[lisper]

OK, but that doesn't actually refute my central point, that Urbit is a cult. One of the hallmarks of cults is that they invent a private language that helps identify the in-group. Obviously I am not part of the in-group.

Scientology is famous for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_terminology

[0x732202]

Can you imagine how unbearable object-oriented programming would be if we couldn't use the words "object", "scope", "function", "class", and so on? None of these terms actually reflect the bits in the silicon; they're abstractions over the bits for the sake of mental modeling. Urbit's language is necessary for exactly this reason; it's technical, not cultic.

[lisper]

No, that's not true. OO terminology is chosen to be informative and inclusive. It might not entirely succeed in this, but that is the goal.

Urbit's terminology, indeed its entire design, is chosen to be obfuscatory and exclusive. It is designed to conceal the fact that underlying the entire enterprise is an extreme right-wing ideology.

The mere existence of terms of art is not diagnostic of a cult. The design and motivation of those terms is.

[0x732202]

Do you have a source on that? If I go and ask for help in a Hoon channel, the devs there are more than happy to explain to me what all of the terms mean, using the documentation of those terms.

[lisper]

> Do you have a source on that?

Which "that"? OO or Urbit? For OO, no, I don't. It just seems obvious to me that OO terminology was not chosen to be deliberately obfuscatory. For Urbit, it's my opinion based on interactions with Curtis ten years ago. Many of those interactions were via email, so I could probably grovel through my archives and find what he said that led me to form those opinions. But again, it just seems obvious to me that Urbit's terminology is deliberately obfuscated.

[jlehman]

Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.

[lisper]

You've lost the plot. My central claim is not so much that Urbit is a cult as that it is a waste of time (in part because it's a cult, but that is really neither here nor there). Part of my initial argument turned out to be based on the mistaken assumption that the reference to "teraforming Mars" was literally a reference to teraforming Mars when in fact it was part of Urbit's secret lexicon. But this mistake doesn't weaken my argument because the argument never turned on this either way.

[NealEDavis]

For someone who claims to mistake the objective of the Urbit project as literally “terraforming Mars”, your other comments on this post show a remarkable degree of outsider familiarity with the project. One suspects that this “mis”understanding shows less than a good-faith reading of the text.

[lisper]

I have no idea what you're talking about. I saw this text:

> We’re running a cohort class of App School to teach you how to terraform Mars.

and thought they were literally talking about terraforming Mars. I was (apparently) mistaken, but I don't see how you can accuse me of reading the text in bad faith if I took it at its literal word. There are people who seriously talk about terraforming Mars, and so it is not at all unreasonable to think that some Urbit users are among them.

[arthyn]

there's a difference between cults and culture, both tend to generate their own language

[lisper]

That's true, but I stand by my characterization of Urbit as a cult rather than a culture because Urbit's terminology is intentionally misleading. Urbit is deliberately obfuscated down to its very core. And the reason for this is that it is designed to produce an in-group that is separated from the out-group.

The founder of Urbit, Curtus Yarvin, is an extreme hard-core right-wing liberatarian. Go read up about him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

I'm not even sure that Curtis would object to my characterization of Urbit as a cult. He and I are not exactly on speaking terms any more, as you might imagine, but he is just enough of an iconoclast that he might actually agree with me on this.

[jlehman]

You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.

[lisper]

> You've given zero justification for this assertion.

No, that's not true. I have given some justification. You could fairly criticize my justification as inadequate, but not as entirely absent.

And you're right. I would not claim to have given adequate justification for my assertion. I can't prove that Urbit is a cult. It's just my personal opinion. If you don't like it you can return it for a full refund.

But I will say this: my opinion is informed by some pretty extensive knowledge of the technical parts of Urbit, especially its core design, and personal first-hand knowledge of the history and motivation behind its design. Again, I can't prove any of this. I could not publish it as a peer-reviewed paper. All I can do it wave the warning flag. How you choose to act on that is up to you.

[vorpalhex]

A shibboleth (a secret language or way of speaking used for identification) isn't unique to cults.

Typically the test for a cult is:

1. Secret knowledge

2. Enforced isolation

3. Some kind of leader/living authority

Eg, Scientology has their secret books, they will attack you and sue you if you share that secret and they have church elders.