An Urbit in Our Stars

Introduction

“What the tools we rely on the most heavily have in common is that they’re all simple, durable, and ours.” – Lane Rettig, Ethereum Core Developer

We have become cattle. The data of our online lives is constantly siphoned from us by a conglomerate of Web2 companies that sit at the center of the modern client-server network stack. When you go online, you first connect to a large Web2 company. These companies connect us to a larger world than our forebearers could ever grasp. But, these entities have used this central position to censor information and build an entire industry around surveillance capitalism. This existing client-server paradigm gives inordinate power to those who control the servers and have created the perverse incentives that have given rise to this problem. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to show that this trend is slowing, an