Disclaimer: I work on Urbit full-time.
There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here:
https://urbit.org/blog/precepts
https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion
Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing.
Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063
Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer.
This is another good summarization, although the sections after "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
There are some good write-ups on the technical decisions here:
https://urbit.org/blog/precepts https://urbit.org/blog/precepts-discussion
Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing.
Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063
Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer.
This is another good summarization, although the sections after "Urbit ID" are out of date: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit