What's a meta for?

But even though the art world functions as a prestige economy, it does not depend on this prestige. To the extent that insider knowledge, upward mobility and signal processing constitute my competence in this field, the value I provide the art world is acquired by prolonged contact: in my case, since the age of fourteen. The primary output of the art world is the economic and cultural capital required to consume it. The barriers to computer programming are similarly high: "Two percent of the world’s population is born to be programmers," Donald Knuth remarked in a 2005 interview, "I don’t know what percent is born to be writers, but you have to be in the intersection in order to be really happy with literate programming."

"Referential transparency is honesty and stability. [..] It's only a small stretch to say that 'Urbit' is this set of principles, and that if anybody follows these principles strictly they will create a system that is isomorphic to the Urbit." That's governance, infrastructure and personal computing, respectively. In 2018, we used the word "overlay" to point to both the Draconian webservice paradigm and also to the project of replacing it. But with what?

My investment in Urbit is motivated by the dynamics of place, position, presentation and public. The following catalogue of practices are based on making sense of Web3 and also sensemaking Web3, as what makes space valuable are not its assets but the dimensions of representation activated through it. Once again, I am an artist. I have a practical and ethical imperative to work site-specifically. My fulfillment through software and digital product development follows from the fact that to the extent I use the internet my interaction with the institutions that I write and make art in are located online. When Freud says "No one can be slain in absentia, in effigie", he is also saying "don't name anything until you have to" and in a certain sense to not be afraid to show up where you don't belong.

The representation of contemporary art online and in galleries and museums don't so much use the white cube, today indistinct from a Web 2.0 splash page, to abstract this culture from its social reality as much as make culture literate. The primary operation of an art institution is the tuning of an elite culture to a public impression: the ideology of the white cube, since the 1960s, is indistinct from computational descriptions of model, view and controller. The art institution's role is taken as a given to be educational: its controllers are historical, else activated through the publicity of nine figure secondary market sales. A similar abstraction of method also occurs in the fields of technological reproduction adjacent to the culture industry, and through the products, platforms and services that endow creativity with lifestyle, and content with its means of circulation.

Between the twin meltdowns of cryptocurrency, the second largest banking failure in the world, and the record sale of the most expensive American painting ever sold, Andy Warhol's "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn", I was asked to consider the problem of the question of value on Urbit.This project began as a whitepaper in the summer of 2022 on spec and misses some milestones, though perhaps for the best. As the organization of the network, the Urbit foundation and Tlon evolve so priorities rear the ugly head of official reason. From "community manager" to "developer experience", we stop to consider how many front end tech jobs didn't exist before Occupy Wall St. We call it "restructuring". So did the cops.

Federated Wiki presents a pattern language for reading and writing in public and in doing so enacts the conditions for federation to be made effective. By implementing wikis as a form of participant-observation that models the dreams and to-do's of Urbit's proposed ecosystem, this wiki takes into consideration the omniscience of trend forecasting and data representation on a macroeconomic scale by focusing on small datasets that illuminate a fractional awareness of properties. An argument against those "omnicient" points of view made meaningless at a point in time when the only thing that can be reliably predicted is crisis, should be implicit here. We look for antecedent patterns in information's integrity in that our "communities", "networks", "groups" and "organizations" are boundary games escalated to historical fervor. What art is and isn't corresponds to how an operating system should and shouldn't work under conditions obligated to a user "out there".

My background has emerged from the Movement of the Squares and the mass adoption of social media. Both the party and the platform demand similar rates of exponential growth. At a certain point in the movement's development, this growth occurs as unbounded. I am interested in the point at which this growth becomes critical. If I consider an art practice to be counter to the status quo in that art stages a biased ground for the development of history, then there is no user. There's only us. And so this whitepaper had to take the form of something other than a manifesto. It had to work.

