Unremarkable technology described in the most confusing way possible, designed to further a reprehensible political ideology.
What Urbit does have in common with Yarvin's political writing is his tendency to play three-card monte with what he's actually doing by employing oblique references to things smart people are interested in, whole-cloth invention of vocabulary, and complex chains of reasoning which are often missing critical bits.
I ask as I've occasionally suspected something similar, purely because Moldbug's floridly verbose prose style (and this is me saying that!) makes his essays each a marvelous hike into the semantic equivalent of the deep back woods, and there are many thickets within those bosques where a sneaky thing might well choose to hide. (Probably from revenuers.)
It's clearly a style choice, because Yarvin doesn't do it; only Moldbug does. And, I mean, I like it; it is a rare pleasure for me to encounter a modern writer who plays with language in a way that's other than masturbatory. But it does seem well suited to making up for weakness of reasoning with strength of narrative, and I'd be interested to see someone point to an example, or better several, of Moldbug palming a card.
This is incorrect: read the old version of the security chapter, before it was bowdlerised to make the startup look less unviable: http://archive.is/UK8So
> and he takes special care not to bring politics into Urbit talks.
This is because being the founder of neoreaction is now hanging like a radioactive anvil over his startup. (Even though Urbit is basically his "My Favourite Toy Language", and I'm pretty sure nobody would have taken the slightest interest if it was just from that OpenWAP guy rather than that neoreaction guy.)
I agree that it is described confusingly. I don't understand it well enough to know one way or the other whether it's remarkable.
Edit: pretty much beaten to it by mayneack.
Newer versions of the docs are far less political, so either Urbit has changed or they're just keeping it quiet.
From his personal statement about lambdaconf, at http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion :
> Politics of any sort is out of scope at a functional programming conference. I pledge to treat other LambdaConf guests as if they were colleagues at a large company or fellow students at a university, and neither utter nor show any content that’s out of scope or otherwise disturbing. My pen name has been “doxed,” but professionally I behave as if it was a secret.
Claiming politics is out of scope is absurd, and is a rhetorical mechanism designed to, at a minimum, preserve the status quo. His politics are abhorrent -- accepting his declaration of them as irrelevant when they're anything but is effectively siding with them.
I'd bet that the adjacent commenter's idea of "[his racist advocacy] is well documented" comes from Twitter and Tumblr quotes taken out of context, cyclically retweeted in outrage.
(You might argue that this isn't technically violence in itself, but it's hard to argue it's not an explicit endorsement of a system of violence.)