The heavily layered jargon extracts a commitment from true believers and creates a boundary between those who “get it” and the rest of the world who hasn’t seen the light. It’s not so much a platform to use, but one to proselytize.

In this it’s closely related to Scientology and cryptocurrency. Urbit is a distributed computing platform in the same sense as Scientology is a mental health program, or Bitcoin is electronic peer-to-peer payments. Sure, there’s technically someone using it for that, but for most people the value is in the social belief system.