The key driver behind Yarvin's ideology seems to be arrogance, covering perceived self-weakness. I think that's what makes it appealing to so many Silicon Valley "nerd king" type figures, and also why it has the form it does.
Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to prove yourself drive, but he doesn't seem to have invested time in figuring out how to move past it or use it productively.
You can completely discard Yarvin's ideology - or even agree with it - and still see this in the way he works. His company, Urbit (not the name of the company but the name of its "product") is a ham-handed, hyper-complex "re-imagining" of pretty much every wheel in computing, from the OS to networking to programming languages. It has effectively no useful user-facing features, but a whole lot of design philosophy and programming language design. It creates lots of problems while solving almost none, but it looks impressive.
...which is to say it maybe actually isn't all that far off from his ideological and political writing, in the end.
Lol, I said that about Urbit 10 years ago, back when Hackernews was still glazing it (and him). That it's a shellgame he plays to seem smart and innovative, without actually breaking new conceptual ground, and that it has that in common with his Moldbug stuff.
And for a bit of fun, I even posted an Urbit parody in those days, in which I inadvertently invented a feature of the Unison programming language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837
Urbit is also written in PHP. A clone of Urbit is written in Rust, i was reading it's source some years back, i don't even remember it's name, but i had this feeling of "Ok, what is that thing doing".
But one thing is clear to me. Blockchain technology + IPv6 opens a lot of possibilities to re-imagine networking, and that's what Urbit is mainly focused on: networking.
A good blockchain technology also has possibilities to re-imagine parts of OS.
For example we will not need to have local users if all identities can be verified using credentials stored online, immutable forever. Also we won't need to have local networks, DNS, Time servers etc. Everything will be global.
Many ideas there, but each one of those problems is unbelievably hard by itself, all of them together is half of the internet and computing infrastructure.
... does it look impressive? I happened across it again recently, and it reinforced my previous view that it seems like a total mess and waste of a time.
What I honestly remain unclear on: Are these serious efforts - both the political writing and the technical work - or is it elaborate trolling?
Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to prove yourself drive, but he doesn't seem to have invested time in figuring out how to move past it or use it productively.
You can completely discard Yarvin's ideology - or even agree with it - and still see this in the way he works. His company, Urbit (not the name of the company but the name of its "product") is a ham-handed, hyper-complex "re-imagining" of pretty much every wheel in computing, from the OS to networking to programming languages. It has effectively no useful user-facing features, but a whole lot of design philosophy and programming language design. It creates lots of problems while solving almost none, but it looks impressive.
...which is to say it maybe actually isn't all that far off from his ideological and political writing, in the end.