the project, as did investments from several major Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Yarvin abruptly left the project in 2019. The Urbit Foundation, a nonprofit entity, spun off from Tlon in 2021, following the common model of many open-source software projects. The relationship between Tlon and the Urbit Foundation was unclear to the casual user, but the pair existed in apparent harmony, united by the goal of building a “more beautiful computer.”
Tlon released Urbit’s first graphical user interface, called Landscape, in 2020. Its design was sleek and Bauhaus-inflected, inspired by the “timeless way of building” theorized by the architect Christopher Alexander. With Landscape, users could easily access an instant messenger, a bible-verse-a-day app, a radio station, and a forum with subsections for interests ranging from archive fashion to esoteric wellness. Whereas gaining access to the network had once been an arduous and code-intensive process, Landscape rendered Urbit accessible to “non-technical” users, making it possible to launch a planet with limited exposure to the command line of code underlying the operating system.
Marketing at the time targeted artists and writers, positioning Urbit as a platform for publishing and monetizing creative work. Urbit parties became a feature of the downtown New York arts scene. Countless blogs, including a short-lived one by alt-lit it-girl Honor Levy, sprang up on the network, though the exact way in which Urbit supported monetization for cultural creators was unclear. Most of the appeal was speculative: a promise of emancipation, strangely confirmed by the fact that Urbit did not actually work that well, which must have meant that it was noble to use.
By the summer of 2022, Urbit’s name was everywhere in the highly online niches I occupied. I was living in Berlin at the time, writing a column about “internet culture” for an art magazine and regularly encountering weirdos whose interest in alternative networks led them towards Urbit. For many of them, one of the attractions of the project was the aura of transgression imparted by its status as the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, known for his edgy online persona and scandalously reactionary politics.
Around this time, I read that the Urbit Foundation was looking for “collaborators.” Bored and only semi-employed, I messaged Josh Lehmann, then the Foundation’s CEO. Lehmann noted that my jankily self-hosted planet was not constantly connected to the network and traced my Urbit to my Twitter to my email. Despite my technical ineptitude and indefensible OpSec, he wrote me to set up a meeting. Subject line: “Discuss brand strategy & communications for the UF.” In a series of meandering Zoom conversations (Urbit-native video conferencing was not in the cards), we spoke of the delicate balance of growing an online community, the desire to build experimental tools for self-publishing, and the goodness of having control over one’s online presence.
That fall, the Urbit Foundation offered to fly me out to Miami for their annual Assembly, which I agreed to cover for the art magazine that I edited (a cozy but not uncommon arrangement in that industry). The conference’s theme was “New World Energy.” Lehmann’s opening address struck all the notes that had drawn me in. He explained that Urbit would “make computers personal again” by building a private interface to draw together the fragmented archipelago of platforms and accounts—“services to manage our services”—that make up today’s internet. I nodded along, admiring him as he spoke, tanned and charismatic on the temporary stage. A cocktail waitress appeared and handed me a complimentary marg. I fell into a sleepy reverie fantasizing about my exodus from MEGACORP, my sojourn into sovereignty.
“As it describes a future, it actively brings that future into being.”
At the afterparty that evening, hosted in a crypto millionaire’s sparsely furnished mansion, I threw back Moscow Mules and chatted with VCs about the writings of the philosopher Nick Land and his collaborators at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). One of the CCRU’s most enduring cultural outputs was the idea of “hyperstition”: imagined narratives instantiating themselves into real existence, belief building through positive feedback cycles until new truths crystallize out of social fictions. Hyperstition is essentially the subject of the Borges story from which the Tlon Corporation took its name, and was foundational to Urbit’s rise. A radical reimagining of presently available technology grafts itself into reality piece by piece; as it describes a future, it actively brings that future into being.
I stayed up all night partying with the core devs, doing karaoke, and swimming in the ocean. I filed my piece at the airport. Afraid of drawing ire from the Foundation after they bankrolled my working vacation, I offered a measured critique of the conference. On the flight back to Berlin, I drifted in and out of fitful sleep, the phrase Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius echoing in my mind like an incantation. Writing as an act of bringing-into-being; description as a dare, a wager, a hyperstitional time-twisted vector entangling past and future. What new worlds was I seeding by writing about Urbit? What techno-fictions was I conjuring into existence?
As I reflected on my experience at Assembly over the coming weeks and months, my initial quibbles matured into full-out qualms. In parallel, Urbit’s technical issues mounted. The network experienced frequent and unexplained downtime, apparently unable to handle its growing user base. Sometimes I logged on to DM the friends I’d made in Miami—UX designers with endless reserves of Ritalin, a DnB music label boss, an academic doing her doctorate under a former member of the CCRU. Eventually, we all grew impatient with Landscape’s clunkiness. Our conversations sputtered out or migrated to Signal.
Urbit’s once-charming friction came to feel like simple disrepair—like they’d blown all the money that should have been spent on dev salaries buying tequila and oranges. It felt like the platform, sold as an escape from MEGACORP, had fallen victim to the same dynamic of “enshittification” that, in Cory Doctorow’s diagnosis, afflicts Big Tech sites as they grow. As autumn turned to winter, the crypto market tanked, taking with it much of the capital that had driven Urbit’s rise. Auguring the wave of layoffs that would soon ripple through the tech sector, Tlon cut its workforce in early 2023. The dream of a “more beautiful computer” was starting to look like another ZIRP—a “zero interest-rate phenomenon” engendered by a short-lived uptick in a volatile market.
Under-resourced, Tlon ceased support and development for Port, the tool that had made it possible for even a “non-technical” user like me to self-host an Urbit planet on a personal laptop. A number of paid third-party hosting services, including one provided by Tlon, sprung up to fill the gap. “Tlon Hosting Services offers the effortless way to claim your home on the network,” they promised. Daunted by the prospect of setting up a home server, I reluctantly began paying Tlon a monthly fee to host my planet for me. Privacy, which ostensibly set Urbit apart from Big Tech platforms, was a staple of their marketing rhetoric—but according to employees, the network’s actual encryption was a work-in-progress. “Sovereignty” was more of an aesthetic signal than a description of my actual relationship to my data. Urbit came to feel uncomfortably similar to the subscription-based cloud services I had previously hoped it might replace.
The sunsetting of Port was a distress signal. Others would follow. In 2023, there was a “mass exodus” of users and developers from the ecosystem, one board member confirmed on a call with developers the following year. Finally, in August of 2024, struggles that had been perceptible in the background but never overtly acknowledged came to a head. The Urbit Foundation admitted that it had run out of capital and the board of directors fired Lehmann. It was announced that a young and relatively inexperienced developer named Christopher Colby would be the new CEO. He was rumored to have been hand-picked by Yarvin, who would also be rejoining the project. Since then, Colby has been out of the spotlight as Yarvin has re-emerged as the public face of Urbit. He positions his return as a founder’s triumphant homecoming, rescuing his company from what he has described as “controlled flight into terrain.”
“Belief dissipated, as did the financing.”
There are varying accounts of how Urbit reached this crisis point. In his first public talk after rejoining the project, Yarvin characterized the Urbit Foundation’s mismanagement as a blend of conservatism and delusion. Unlike many other early-2020s startups built on blockchain infrastructure, Urbit never launched a native cryptocurrency, frequently insisting it was not a “crypto startup.” While the project self-funded by selling blockchain-based address space, it is true that they did not cash in on the trend of capitalizing via an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). “By failing to take the hors d’oeuvres while they were being passed around,” Yarvin said, “it left us with our integrity intact but it also left us without a ton of money.”
Nevertheless, as a knock-on effect of the crypto market’s rise, general enthusiasm about blockchain technologies led to a surge of interest and a rush on Urbit real estate. Parties were thrown; swag was produced; slide decks promised super-private computing on Urbit-specific hardware. All the while, not enough was being done to ensure what Yarvin called the “general robustness of the system.” With Landscape, Tlon had effectively built a beautiful interface that wallpapered over a barely functional operating system. The Urbit Foundation lacked liquidity. Developers were getting paid in address space. They were operating on faith, but as time went on it became clearer that the system was failing. The Urbit Foundation kept trying to promote user growth, running grants and developer programs to incentivize the building of Urbit-native apps. Limited effort went towards addressing the fact that the core OS was, in Yarvin’s words, “just not aerospace-grade.” Belief dissipated, as did the financing.
Yarvin’s diagnosis of the Urbit Foundation’s recent missteps was only a partial explanation of where things had gone wrong. The truth is that Urbit’s organizational politics had been dysfunctional from the outset. The challenge of developing accountable governance in open-source software production communities has been well-documented, and Urbit proved no exception. In part, the difficulties stem from the fact that Urbit sits uneasily between realms. The code is publicly visible, and people beyond Tlon and the Foundation’s payroll contribute to its development. Yet decision-making around the project’s direction is not particularly participatory or transparent. Is it an open-source software project abiding by the reigning norms of peer production? A startup developed by a private corporation? Or one enthusiast’s passion project, subject solely to his will?
In 2023, Lehmann introduced a process for submitting “Urbit Improvement Proposals” (UIPs) on GitHub, attempting to ensure some transparency in the project’s governance. This is in keeping with the common practice of allowing “requests for comment” to enable community discourse around proposed changes to an open-source codebase. In this case, though, the move was little more than a symbolic gesture. In practice, the proposals are barely used. More often, Tlon exercises power. The company was instrumental in facilitating Urbit’s access to venture capital; it could afford full-time salaried developers who logged more hours than the open-source project contributors who volunteered their time. Tlon’s influence is also reflected in the distribution of Urbit IDs: the critic and technologist Francis Tseng calculated that, as of 2019, 185 of Urbit’s 256 galaxies were owned by Tlon, Tlon employees, and Urbit Foundation employees. That group also accounted for almost 38,000 of the network’s 65,500 stars. Despite the project’s lip service to decentralization, address space ownership is highly concentrated.