If Urbit's goal is to make the Urbit OS suitable for mass adoption as a consumer project, the strategies for achieving these goals must also be "general purpose". This research fatefully orients the Urbit Valuation Papers to Urbit's development roadmap in three acts. First, backwards compatibility, in which things that are old remain functional despite the catastrophic novelty of the useful. This will be demonstrated by the implementation of wiki's methods and documents sourced from over 28 years of public service on behalf of self-hosted individuals. From here the need to "improve developer experience" follows naturally. So does the significance of Donald Knuth. This angle takes "native UI research" to be indistinguishable from a project of literacy, of literate programming:

If you can deconstruct a form, you can deconstruct a system, but doing so will reveal the politics of that system. Critical development, which I am enacting here, does not attempt to analyze the recent macroeconomic failures of digital economy but tries to free the user and the customer and the developer with an intervention into the system. The effectivity of this intervention includes interpretation but is also limited by the conditions outlined by the UF in the Value Articles grant. This limit is economic as well as ethical. By choosing to work open-source, we delimit the site-specificity of relational software and its transformation out of necessity, and also a priori to commercial utility. We elect to self-host as an act of authorship.

The limit imposed by the hosting environment on developer experience is well summed up in the core principle of extreme programming, which is that the form and functionality of the program being developed should grow at the same rate as the programmer's and customer's understanding of the application. In that "changes will be accepted when they are recognized as do-able" places a limit on the programmer in that any appeal to an outsider extends its authority: what resists persists, and any attempt to displace our positions relative to the established beliefs and practices of a profession would only obscure them. To make literate the relations under which a problem becomes a priority is an ethical imperative. It doesn't really matter if I'm a programmer or not, whether my status as a host is commercial or recreational. The position that I occupy as a user of Urbit is that of a producer, an agent, a network actor. This position is one of privilege. I am not the programmer, I am the program.

On the one hand, there is the relative autonomy of fine art and particularly contemporary art. On the other, contemporary art is conditioned and limited by the industrial (dis)organization of the global art trade, its stratification of professions and its legislation of norms. My job as an art critic is to contribute to the sanctified mutual exclusion of real art and non-art, of insider and outsider; the language of legitimate and illegitimate. Is interpretation a mode of production? What the avant-garde and the venture capitalist enterprise have in common is the pitch, in the words of Tiqqun, a "disruption":

The bleeding edge is inclusive. Meaning: nothing is excluded. Rather, the possibility of representation is granted to some and denied to others based on antecedent patterns of recognition and display. In art, the production of discrete objects capable of the means of poetics is valued as the highest form of artistic pursuit. Yet the vast majority of arts graduates, 70%, Chris Kraus observed in 2017 visiting a prestigious West Coast MFA department, "of the student work is neither painting, nor sculpture, new media or even installation."

This is how I'm pitching critical development, that is, as a form of counterprogramming within the field of software development.

I am not blasphemous enough to call myself a Creator: I think the Creator belongs on the Sistine Chapel. And as I am no Michaelangelo, therefore my role is two-fold: I engage in the highly specialized reproduction of a certain coveted class, and, on the other, the autonomous reproduction of an international downtown: the art world, so called. An underground. The autonomy of the art world exists as a capacity of Autopoiesis, of systems characterized by the ability of their constituent elements to impose their own norms on both the production and consumption of output and/or energy. In art, these norms are determined by the history of the field and the formal relations of its discourse. The privilege of my participation is an historical fact of arts institutions and structures, and the messy economic relations therein.

But even though the art world functions as a prestige economy, it does not depend on this prestige. To the extent that insider knowledge, upward mobility and signal processing constitute my competence in this field, value is acquired by prolonged contact: in my case, since the age of fourteen. The primary output of the art world is the economic and cultural capital required to consume it. The barriers to computer programming are similarly high: "Two percent of the world’s population is born to be programmers," Donald Knuth remarked in a 2005 interview, "I don’t know what percent is born to be writers, but you have to be in the intersection in order to be really happy with literate programming."

In 2013, I was paid as a copywriter for Micaela Carolan's "The Chandelier Bid", a work of conceptual art that adapted the figure of the artist as represented in luxury economies into the grey-zones of the post-2008 online sex trade. Financial Domination is practiced as a form of BDSM: the monetary realization of power driving transactions between "FinDoms" and "Pay pigs" constructs the narrative of demand and disobedience that gives sexuality on the internet its charge. Having covered the project in 2018 for Spike Magazine's "Immorality" issue, I reflected:

Looking back upon 2010's online performance art practices through Urbit triggers an underlying sense of anxiety in creative economy. Compare Carolan and Schrager's experiments with symbolic exchange through the presentation of self to Justin Murphy's idealization of the Creator made manifest by Urbit's self-hosted system of personal servers:

Despite the energy around Murphy and the leadership brought to efforts to develop Urbit's network effects that Murphy's "Creators DAO" -- cleverly incorporated as Other Life, a throwback to the 3D virtual worldbuilding that offloaded the dot com boom into the bubble of e-sports and digital asset trading -- it's not Urbit's capacity as a solid-state interpreter that Murphy is promoting. Rather, its the promise of privatization, a rejection of progressive taxation, income reporting and prostitution without the pimp that seems to be promoted. The "precocious acquisition of legitimate culture" that Bordieu assigns the artist is here mirrored in the acquisition of fanbases: "No ads. No branded content. Just varying degrees of membership, with members enjoying private channels and cohort-based courses all under the header “Philosophy and technology for the ungovernable.”

Murphy is guiding us, through the discourse of the avant-garde, to the audiences to whom we should apply to represent Urbit's valuation on a growth model. Creators are those who are represented by these audiences, as the influencer points to who or what is to be influenced by who or what. The identification of the Creator with his or her audience is established in the exclusion of the vast majority of arts practices as legitimized by the existing cultural institution.

But what does Other Life, and Urbit, provide? The language of strategic marketing seems to be addressed to a user who is elsewhere, to one or many general purposes yet to be developed. And it is the developer who must stand in, like an understudy, for the phantom of customer retention propped up in the dismissal of a utility made actual and manifest through the determination of the operating system itself.

What's at stake in the cold war between (high) cultural and (popular) creative participation as it's been played out so far on Urbit's social register are not really creative practices or even recreational programming, to a significant extent, but rather the community of developers to be adopted. It's the recognition by this community in a developmental context that will establish the subject to which Urbit's programming is oriented.

As a user I may be more or less creative, depending on my economic situation, the social roles I confer to, and how well I understand Marshall MacLuhan. My resistance to the current paradigm of computing is expressed in my relationship to the current paradigm of art. Providing interpretations of such paradigms is what I do as an art critic and a consultant. In the past, as an art activist working in experimental forms of performance and pedagogy, my audiences and readers have identified me with a rejection of the art institution, against the predatory debt model of arts education-- its regimes of credentialling, but also the normalization of unpaid and underpaid "opportunities" through which the art institution solicits a voluntary pool of labor power. The refusal to engage with this latter context is what has earned me recognition as an outsider in both art and technology, and rightly so, because my CV looks like a criminal's.

What I have resisted is actually the platform. The platform's growth model of venture capital production corresponds to the trend in the museum sector to financialize growth through the production of public audiences for art. Like the well-paid escort, front-end graphic designer or product manager whose background is in literature or art history but whose work in no way reflects this knowledge, though draws upon it resourcefully, my skills correspond to that of a class with no formal training in one specific industry, but with industry in general. But this application of expertise applies to a particular urban zone, to the social networks that correspond therein; ever cosmopolitan, nonetheless tethered to the regional alliances between East and West coast in the US and a few major European capitals. As such, our position is defined by an identification with the subject of cultural capital: not the consumer, but the platform. We invest our bodies with data, networking, and identities that correspond to the significance of the high-level, world-class cultural program, but for lack of property or power, we continuously resign ourselves to its periphery.

Platforms embody the dominant model of value production in digital economy. They correspond to the start-up model after 2008, which Paul Graham, in 2012, defines exclusively by a commitment to growth: "Platforms are not small businesses...". This is why it is difficult for me to see Urbit outside of the context of Occupy Wall St.: I recall the size and scale of the General Assemblies in the months after September 17th. Those of us on the media teams would stand on the outside of the sprawling bodies in space who, through the activist protocol of the People's Microphone, would speak and act collectively as one body. Twitter, which had yet to see mass adoption in 2011, was used primarily by journalists. I had not used the platform until I was handed a blackberry by media organizers and told to tweet the output from the People's Microphone, IRL, into the mediasphere. What's interesting to me is how the length of a tweet corresponds to the amount of information that can be transmitted by 300 people acting and speaking as one: short statements, outcries, accusations, slogans, battlecries, the bread and butter of the cultural missionary.