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        <div class="overline">urbit subassembly</div>
        <div class="title">coordinating reality</div>
        <div class="subtitle">the manifesto</div>
        <p>
            The original, Borgesian metaphor of Urbit is about the nature of
            representing reality; the map of Tlön unrolls over the landscape.
            Urbit has always attracted those who think deeply about new
            manifestations of reality, and new realities which emerge from
            activity. We believe that it’s time to make the coordination of
            reality a major focus of Urbit. The early tools and primitives are
            ready, and the timing is viciously elegant.
        </p>
        <p>
            Legacy society is undergoing an accelerating migration to the
            digital realm, which holds both the extremely dangerous potential
            for a loss of long-held context and values in the process of
            translation, and the promise of building durable foundations of
            distributed infrastructure that route around damage and resist
            tyranny. Legacy institutions and maps of reality are surrendering to
            a sclerosis which demands tools to allow dramatically more agentic
            coordination; in order to free capital, capacity, and trust loose
            from their rotting bindings, and assemble them into functional
            organs of a human-oriented digital civilization.
        </p>
        <p>
            Urbit’s emphasis on simplicity and stability, its radical lack of
            dependence on the legacy computing and networking paradigm, and its
            high degree of control over tools; provide us an unparalleled
            advantage in building these foundational primitives. Every design
            decision, down to the simplicity of the Nock instruction set,
            reinforces these principles.
        </p>
        <p>
            Urbit’s future is to first represent the reality that its owners,
            builders, and users deem worthy; to create a life-size map of the
            world as we see it. Once these pictures have been painted, via
            systems of reputation, mutual verification, and data inputs from
            other levels of reality; the unique architecture of the Urbit
            network–simple personal servers, a widely distributed PKI, a p2p
            routing protocol–allows for the composition and autonomous
            rearrangement of any set of objects represented on the network.
        </p>
        <p>
            From there, Urbit identity, reputation, and reality-mapping
            standards will allow us to take the first steps towards full-scale,
            civilization-level protocols.
        </p>
        <p>
            Until recently, Urbit has mostly been focused on tool-building,
            whether on the core development or product side. Now, we see the
            first explorers and track-layers using those tools to map the
            wilderness and set up outposts and communication lines.
        </p>
        <p>
            Azimuth is increasingly attracting attention as a genuinely
            competitive entry in the self-sovereign ID space, which has
            traditionally suffered from a paradox: Sovereign ID needs to grow
            organically around high-signal interactions of social, financial,
            and technological import. The initial population of an ID schema
            needs to be doing real things, trusting each other, and building an
            initial trust graph that can subsequently attract more participants.
            There have been many attempts to build technically brilliant
            decentralized ID systems that have crucially neglected to attach
            themselves to a compelling use case. Urbit, as a full-stack
            computer, with a decentralized networking protocol attached, has
            perhaps the best “compelling use case” one could imagine.
        </p>
        <p>
            There are murmurings of multiple Urbit-native blockchain projects
            which seek to use the sovereignty and widespread distribution of
            Azimuth points as the basis for an innately distributed and
            committed consensus layer.
        </p>
        <p>
            Projects like %fund and Alphabet are creating open protocols for p2p
            interaction on Urbit which create their own flywheels of reputation
            data among users, making the social graph of Urbit richer as time
            goes on; eventually, they will eat chunks of the web2 social graph
            whole as they endow ‘users’ with self-sovereign Azimuth IDs. These
            protocols are fundamentally different from the web2 platforms whose
            functions they replace; they share basic understanding of key
            primitives, but allow users to set community rules with a high
            degree of flexibility both internally and inter-communally. Urbit
            has sometimes been termed a ‘network of networks’, but we’re only
            now seeing the second clause come to fruition.
        </p>
        <p>
            Urbit IDs (Azimuth points) can represent humans, network nodes, AI
            agents, or physical devices. Urbit-native blockchains can create a
            consensus layer. Protocols built on Urbit create ever-deepening
            layers of opt-in reputation data on top of Azimuth. Hardware hosting
            options and Urbit-native crypto wallets make Urbit nodes sovereign
            enough to maintain a diversity of perspectives on reality.
            Integrations with other decentralized protocols are bridges to other
            segments of reality and graphs of trust and interaction.
        </p>
        <p>
            Mapping reality is the first step. Urbit’s high-fidelity network of
            nodes, tools, and protocols allow for novel, endlessly composable
            and creative forms of coordination.
        </p>
        <p>
            Urbit is a self-sovereign coordination primitive. Legacy platforms
            and network architectures mandate one-to-many or many-to-one;
            coordination is at the whim of the chokepoint. As layer 1
            blockchains are global consensus, and L2s are local consensus, Urbit
            is an endlessly flexible consensus-creation tool that can seamlessly
            interface with the requisite level of legibility. This is the
            missing piece needed to allow open protocols to coordinate the
            resources of reality at a high enough degree of fidelity to allow
            for organic, incentive-driven replacement of brittle, centralized
            legacy alternatives.
        </p>
        <p>
            Social layers, marketplaces, knowledge production, cultural
            flowering, property rights, and physical human society must all find
            their digital accommodations with this new representation of
            reality.
        </p>
        <p>
            We believe that the time is ripe for Urbit to begin conquering—using
            Azimuth, the first Urbit-based protocols, and a universe of
            practical use cases—the legacy informational, social, financial and
            physical realities around us. The question in front of us is now how
            we will do it.
        </p>
        <p>
            We invite you to join us in the foothills of Mount Rainier, this
            October 20th-22nd, 2024, to discuss and plan the representation of
            reality and the possibilities of its coordination on the Urbit
            network.
        </p>
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        <p>Some topics we’ll discuss:</p>
        <ul>
            <li>
                Computational verification and zk pseudonymization of local and
                network actions
            </li>
            <li>Mutual attestation of actions, data storage</li>
            <li>
                Protocol and internal economy use cases to spur ID/reputation
                adoption
            </li>
            <li>Post-SaaS protocol business moats in the Urbit future</li>
            <li>
                Subnets as reputational rehypothecation mechanisms for Urbit
                address space
            </li>
            <li>
                Integrations with other ID systems, blockchains, and
                reputational data sources
            </li>
            <li>IP and software licenses as group-owned assets on Urbit</li>
            <li>Uptake of reputational data from legacy systems</li>
            <li>Proof-of-human, ML agents, ephemeral identities on Urbit</li>
            <li>
                Sources of truth from the physical world (PoL, POAPs, node
                dispersal, physical decentralization) that inform uniqueness and
                reputation of identity
            </li>
            <li>
                Hardware and hosting environment interactions with identity and
                reputation
            </li>
            <li>And more to come!</li>
        </ul>

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