Welcome back, Pilgrim. Here’s what’s happened in town since you’ve been away…
Welcome back to the Reformer Newsletter, where we can take a dive into various projects and activities from around web3 and across the Christian community. You have joined this network to contribute to our collective mission of building for Christ’s Kingdom, and we will use this newsletter as a platform to enable that.
Around Web3
Well, this issue of the Reformer is going to be a deep dive on a strange, controversial and uniquely web3 project: Urbit. Not shy about grandiose statements, their marketing material trumpets a “A clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century.” Everything about Urbit gets weirder from there, from the strange nomenclature that seems to intentionally obscure basic functions beyond casual comprehension, to the murky origins and troubling politics of the now-exited founder Curtis Yarvin. Urbit has lately been ridiculed as vaporware, nothing more than a complicated software experiment for bored coders. But things are starting to change. And the further we investigate Urbit, the more interested we are. All the usual caveats apply here, so consider what follows just the starter pack for you to Do Your Own Research. But if Urbit is able to deliver on its lofty promises, it seems poised to create a fertile scene filled with fascinating opportunities for truly independent computing. What if computers were really yours, and sort of looked and felt…cool? Let’s find out.
The Dream of Digital Homesteading: A dispatch from the recent Urbit assembly from a relatively outsider perspective, this Compact Magazine piece summarizes the unique appeal of the Urbit ecosystem as well as some of the unique bewilderment that confronts newbies. Compelling reading.
Urbit: Introduction: Here’s the manifesto and general FAQs from the project itself. A personal favorite quote for its sheer imagination: “Operating systems for the PC took the desk of the 1970s and made it digital. Paper, drawers, and envelopes became ‘files’ and ‘folders’. It’s a great abstraction, but it’s ancient. We live in a connected, multiplayer world; we need an operating system that acknowledges this world.”
Urbit Computing: A CoinDesk interview with a professor teaching a course on Urbit. Helpful for those interested in the technical quirks and innovations that the system and language plays with.
The Smart Home of the Future: A post from the official Urbit blog with some technical and esoteric ideas on reimagining the smart home tech stack. While we aren’t yet sure what the wording might be, ideas like this start to show how Urbit is a “retrofuture” tech of sorts, attempting to roll back to computing clock to a more analog way of doing things.
What Comes Next: A Thoughtful Twitter thread from a recent attendee at Assembly with some exciting developments on the Urbit horizon, as well as some concerns and unsolved problems.
Here’s the thing. Is Urbit the perfect answer to the monumental problems the project is taking on? Probably not. But you don’t have to be a hobby technological esotericist or a libertarian conspiracy theorist (we are strongly in the “neither” camp) to realize some of the benefits of this tech for the church. Access to a parallel world of computing that hopes to strip out much of the surveillance tech and advertising cruft while designing for simplicity, user control and privacy is something that the Church would benefit from keeping an eye on. The concept of a less addictive, less invasive form of technological tool is deeply compelling. While all of this seems in very much the “glorified beta” stage, that might make it an ideal moment to read up, experiment, and report back to your tribe on the possibilities. Many of us act as Scouts in our respective worlds, tasked with pioneering the lay of the landscape and discerning opportunity. Good hunting, Pilgrims.
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