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[Soundcloud](https://soundcloud.com/user-628294386/ep039-cincinnati-chili-with-ritpub-sibsyl)
[iTunes](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep039-cincinnati-chili-with-ritpub-sibsyl/id1539596322?i=1000559688466)

Welcome back to The Stack.  This week we speak with Edward Amsden, engineer at Tlon and better known to the network as 

.  We cover Cincinnati Chili, the warm dumpster runoff of Javascript, the origins of React, UrchatFM, and New Mars.

But first: the news.  



 has shipped basic theming functionality for Escape or Escape by Uqbar or Uqbar.  You can now easily change the background photo and opacity of Escape as well as change the borders to a pixel width of your choice.  I like to change mine to 20px and then shock unsuspecting women with my girth.  I remember an untrustworthy ex-girlfriend whose favorite was apparently solid black.


And Assembly 2022 is coming to Miami from September 22 to 25th.  Looking to rehabilitate our image as crypto-fascists in the eyes of the American elite, we have decided to have our annual conference in the Bitcoin capital of the Ron DeSantis state.  Apropos of nothing, this follows on the heels of Andy and I getting hired to the Foundation’s marketing team.  Assembly 2023 will be in the People’s Republic of China in an apartment complex in Shanghai.  

Personally, I’m a bit torn over attending Assembly.  It’s not because upon leaving China it is doubtful I’d be able to return to my wife and children ever again: no, that’s a sacrifice one makes to spend a weekend with Urbit people.  But the same weekend, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship are gathering for their yearly conference at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.  The 200 year old 400 year old question of Shakespeare’s true identity has been getting hot lately and I want to see what sort of new evidence these boomers are going to reveal.  Will Alexander Waugh dazzle us with some newfound gematria implicating someone named John Oldcastle as Shakespeare’s butler and lover?  I can hardly wait!  I tried a little gematria of my own today.  Try to figure it out if you have the time.  It goes 474.346.885.925.987.664.028.008.  First person to figure that one out gets a prize.  As does the last!




_Disclosure: I took a course from Robert Shiller, which I paid for, and had lunch with him once, which he paid for.  This post also contains affiliate links from Amazon as well as materials understood by the State of California to cause concern in even small doses_

With [Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events](https://amzn.to/3NL4k3f) (2019, Princeton), Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale Robert Shiller develops many of the same themes from his recent books on behavioral economics co-authored with George Akerlof, Animal Spirits (2009) and Phishing for Phools (2015), while also addressing bigger questions of the usefulness of economics and finance in the world brought up in Finance and the Good Society (2012). Of the four it’s probably the most academic, but like the rest it’s non-technical and accessible. The book grew out of Shiller’s [presidential address](http://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d20/d2069.pdf) to the American Economic Association in 2017 and his [Marshall Lectures](http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/Marshall_Lecture/RobertShiller) at Cambridge University in 2018-2019 (which focuses on bimetalism and Bitcoin).





William James noted that “mankind’s common instinct for reality … has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism.” Everyone wants to be a hero for some story, and looks for heroic stories to make sense of the world around them. A narrative is the telling of these stories, linked together with a lesson or moral that allows the reader/listener to personally identify with it. Some of these stories spread, whether in print or by word-of-mouth or (increasingly) by online media, and become contagious (‘going viral’ and ‘trending now’ have themselves spread contagiously since introduced around 2010). Some people make efforts to make new, contagious stories that advance useful narratives, sometimes leading to significant changes in society. Historians, anthropologists, and psychologists have understood this for a long time, but economists have for more than a century been so focused on quantitative data and seeing social factors as an outcome of economics rather than the reverse that they have neglected it. This despite the fact that there are many obvious examples, from bimetalism (adoption of silver to back currencies) to Marxism, of narrative-based social movements that lead to significant political economic changes (bimetalism pamphlet [Coin’s Financial School](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coin_s_Financial_School/6iYMAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover) sold one-million copies in 1894 to a country that had hardly been aware it was on the gold standard a few years earlier).

Shiller offers a number of vignettes and examples, some significant and others frivolous. Too many to include here and do justice. With the wheel invented millenia ago, how come no one thought to put them on a suitcase until Northwestern Airlines pilot Robert Plath came out with the [Rollaboard](https://invention.si.edu/roll-aboard#:~:text=%2Dluggage_Google%2DImages.-,jpg,vertically%2C%20and%20turn%20360%20degrees.) in 1987 (Shiller puts it in the ‘1990s’, though perhaps meant when it became widely popular)? Similar products had actually been patented in the past, as long as almost a hundred years earlier, but hadn’t become popular. What they didn’t have was the image of a pilot and flight crew (much more glamorous and admired 30 years ago than today) pulling them through the airport and aboard the plane. They didn’t have a ‘hero’ behind them.

If you learn about [Urbit](https://urbit.org) mostly through [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21672481), then you might think it has a certain narrative, though I argue we are only in the first part of the early days of the platform. What I do believe is that Urbit can be a platform for narratives, just the way the legacy internet has been. They won’t be the same. They won’t have the same heroes, the heroes will do different things. The space is open. What will you do?

Stations

Urbit Media

Episode 40: Market Bedshite

The Stack Ep. 039: Cincinnati Chili

Urbit and Narrative

Links

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