Virtualization and Understanding Power

Mainstream "political science" mistakes the virtual for the fundamental

Urbit is a virtual network of virtual machines which runs inside the more fundamental reality of the physical internet and bare metal operating systems. Urbit does not expand a user’s set of choices, it restricts them. Insofar as Urbit is “freeing” or “value producing”, it is through its imposition of order on chaos, its reduction of the entropy of the more fundamental “natural order” of the physical internet composed of physical processors mostly running programs which are specifically designed for the metal that runs them. This meshes well with Yarvin’s political ideology — he thinks leftism is “entropy” and demagogic dictatorship or oligarchism is “democracy.” Urbit’s promise to “decentralize” is Straussian marketing — Urbit will actually centralize with respect to the masses; it will decentralize with respect to the elites. Democracy in Yarvin’s theory is centralization with respect to the elites through the exploitation of The Hammer. The freedom of other fundamentally elite people is bypassed by appealing to the lowest common denominator, in Urbit speak one accumulates a disproportionate amount of “planets” and even lower bodies and then smashes the other “galaxies” with that hammer.

Through the unrestricted “choice” of the low agency mass comes the democratic hyper-centralization of the elite. One party superstates emerge from what was previously a patchwork of various smaller fiefdoms. When a user signs up for Urbit, he implicitly agrees to an inalterable virtual order when a “galaxy” can only ever have a set number of planets. It is impossible to smash other galaxies by accumulating new planets. For centralization to happen, there must be a royal marriage of galaxies — in other words one person must acquire multiple galaxies by legitimate means. Demagoguery can no longer be exploited; a Facebook galaxy cannot emerge that simply collects all users directly and smashes counter-Facebooks with network effects and monopoly. Urbit is e-Patchwork.

Constitutions can be thought of as virtual power systems that run on top of the real system, which defaults to higher entropy and violence rates. Studying constitutions is great, but only if they are understood in this way, just like how studying Urbit is great, but only truly makes sense when one first understands it as a virtual order attempting to impose structure on natural entropy. If the structure of Urbit were mistakenly seen as fundamental, one would be very confused about the nature of reality and the true range of choices. When Urbit is understood as merely a virtual order, a subset of the real order, it’s obvious that Urbit can be changed as people desire and if there is a problem with it, a new or edited virtual system may be adopted insofar as it is a subset of the real order.

If a person fails to understand Urbit as a virtual order, they may think either that it is eternal and unchangeable, or that any edit to the virtual order is an edit upon the real order. In either case, they don’t understand the limits of the real. Someone who doesn’t understand that liberalism is not the real political order and who thinks it is eternal and unchangeable will be an ontological neo-liberal. Many such cases — most people are like this it would seem. On the other hand, he who thinks that any change to the virtual order is a change written upon reality may become a communist or some other silly utopian who does not understand the limits of the virtual system he seeks to edit. He mistakenly believes that anything can be achieved with a new virtual order. Two and two can equal five and gravity can cease to function if the virtual order makes it so.

Mainstream political scientists know practically nothing about the real order while narrowly obsessing about the current virtual order. They hyper-focus on how the masses vote without understanding what the mass is. Other obsessions include the effects of “policy” and the dynamics of virtual systems like Congress and parties.

One would think that “political science” would focus on how different virtual political orders emerge from material fundamentals, but this would be a mistake. In this regime, “political science” is about assuming that the current virtual political order is fundamental, and performatively trying to predict trivialities from that assumption. Their models tend to all roughly look like this: given the virtual order, how does one aspect of phenotype predict another aspect of phenotype? In other words, their studies consist of research on questions like, “how does race effect voting patterns?” “How does crowd cohesion effect other crowd behaviors?” “how do beliefs effect other beliefs?”, etc.

Not all political science research is useless, of course. But practically no political scientists are asking the right questions to begin with. They lack what might be called criticality towards their current political surroundings. To the vast majority, voting, Congress, funky legalistic “policies”, written law, the judicial system, the presidency — all of these things are Literally Real. The majority of political scientists are narrow minded people who do not seek the universal laws of politics and society based on biological and environmental fundamentals.

This is unfortunate, because it is certainly possible to discover these laws. I have already started on this — the big blocker preventing academics before me from achieving this in the last 50 years has almost certainly been liberalism. The laws describe a very unequal society deriving from a very unequal gene pool. Political conflict is shaping up to be a genetic conflict between altruists and hedonists. Before 1970 there wasn’t enough math and data to achieve what I am describing — this is no longer the case, but preaching scientifically proven inevitably massive centralization of any society resulting from massive genetic inadequacy and inequality is not an option in the mainstream public sphere. Hence my pseudonym and lack of a face.

It’s a real shame because this sort of knowledge is fundamental and absolutely necessary for anyone who seeks to understand society on a level at all deeper or truer than the ancients. This is why I carry on despite the sneering and seek to prove these things and provide them to the few other truth-seekers who exist, who reject the false shibboleths of the day.