Urbit and the Not-So-Dark Future of the Internet
A dark genius is remaking the internet to revolve around the user
The internet is ostensibly a happiness engine. Studies prove that connection makes humans happy, perhaps happier than anything else, and the internet, at its core, is a connection machine. Yet studies also show that the more time we spend online, the more depressed we are. Surely, if the internet connected us the way we connect in real life, it wouldn’t make us so unhappy.
Solving this problem is not the target of many new apps; tech founders typically aren’t interested in acknowledging that most of what they produce doesn’t actually improve anyone’s lives. A solution will thus have to come from an outsider. Someone cynical enough to see the deep, fundamental flaws that make being online depressing and unreasonable enough to believe those flaws can be fixed.
Enter Curtis Yarvin and Galen Wolfe-Pauly, co-founders of a project called Urbit, which aims to fundamentally overhaul the internet by making it more like real life. If Urbit has its way, you’ll own not just all of your data, but all the data you interact with. For example, if you read a newspaper, you’ll keep that unchanging copy of the newspaper, just like you would in real life. If you have a photograph, it’ll belong only to you, not Mark…
