The original, Borgesian metaphor of Urbit is about the nature of representing reality; the map of Tlön unrolls over the landscape. Urbit has always attracted those who think deeply about new manifestations of reality, and new realities which emerge from activity. We believe that it’s time to make the coordination of reality a major focus of Urbit. The early tools and primitives are ready, and the timing is viciously elegant.
Legacy society is undergoing an accelerating migration to the digital realm, which holds both the extremely dangerous potential for a loss of long-held context and values in the process of translation, and the promise of building durable foundations of distributed infrastructure that route around damage and resist tyranny. Legacy institutions and maps of reality are surrendering to a sclerosis which demands tools to allow dramatically more agentic coordination; in order to free capital, capacity, and trust loose from their rotting bindings, and assemble them into functional organs of a human-oriented digital civilization.
Urbit’s emphasis on simplicity and stability, its radical lack of dependence on the legacy computing and networking paradigm, and its high degree of control over tools; provide us an unparalleled advantage in building these foundational primitives. Every design decision, down to the simplicity of the Nock instruction set, reinforces these principles.
Urbit’s future is to first represent the reality that its owners, builders, and users deem worthy; to create a life-size map of the world as we see it. Once these pictures have been painted, via systems of reputation, mutual verification, and data inputs from other levels of reality; the unique architecture of the Urbit network–simple personal servers, a widely distributed PKI, a p2p routing protocol–allows for the composition and autonomous rearrangement of any set of objects represented on the network.
From there, Urbit identity, reputation, and reality-mapping standards will allow us to take the first steps towards full-scale, civilization-level protocols.
Until recently, Urbit has mostly been focused on tool-building, whether on the core development or product side. Now, we see the first explorers and track-layers using those tools to map the wilderness and set up outposts and communication lines.
Azimuth is increasingly attracting attention as a genuinely competitive entry in the self-sovereign ID space, which has traditionally suffered from a paradox: Sovereign ID needs to grow organically around high-signal interactions of social, financial, and technological import. The initial population of an ID schema needs to be doing real things, trusting each other, and building an initial trust graph that can subsequently attract more participants. There have been many attempts to build technically brilliant decentralized ID systems that have crucially neglected to attach themselves to a compelling use case. Urbit, as a full-stack computer, with a decentralized networking protocol attached, has perhaps the best “compelling use case” one could imagine.
There are murmurings of multiple Urbit-native blockchain projects which seek to use the sovereignty and widespread distribution of Azimuth points as the basis for an innately distributed and committed consensus layer.
Projects like %fund and Alphabet are creating open protocols for p2p interaction on Urbit which create their own flywheels of reputation data among users, making the social graph of Urbit richer as time goes on; eventually, they will eat chunks of the web2 social graph whole as they endow ‘users’ with self-sovereign Azimuth IDs. These protocols are fundamentally different from the web2 platforms whose functions they replace; they share basic understanding of key primitives, but allow users to set community rules with a high degree of flexibility both internally and inter-communally. Urbit has sometimes been termed a ‘network of networks’, but we’re only now seeing the second clause come to fruition.
Urbit IDs (Azimuth points) can represent humans, network nodes, AI agents, or physical devices. Urbit-native blockchains can create a consensus layer. Protocols built on Urbit create ever-deepening layers of opt-in reputation data on top of Azimuth. Hardware hosting options and Urbit-native crypto wallets make Urbit nodes sovereign enough to maintain a diversity of perspectives on reality. Integrations with other decentralized protocols are bridges to other segments of reality and graphs of trust and interaction.
Mapping reality is the first step. Urbit’s high-fidelity network of nodes, tools, and protocols allow for novel, endlessly composable and creative forms of coordination.
Urbit is a self-sovereign coordination primitive. Legacy platforms and network architectures mandate one-to-many or many-to-one; coordination is at the whim of the chokepoint. As layer 1 blockchains are global consensus, and L2s are local consensus, Urbit is an endlessly flexible consensus-creation tool that can seamlessly interface with the requisite level of legibility. This is the missing piece needed to allow open protocols to coordinate the resources of reality at a high enough degree of fidelity to allow for organic, incentive-driven replacement of brittle, centralized legacy alternatives.
Social layers, marketplaces, knowledge production, cultural flowering, property rights, and physical human society must all find their digital accommodations with this new representation of reality.
We believe that the time is ripe for Urbit to begin conquering—using Azimuth, the first Urbit-based protocols, and a universe of practical use cases—the legacy informational, social, financial and physical realities around us. The question in front of us is now how we will do it.
We invite you to join us in the foothills of Mount Rainier, this October 20th-22nd, 2024, to discuss and plan the representation of reality and the possibilities of its coordination on the Urbit network.
Some topics we’ll discuss: