Image from Moscow Times
I came across a souvenir I received in the the beginning of 2017. It's from a shop inside the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (picture above).
I'm told that this can only be acquired inside a part of MGIMO that requires security clearance. From what I understand MGIMO is part University, part military, and all about international relations involving Russia.
I hardly know the person studying there. His name is Clint Ehrlich, an American visiting researcher at the university. I gave him my address and he sent it from Russia with a card celebrating their Victory Day.
We were both part of a chat running on a program called Urbit. A very interesting project which has received funding from Peter Theil.
Urbit is a secure peer-to-peer network of personal servers, built on a clean-slate system software stack.
I found a Steem article from 2 years ago describing the project. I might have to install it again and see if I still have my old "planet".
From what I understand a "planet" is a namespace for a personal server. On that server you could run decentralized versions of services you use, like email, calendar, ect.
Planets revolve around "stars" if you own a "star" you can distribute X amount of planets.
A lot has happened since I was interested and using Urbit. Apparently they've been moving aspects of the system to ethereum. For example tokenizing their stars and galaxies. Here is a list of contracts they will use:
I'll have to see what's new and see if you can do anything useful with it yet. The creator is an interesting guy. As a developer his name is Curtis Yarvin, but he is also a writer with the handle Mencius Moldbug.
He's written works about the power structure of the world which he calls "The Cathedral".
The title and term is an ode to a very important book in open source called The Bazaar and The Cathedral.
According to the theory of The Cathedral, American universities and mainstream media act as a sort of new age religion.
First I will say I'm not sure about what I think of Moldbugs suggestions for organizing society. What I'm most interested in is his critique of our current societal system.
It seems accurate to me. It's not evil, just a series of systems interacting with each other to result in an equilibrium which is our society. I think technology will bring about more efficient ways to organise society with more happiness and freedom.