The Yarvin Heuristic

I have an Urbit planet. Listen to my tale.

Sigil for ~napmet-davrut. More about Urbit sigils here.

I am ~napmet-davrut on Urbit. Urbit describes itself as “a clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century.”

Urbit is a new kind of computer that you can own completely in ways that matter: networking, identity, & data. We realized that in order to fix the internet, we had to build a new computer from scratch. Good thing we started over a decade ago. Today, Urbit is a real system with thousands of users that are building all kinds of communities, software, DAOs, and more. And it’s getting better every day.

This is likely obscure to my readership, but the path by which I got here may be worth noting. What follows is a brief recollection full of hyperlinks, so the curious may explore further and everyone else can enjoy my getting to the point.

I was a longtime reader of Unqualified Reservations, written by one Mencius Moldbug, an obvious pseudonym. UR was one of the powerhouses of what was known at the time, the later Aughts, as the Dark Enlightenment. Arnold Kling, author of the highly recommended (and free) book The Three Languages of Politics, dubbed that crowd the “neo-reactionaries.” It stuck. One sees them referred to in shorthand as NRx.

Moldbug was not aggressive about maintaining his pseudonymity. It subsequently became common knowledge that his real identity was

Curtis Yarvin

, who had begun work on Urbit in 2013. In 2015 he was canceled from the Strange Loop conference due to anonymous pests backchannelling to the organizer that he was a supporter of slavery and an utterer of hate speech. The same crowd attempted to get him canceled from LambdaConf in 2016, characterizing Yarvin publicly this time as “a man known as a founder and advocate of an ideological movement that promotes racist bigotry, and as an apologist for slavery.”

Having read his work I knew this to be humbug, though Yarvin was obviously something of an edgelord. Yes, he believes monarchy to be a superior system to democracy, but I view that as no more extreme than the suggestions that the Electoral College should be eliminated and caveats added to the First Amendment, as are voiced by prominent progressives openly and without reprisals.

It was around then that I began regarding progressive condemnation as an actionable signal. I call it the Yarvin Heuristic: anyone that the progressives want to destroy is probably getting aggressively lied about, and the truth about him or her is likely to be fascinating.

Following the Yarvin Heuristic I witnessed amazing things. One of them was a 2019 debate, streamed on Rumble and as far as I know not preserved, between Richard Spencer and Styxhexenhammer666. Spencer is best known as the white nationalist who got punched during an interview in 2017. Styx is an occultist who has an sizable following for his daily videos commenting on current politics. The topic was whether Trump or Biden would make a better president. Styx took the side of Trump. Spencer backed Biden.

This is not to say that Spencer is an admirable guy. But he is surprisingly contrite for the failure of the alt-right to make lasting political gains. Too, he saw an authoritarian streak in the Biden regime that he thought was promising. That panned out. Biden is an autocrat who pushes executive orders and dares the courts to stop him. The Biden Centers for Disease Control trampled the First Amendment. The latest scandal of his Department of Justice saw the FBI retracting a memo characterizing traditional Catholics as “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.” Spencer’s politics are odious, but he wasn’t wrong about everything, and he picked the winning horse.¹

The converse ought to be true, but it isn’t. Progressives tend to disdain the possibility that their enemies are astute, moral, or intelligent. Conservatives tend to overestimate their enemies as evil masterminds.² Consequently progressive targets of conservative abuse, upon closer examination, are often revealed to be stuffed with sawdust. Instead of maligned worthies, they’re pretentious bogeymen. It’s obvious two chapters into How to Be an Antiracist that its author is one of the most hackneyed intellects to reach the bestseller lists since Shirley MacLaine. Paul Krugman, who holds what I’m led to understand is a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his contributions to the understanding of macroeconomics, is penning I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I pabulum assuring readers of the New York Times that the recent accusations they’ve been hearing about Democrats are not true about Democrats, but they’re super-duper true about Republicans.

In contrast, regard this recent observation of Yarvin’s:

Aristotle saw three forms of government: rule of one, rule of the few, rule of the many. He called them monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. Our Reality Department calls them: dictatorship, democracy, and populism.

As is typical of the man, the whole essay is worth your attention, and will disturb your thought patterns for weeks.

The Yarvin Heuristic applies most of all to its namesake, and I followed the Urbit project from its beginnings as best I could given that it’s written in a profoundly idiosyncratic programming language called Hoon, which is also Yarvin’s invention. Likewise goes for the runtime upon which Hoon is written, Nock. I won’t pretend to understand the details but I recognize counterculture when I see it.

In 2019, after 17 years of intense hacking, Yarvin left the company he founded that was working on Urbit.

I won't be back to Urbit. I am leaving not just the project but the field – no less than Satoshi, or Everett, or Rimbaud. Will Satoshi weigh in on the next Bitcoin Cash fork? Did Rimbaud fly back from Ethiopia for his book-release tour? (Did anyone want him back?) It's not so bad to be a middle-aged Rimbaud.

Nevertheless said company, the Tlon Corporation, continues the work. It has begun rolling out planets to early subscribers to its mailing list. Now here I am at ~napmet-davrut. The view is lovely. There is a Dissident Muse group. I created it one minute ago. As someone who studies the phenomenon of cancel culture, I’m attaching Dissident Muse to decentralized, censorship-resistant networks at the outset. Urbit is one of them.

Obtaining your own planet will be higher effort but it is in the realm of the possible. You can start using the Yarvin Heuristic right now. What gifts will it yield unto you?

1. That said, Styx ate his lunch in that debate. I expected Spencer to perform better given that he defended a Master’s thesis on Adorno to the redoubtable Paul Gottfried. But his talents seem to be taking leave of him, as talents may when one squanders them on nonsense.

2. The truth is that conservatives are spectacularly bad at wielding power and progressives are not. This is beginning to change with figures like Florida governor Ron DeSantis but they have a lot of catching up to do.