Urbit And The Impatience Principle

Amongst the factors that determine the popularity of a technology meant for end-users, user-friendliness or usability plays a fairly huge role. I don’t simply mean pretty GUIs that can be added later on, as an afterthought (right, Unix/Linux?), I mean a certain principle which I will call the impatience principle here.

Suppose I need to reserve a flight to London for the next week and I heard Hipmunk is a good place to do that. When I go to that site, I will want to be able to find my flight ASAP. I don’t want to configure anything, I don’t want to learn anything, I don’t even want to understand how it really works or what it really does, I just want to find my flight ASAP.

(Programmers of the 1980’s used to be sore about this, “you can make idiot-proof programs but the universe just makes bigger idiots”, at some level it is disrespectful that your customers outright refuse to understand the work you are doing for them. Although the newer generation of programmers seem to have accepted this better, largely because they see the big $$$ in swallowing their pride and idiot-proofing everything. Ultimately, I as the user may even be a non-idiot and curious about how Hipmunk really works. But I will want to learn that later, when I have some free time to learn and discover things for fun, right now if I need a flight ticket, I just need that flight ticket ASAP! Hence the impatience principle.)

Now, in case of technologies meant for programmers, techies, IT folks, there is a similar impatience principle at play influencing how popular it is going to be and how quickly.

When complete non-programmers realize they have a problem they can only solve through programming, they are impatient, tehy want to invest a minimal time in learning the whole idea of programming, they want to bang out live productive code ASAP and solve their problem already.

Of course the code will be horrible, but whatever. Hence the popularity of Visual Basic. And early PHP which was exactly about this, too, web graphics designers found Perl too hard, because that actually requires learning programming knowledge, in early PHP they could just ask on IRC what built-in functions to call in what order.

Then sometimes actual programmers want to solve problems that are outside their expertise, like systems programmers wanting to whip up a web app. Again they will be impatient, they will want tools where they need to invest as little time as possible in learning their specifics and getting code running live ASAP. Hence the somewhat slower popularity gain of Ruby, Python and associated frameworks.

Then there are cases where you must be patient and really learn what it is about, but it makes you super productive for life. That is Common LISP and you can see how popular it is: not at all.My point is simply I don’t see the impatience principle at work in these early phases of Urbit – and it should not be an afterthought.

Admittedly I only looked at the theory at it so far, did not go deep into learning the specifics. But what the theory means, in my interpretation, if you want to purchase something from a webshop, you learn what a planet is, set up one for yourself, you learn what a shopping assistant application is, set it up, point your browser at it, and then go on buying things. This sounds like something that, starting from zero, takes even tech literate people _hours_ to do: the first time only, of course, but that is the point! There is always a first time, and usually people are looking for a new tech because they they want a problem solved that they could not really solve well before, and if they face hours of investment to solve that very first problem…

Yesterday I suddenly remembered a good book someone mentioned to me and, impatiently, I wanted to read it immediately. I took my Kindle, which was not used this way before, because I just used it to read ebooks acquired from other sources. So the first time in my life, without any learning or configuration, I entered the books title in Kindle’s search, found it, tapped one button to purchase it, and 15 seconds later I was reading it.

I really hope Urbit takes off, because I am damn curious about the politically philosophy Yarvin supposedly burned into it. It is not obvious to me how to get from his political writings to Urbit.

But for it to take it off, it must own the impatience principle.

Now of course, it is possible that the principle is already there, just not so visible yet. If most of the logic is in your planet, then maybe your computer, your browser, could actually be just a really dumb, cheap generic thin client? So in theory, a vendor could make pre-configured planets, and you had to do is to point your e.g. tablet at it? Purchase a tablet, purchase a card with a scannable barcode URL on taking you to your planet? Use it immediately, then as you go on, as you gradually learn it, you slowly take ownership of it and customize it? That could be satisfy the impatience principle well enough…

I know Urbit philosophy is closer to homesteading the web, of having your own nice little ecosystem, property on it. (There is a whiff of deliciously ruralistic, conservative philosophy there. Tolkien’s Shire as a web architecture model? Would love it.) But I think most people like buying ready-made things, and generally providing them as a service instead of a property seems more and more popular and succesful. Many people just don’t have this kind of ownership instinct. Even accounting software is going SaaS these days.

For example, I think home ownership is slowly on the way out. I don’t like that, but that is  the direction the world (at least, Europe) is moving toward. Renting a flat isn’t simply having a temporary property but more like using a service, and an enterprising landlord can couple it with other services provided for tenants, like cleaning, lawn-mowing, repairs etc. and thus it can more and more move towards a pleasant, lazy “hotel-like” experience. I think this is where we are moving towards. I don’t like it, I’d rather own and maintain my property both offline and online.  But I am not like most people.  If a technology wants to get popular, it has to follow what “normal” people want.

I actually intend to participate and contribute, so try not take it as an attack, but as an, I don’t know, strategic advice, strategic idea or something like that. Or just a personal observation how this angle is not yet obvious to me.