Urbit’s governance trouble dates back to its early designs, in which Yarvin ordained that decision-making power is proportional to ownership of address space on the network. He has called Urbit a “transparent plutocracy.” Tlon’s status as one such plutocratic power has become self-evident. Who, or what, constitutes the other powerful nodes in this order? Corporate docs outline the presence of a “Galactic Senate” composed of galaxy owners, but it is unclear from the published documentation how or whether the Galactic Senate dictates development priorities, process changes, and leadership appointments. The Urbit Foundation’s board is distinct from the Galactic Senate, and both are separate from Tlon’s corporate leadership. There are likely considerable overlaps among these entities due to the distribution of address space, but the exact contours of each group’s power and influence are too murky to trace.
When Urbit hit an impasse in 2024, it became clear that only one person was really in charge. That person is Curtis Yarvin. Urbit’s governance structure is, and has ultimately always been, a direct outgrowth of Yarvin’s monarchist political vision, where Yarvin inhabits the position of (in his own words) “the prince.” In a speech given to Urbit developers following his reinstatement, Yarvin argued “democracy is the most beautiful … but not the most effective” form of governance. Elsewhere, Yarvin has expressed his anti-democratic views in less measured terms. In certain corners of the internet, he is better known by the alias Mencius Moldbug, under which he penned the blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 until 2014. There, he developed a distinctive political philosophy he calls “neo-cameralism,” essentially a fusion of monarchism with libertarianism.
“Urbit users were ultimately living under the domination of a king.”
As Moldbug, Yarvin was fond of arguing that democracy should be “rebooted” into corporate governance. “The ideal government,” writes Moldbug, “is a corporation that owns its country in the same way that Apple owns its factories or Microsoft owns its software.” Attempting to reconcile libertarian interests with his enthusiasm for unilateral rule, Moldbug lands on the position that a nation should be run like a tech startup, and a tech startup should be run like a monarchy. If someone subject to this system takes issue with it, their only recourse is to leave. In Yarvin’s preferred style of governance, the people have no voice, only the freedom to exit.
When Yarvin walked away from Urbit in 2019, he claimed he was motivated by a desire to see Urbit grow under new leadership: “From the very start, I knew Urbit could not succeed until it ceased to be mine and became the world’s,” he wrote in a post to the Urbit blog. But the residue of his political vision remained. Urbit tended toward a feudal concentration of power that paralyzed its development and precipitated its decline. Absent a defined protocol for accountable decision-making, the pragmatic norms of peer production were liable to be dismissed as unfashionably “democratic.” Instead, Urbit cultivated an every-man-for-himself ethos, admirably entrepreneurial but evidently scattershot in its outcomes. An entire ecosystem sprang up, building “on” Urbit, but no one could agree what it meant to build Urbit. As the project’s governance woes came to a head, the limitations of its promise of user sovereignty were painfully laid bare. Rather than governing their own data, Urbit users were ultimately living under the domination of a king, and far from being enlightened and effective, his leadership was erratic.
As Urbit collapsed, I came to realize that the fantasy of individual sovereignty on which it was built is essentially anti-political. It regards political and social ties—the fabric of cooperation—as mere bondage. It assumes that pure self-reliance is both desirable and feasible; in my experience, it is neither. Our dependence on others does not make us less human. On the contrary, it defines us as social beings.
Urbit’s anxious disavowal of dependency appealed to rugged “power-users” eager to exit MEGACORP for the freedom of the digital frontier. By offering users ownership of “galaxies,” “stars,” and “planets,” it promised a virtual liftoff from earth and into outer space. But the same fantasy that attracted users contributed to Urbit’s dysfunctional governanc. It obscured the role played by concrete human relationships in the real world in operating and maintaining this (and any) technology. As a result, Urbit has come to resemble Web 2.0: an enshittified infrastructure controlled by a small handful of actors immune to democratic accountability. If Yarvin’s political vision proved to be an unsound model for governance for a company, one can only imagine how it would play out on the scale of a country.
Urbit missed its opportunity to become a novel platform for internet governance. But it isn’t quite dead yet. Perhaps from its remnants, a “more beautiful computer” may yet emerge. Even in the realm of hyperstition, no prophecy is self-fulfilling, no monarchy eternal. If a technology has emancipatory potential, it is not the would-be feudal lords who will realize it: It is the community of power-users, the weirdos and dreamers—working together—who will bring it to fruition.