More model than document. More method than meaning. More macro than marketecture: here we chart ways of working by doing in order to
> Create in-depth valuation models for Urbit address space, network effects, and commercial utilization.
How to frame Urbit? Why use wiki as a model?
Both paradigms orchestrate a distinctive position for the programmer — freer from predetermination, from product, from the deadweight of database-backed design.
What federation makes necessary: a radically subject-oriented programming — that contributes to the personal in computing — 'literate' & with a knack for finding where it breaks.
But what does it mean to put the 'subject' at the center of the language environment? Technical or non-technical, the growth and evolution of Urbit stakes itself on the denizens of the open web. Not just product marketers and VCs, but those motivated by the experience of development-- at the 'bleeding edge'.
So, what's the method of macroeconomic valuation for a programming made functional by means of abstraction, the reduction of complexity-- in a sense, the immutability of value?
Wiki maps the features of an expressive programming that makes the subject a context of mechanical interpretation. On a high level, writers are readers who are encouraged to participate in federation as an act of volition. Each site represents a single author who is expected to preserve that domain as a reference for attribution.
Interpreters
>By interpreting quantities as instructions a generalization of purpose becomes possible. We exercise tremendous influence over the thoughts of others by choosing who will select the meaning of quantities and who will provide the quantities to be so interpreted.
uvp.viki.wiki dispatches to a godaddy DNS with .wiki suffix, followed by my name which rhymes with it: viki.wiki was launched as a Structural Assistant for the Valutions Research Bounty, and various drafts of this paper were dispatched from subdomains related to Urbit and that were shared across the network (sometimes supplementing broken apps on urbit, such as Page App). Both viki.wiki and my Urbit ship are hosted on the same Digital Ocean/AWS server.
Wiki Words dispatch to page contents when one clicks
Permanent snapshots Clicking on one of the grey panels below when 'wiki' is enabled reinterprets previous versions of a page based on previous actions. This graveyard of happenstance we call the journal.
Unique Item Identifiers make fluid reading and writing in shared memory
Wiki maps many of the features usually mentioned when we talk about Urbit as a "browser for the server side". We consider how events in wiki are always of a single type, but have multiple producers: on the server, there is only one instance of a given page, but on the client side, there can be many copies of the same page in the lineup.