Half of this think-piece is about Urbit; the other half is about myths (which I'm under-qualified to talk about).

Chances are you're unfamiliar with Urbit. To make sense of it, think of it as computer servers that talk to each other so easily they don't need middlemen. You get an identity only you control (no domain registrar), and you run it on a server somewhere and that's it.

I've been socially dabbling within Urbit for some time that it has taken away most of my attention from Twitter. As a collective of humans, it has non-zero chance at achieving a kind of sovereignty to be taken seriously.

I think about what this place needs. I would frame the questions as "Urbit needs ___ more than killer apps." It's a counterintuitive move in that new technological platforms seeking mass adoption always want to find their killer applications, after which success is locked in. Instead I'm more interested in what leads to killer applications being made.

For very little basis at all, it occurred to me that what if Urbit needs mythos more than killer apps? I sense some legs in this, so let's take it apart.

Myths are narrative power ups. Any philosophical point you want to make is made stronger when it's backed up by myths.

Myths are containerized within stories. When they say storytelling is a powerful tool, they really mean myth-telling.

Myths are ideological Trojan horses smuggled into stories. The devious thing is you can't reject the myth without rejecting the story.

There are historical myths and there are fictional myths. Historical myths sound like true stories about real people doing incredible things but completely liberal with facts. Fictional myths have no pretense of being real, so they can be versatile, afford to be fantastical and often are. I think historical myths are superior in effectiveness (because its half-truth is seen as full-truth), but creation of it involves costly sacrifice (men dying before their time).

Gossips are attempts are finding myths. When that fails, scapegoats are found instead, which is most of the time.

When mass media came around, they take the role of gossips in myth-finding. The ultimate good of media is less about reporting truths than about finding and creating myths.

Corporations that are large enough can't avoid having myths of their own. Apple has the strongest public myth in the form of Steve Jobs. I've seen Siemens tell stories of their involvement in World War II as part of their employee orientation.

Back to "Urbit needs mythos", I think that is somewhat faulty. Every collective wants a myth, but many get by without it. It's a luxury very few projects, nation or corporation has.

Bitcoin has a myth in Nakamoto. It checks all the marks in a sacrificial mythology, I can see it energizing its narrative for a very long time. Ethereum however has no myth but isn't less successful.

Then again, myths suit Urbit more so than any other engineering project. Despite being more than a decade old, Urbit is still barely useful beyond basic social networking. It doesn't exist because it's useful. The few of us use it for its ideals; Urbit runs on romanticism.

So if the foundation is spiritual, perhaps the evolution should be spiritual too?

But Urbit has no sacrificial stories like Nakamoto; it'll be inauthentic to manufacture one. It's not a pound-for-pound comparison but LessWrong has plenty of parables and thought experiments, it probably holds their people together much more strongly than any killer app.

It's said that science-fictions play the role of painting pictures of the future so that people can build it. I believe it, but how much of that is actually true? I don't know, maybe that can be tested in the Urbit-confined world?

What if Urbit-fictions make up a big part of an Urbit state-building?