This is a pretty strong statement. Can you provide details to back it up? I’m interested because Urbit seems at the edge of genius that is ahead of its time and obscure and inaccessible. The hoon programming language seem quite ambitious.
The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there. In point of fact, the functional parts of the system are all really written in C (pieces of code which in Urbit-speak are called Jets, again in an effort to obscure the underlying truth).
Other items of evidence:
1. Urbit was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He espouses an extreme right-wing Ayn-Randian political philosophy. Go look him up and read some of his writing (he's quite prolific) and see for yourself. I suggest starting with [1].
2. Urbit makes extreme and unjustified claims about itself. The very first sentence on the web site is (as I write this) "Urbit is your last computer." Well, no, it's not. It's not even a computer at all. It's software. It's a badly designed, badly written, badly documented federated social network. And that's pretty much all it is.
3. Buried deep inside Urbit is a scam to take your money. The scam is quite well hidden, but it's pretty obvious once your attention is drawn to it. Part of the Urbit design is an address space analogous to IP addresses. The Urbit people call this address space "real estate" and they call Urbit "the biggest real estate platform in the world" [2]. They claim that these addresses have value because they are scarce [3]. Except that they aren't. The Urbit address space is 128 bits wide, meaning that there are vastly more Urbit addresses than there are elementary particles in the universe. But this fact is conveniently obscured in their documentation.
If you want what Urbit claims to provide, a computer that you control, just get a Linux machine. Gnu/Linux has its own political baggage attached to it, but it's not a scam. It has its obscure bits, but that obscurity is rooted in history rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.
I don't think he's all that brilliant. He does have one extraordinary skill, and that is to make himself appear brilliant by being prolific and obscure and using other psychological tactics. This is a very useful skill (Donald Trump used it to become president) but I think it is very important to distinguish it from actual brilliance. To my knowledge, Curtis has never done anything that is actually brilliant.
Heh, you're right. Interesting that there are two things out there both using the label "Urbit" and both with very similar rhetoric, but not at all the same thing.
looks contradictory: "The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics" with "If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there"
Is inaccessible but you dig into it, is obscure but are pieces of code written in C.
