To borrow an old joke about Chomsky: Curtis Yarvin the neoreactionary theorist (aka Mencius Moldbug) should not be confused with the computer programmer of the same name. Yet the latter has been dropped from at least one conference based on the former’s writings. I don’t take any strong position against this, any more than I do against William Shockley being sanctioned for his eugenics activism. Neither Shockley then nor Yarvin now are entitled to any particular peer forum.
Yarvin has created an operating system called Urbit, coded in a language he also created that resembles glitch art, or perhaps fragments of a grimoire. Yarvin and another Urbit developer propose that an operating system should be developed toward a state of absolute perfection, and then frozen for all time.
Urbit’s typed functional language, Hoon … is defined in about 5,000 lines of Hoon, or 10,000 if you count the deep standard library.… Above Hoon, the stack rapidly gets much warmer. Arvo is an event-driven microkernel that’s 1,000 lines of Hoon. Above this are another 5,000 lines of system library, then 12,000 lines of Arvo modules.… The actual status of Urbit is that in 2017, we hope to make our last discontinuous update.
Yarvin defines “operating system” here differently from typical usage. Urbit doesn’t issue commands directly to hardware. It issues them to an underlying operating system that does so. But like an OS kernel, Urbit’s access to the hardware is exclusive and airtight. Although Yarvin routinely brings political metaphors into technical discussions, this is not an essay where he does so. “Freezing” is instead justified in terms of Urbit’s ultimate purpose, which is said to include permanent, distributed data storage.
There is nothing inherently political about wanting to finish a program, but programmers don’t usually protest it at length. In doing so, Yarvin suggests a parallel to his politics. The essential belief of a reactionary is that society should be purged of its decay since some prior moment, so that something like the prior order can be established — forever! Moldbug has written elsewhere:
Perhaps the principal error of modern libertarians is their failure to distinguish between weak government and small government. My ideal government is extremely small, extremely efficient, and extremely strong - its authority cannot be challenged. It does not repress its citizens not because it is physically incapable of repression, but because repression is, far from being in its interests, directly opposed to them.
Likewise, Urbit’s kernel is small, efficient and eternally supreme. How Moldbug’s ideal government expresses its strength is glossed over. For a computer kernel, absolute authority is ensured by having it when the computer turns on and taking care not to fumble it. If only, the reactionary wishes, the same were possible for human beings!
