Where have all the Cowboys Gone?

They have gone to Urbit

"The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly."

- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Needless to say my politics have evolved since I first picked up Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, but of all of the writers I encountered during that time in my life, Fisher is the only one I reliably come back to for quotes like this. More than a Socialist, or Leftist, or Post-Leftist or whatever political micro-identity he would be pigeonholed into this week, he was more than anything a humane and gentle person who had high hopes for what the world could be and was crushed by what he saw it become. For that, I do not need to share his politics to share a fondness for him, even now years after he took his life. RIP Mark, wish you were still here but I understand why you’re not.

The "slow cancellation of the future" is one of the tenets of his writing that had the most profound, visceral resonance with me. This was a name for something I could feel. It was something I knew was happening, swirling all around me, but far too fleeting and effervescent for me to scoop up into a jar and name. One of the beauties of great writers is that they can do this. So even though naming the thing didn't make it go away, it did at least allow me to better conceptualize this aura of dread that I seemed to be swimming through at the dawn of my thirties.

Quite simply, we have just been running out of "future." Say this idea to any friend who is gleefully unplugged from the zeitgeist and they will tell you you're simply "getting older." It's not an overt gaslight, but it's just wrong. Something strange has been happening in our world. Something has shifted by degrees over the last thirty years and, over time, has morphed into something else. Our world has become "futureless." In a term that Mark uses (but I cannot find!), we are "running out of cultural runway.”

If you feel this as I do, you feel a sense of dread as Harrison Ford is dragged out onscreen once again to play Indiana Jones for the fifth time. At a certain point, the "coolness" of seeing your old favorites is eclipsed by your fear that the actor is going to fall onset and break a hip. If it is taboo to ask, "who will be the next Indiana Jones?" then it is pure sacrilege to ask "WHAT will be the next Indiana Jones?" What will become this generation's Harry Potter, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. I'm not asking about the next Star Wars series - I am asking what will be the story of NOW, that is created from scratch, and fills the same cultural space as Star Wars did in the 70s all the way to now? When is the movie going to come out that will spawn sequels and toys and spin-off tv shows all its own? And can this show take place in 2022 and not in the 1980s?

Half a smile as I type it. We all know there won't be. It'll just be more of the same shows, theme parks, and merchandise. To make a new Star Wars requires a new singular vision, an auteur. But studios are now more than studios, they are such vast corporations that in a few years I see myself spreading "Disney's 20th Century Fox Presents: Light Mayonnaise" on my ham sandwich. They have no need of singular visions, for new projects, for new "properties." Sure, they may dabble here and there, but why take a chance if you already have a bunch of properties that are guaranteed to fulfill your most sacred profit objective? But ack, too easy to blame it on corporations or money or greed or x industry. The truth is it wouldn't matter - we've run out cultural runway. How? Why?

I was born in the mid 1980s. I didn't see the moon landing. I was too little to watch the Berlin Wall crumble. Instead I read books about untamed jungles, deep water trenches, and imaginary planets far away in the stars. There were still "places" I could go, undiscovered and wild. Places without vacation packages, tour guides, airbnbs, and gift shops. Who knew where or when I'd go, but hell - not too long ago a few guys went to the moon. Who knows what frontiers are out there for me?

Now I know what became of these frontiers. I can go deep into the jungle any time I want, I can even do it in high def and 3d on my Oculus Quest 2. The deepest oceans can be easily dove down into with a little help from James Cameron, Boyle's law be damned. The moon landing might not have been a hoax, but - it was sort of a pipe dream. Never thought we'd so far on and that's as far as we got. Even the frontier represented in the infinite black velvet of space was starting to dry up. Surrounded by the repetition of news and politics and even new-age religion, with all of its texts filled with no higher than sixth grade words (e.g. "we must be kind and forgiving so to give compassion for the goodness and oneness"), it all felt like a trap with no escape. No frontiers. Nothing new. The decades were now on repeat, playing the hits 24/7. "Yeah!" by Ludacris with Usher and Lil John playing on repeat for eternity.

A question kept boiling up my mind over and over again: "I wish to run, but where would I even run to?"

What is the nature of this malaise? Why is it causing a cultural sickness that seems incapable of repair? Why now are we seeing more people moving toward the transendant rather than away? Well that's simple - that which lies above us is the only frontier we have left. The digital space might only be a metaphor for more heavenly realms, but they’re the best stand-in we can afford. I do mean to use that word afford, as you can now get a planet on Urbit for less than 50 bucks. The whole network is set up in an outer space theme, each individual a planet. If you have some more money you can now buy a star for around 10k. If you have a lot more money you can even buy a galaxy. Could be a goldmine or the worst investment of your life. Who cares? It’s something new. I have a planet, you can find me on there if you want, I’d be more than happy to be your friend: ~rolnub-doswep

I’m not going to attempt to explain Urbit, I understand very little of it other than that it is a vision of a new internet on the ashes of the old one that cannot be saved. The specs of the venture are not nearly as interesting as the crowd it attracts: hype beasts, tradcaths, Brooklyn scenesters, men who read tarot and women who practice witchcraft not for the TikTok views but for the actual power an incantation might hold. There is something about this weird service that attracts those not just with money or “ideas” but with spiritual power. The whole thing seems to glow for some people. But why?

Does it matter?

Everything else is such a scam it barely even tries to not be a scam. Yesterday an ICO dropped that offered a cryptocurrency service that lets you earns coins by using it in place of google maps. Is anyone dumb enough to think that will work? Does anyone actually “really believe in the project this coin represents?” Or is it all exactly as it appears to be, one big fucking circlejerk in an otherwise meaning-starved world. But Urbit offers something that at least appeals to something real. It offers a frontier. An escape. A chance to start over and try again on your own terms. This internet I type this on is filthy with data. It knows more about me than I know about myself. But on Urbit I’m a blank slate. As nascent a stage it is in, it still seems to hum with something not quite of this world.

Is it any wonder why Urbit attracts the people it does? Is it any wonder they settled on the model of interstellar travel as the primary metaphor? I think it's no mistake at all.

Who knows if this project will work. It could just be another hype-fest that burns bright and then out forever. I don't really understand it, and I won’t claim I do. It’s all just a vibe at this point. I don't understand the tech, I'm not yet fully sure that I even get the point of it. But I do know that there's something to be said for the type of people a community attracts. Sometimes as much can be discerned by the excitement a product causes as the exitement a product receives for free.

If you manage to snag yourself a planet (or even just “boot a comet” to have a look around), you’ll see it too. Probably. Maybe. If all you see is an interface reminiscent of a Compuserve homepage circa 1995, then you probably won’t see it. But if you can look between the simple lines and boxes and text, you’ll see what I see. There is something different there, no? I'm not sure if that different thing has anything to do with the fact that it's an attempt to "deconstruct the client-server model in favour of a federated network of personal servers in a peer-to-peer network with a consistent digital identity." I don't know what that means. I'm sorry, I'm sure to many of you it means something. Not to me. But what is meaningful to me is that, for some reason, people who are excited about this place feel like there are new possibilities here that weren't out there before. New frontiers. New meaning. New you. That's what get's me going. If this is a new frontier, I'm with it all the way.

I did, however, feel the same way about Digg.com, so ymmv

(A previous draft of this article was posted on the “Other Life” page on Urbit)