loader from loading.io

Understanding Urbit #3 - Technology and Freedom

Understanding Urbit

Release Date: 03/23/2020

Understanding Urbit #7 - Tlon Operations & Community show art Understanding Urbit #7 - Tlon Operations & Community

Understanding Urbit

Tlon COO Erik Newton and Community Manager Kenny Rowe join this session to provide some additional background to Tlon and the Urbit Community. 

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #6 - Built to Last show art Understanding Urbit #6 - Built to Last

Understanding Urbit

The recurrent theme of calm computing is explored more deeply in this discussion with Logan Allen whose focus is infrastructure and product at Tlon.

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #5 - Urbit & Bitcoin show art Understanding Urbit #5 - Urbit & Bitcoin

Understanding Urbit

Christian Langalis is the resident bitcoin ambassador to the Urbit team. His motto is sound money requires sound computing and this well describes his role is to develop Bitcoin infrastructure for the Urbit ecosystem. 

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #4 - Urbit ID & the Network show art Understanding Urbit #4 - Urbit ID & the Network

Understanding Urbit

As Ted indicated in episode 2, The Urbit ID public key infrastructure and the Urbit network are core to the way individual Urbits communicate and maintain self-sovereignty. In this episode we hear from three members of the Tlon team, each explaining the part of the system they are most familiar with. OS lead Ted returns to introduce the subject.

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #3 - Technology and Freedom show art Understanding Urbit #3 - Technology and Freedom

Understanding Urbit

The effect technology has on individual freedom is a recurring theme in lunchtime discussions in the Tlon office. Chief Product Officer, Anthony Arroyo has a background in linguistics and the philosophy of technology. This positions him well to explain the nature of this relationship and how Urbit positions itself between the two.

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #2 - Under the Hood of the Urbit OS show art Understanding Urbit #2 - Under the Hood of the Urbit OS

Understanding Urbit

Engineer Ted Blackman works on the Urbit OS kernel. Like many Tlon employees, Ted initially came to the project as an open source contributor. In this discussion Ted breaks the operating system down into its components and explains its relationship to Urbit ID which we will cover in-depth in episode 4. 

info_outline
Understanding Urbit #1 - Introducing the Personal Server show art Understanding Urbit #1 - Introducing the Personal Server

Understanding Urbit

Few software projects today share either the contemporary relevance or fringe mystique of the Urbit Operating and Identity System. As a highly secure personal server, Urbit aims to deliver on many of the ideas pioneered by the Cypherpunks, and, after nearly 20 years in development the platform has begun a phased launch. Urbit gives us persistent digital identity, a new benchmark for secure computing, and maybe even an open source response to more modern social computing platforms like WeChat and Kakaotalk.

info_outline
 
More Episodes

The effect technology has on individual freedom is a recurring theme in lunchtime discussions in the Tlon office. Chief Product Officer, Anthony Arroyo has a background in linguistics and the philosophy of technology. This positions him well to explain the nature of this relationship and how Urbit positions itself between the two.

Anthony offered the key insight that today computers have evolved from their nature as tools into mechanical colonizers of our lives. More than just absorbing our attention, the online services advertising greater human connection are in reality limiting the way we relate to one another to a centrally defined mode of interaction. This extends to the way we consume news, poisoning the well of information and leading to a toxic mass social environment.

He offers Urbit as a solution that allows the user to determine their mode of interaction, and the scale of their social graph, rather than a graph that is global by default.

Anthony also introduces three characteristics of a virtual tool that are needed for it to conform to our expectations of physical tools. He describes those characteristics as simple, durable, and yours.

Finally, we learn about Urbit’s decrementing versioning system and the benefit of software that evolves toward stability.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live