sinedpick
He shares a lot of speaking patterns with obvious cranks. I’ve spent some time listening to people who think they’ve figured out quantum gravity and the way they make little digressions sounds exactly like Yarvin does in this video. It’s not rigorous, but if I didn’t know who Yarvin was before watching this video I’m pretty sure I would have thought “crank” and quickly clicked away.
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it’s a pretty decent source of sneers. This month’s contains: “The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin”. In classic Moldbug fashion, it’s Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I’ll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 –
Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that’s simple and easy to use that’s not a small amount of of work
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 – a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You’re the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 – here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as “oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy” and responding by saying “nuh uh, urbit is decentralized.” Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.