I think initial skepticism is reasonable, big ideas and bullshit often sound similar at first and require more investigation. An ambitious project can still sometimes be real though, not everything has to turn out to be Magic Leap. In Urbit's case the docs are really good you can find out a lot if you want to.
1. I don't think elite is the goal, it's more about first principles and being free to rethink things. Obviously high risk and in most outcomes would lead to failure, but they've made progress for years and have now proven they can actually ship. I don't think big complex goals are impossible, just hard.
2. I don't think the politics of the original author matter that much.
3. I don't agree with Thiel's politics. That said, Thiel has a pretty good track record for picking things that end up really successful because others pre-judge and misvalue them. I think he's good at taking the contrarian view and really thinking it through, looking for blind spots or generalized assumptions (that may be correct most of the time, but not all the time) that lead the community to undervalue things. I think his political views are both contrarian and wrong, but his VC success is often because he is contrarian and right.
As far as closed off and gatekeeped - the IDs are cheap (free to $10ish), and I believe their spam explanation for the existence of them. You can spin up a free 'comet' ID to play with things without needing to buy an ID at all. I'd argue the modern internet is what's closed off and feudal with large companies running our applications and requiring us to give them our data in order to interact with each other. Sure you don't technically need to do this (I created r/hnblogs and I want people to run their own websites), but the reality is most users won't do this, so how default applications work on the network matters. Right now they work almost entirely on a large company server/client model.
The 'galaxy' and 'star' urbit nodes are basically governance and infrastructure nodes, they allow a network consensus to determine changes that might have to happen to the network over time. They also incentivize people to operate portions of the network for other users (IDs can move between stars freely). A lot of this when compared to flaws in existing internet infrastructure comes out ahead to me - or at least not worse. (CAs, ISPs, etc.).
1. I don't think elite is the goal, it's more about first principles and being free to rethink things. Obviously high risk and in most outcomes would lead to failure, but they've made progress for years and have now proven they can actually ship. I don't think big complex goals are impossible, just hard.
2. I don't think the politics of the original author matter that much.
3. I don't agree with Thiel's politics. That said, Thiel has a pretty good track record for picking things that end up really successful because others pre-judge and misvalue them. I think he's good at taking the contrarian view and really thinking it through, looking for blind spots or generalized assumptions (that may be correct most of the time, but not all the time) that lead the community to undervalue things. I think his political views are both contrarian and wrong, but his VC success is often because he is contrarian and right.
As far as closed off and gatekeeped - the IDs are cheap (free to $10ish), and I believe their spam explanation for the existence of them. You can spin up a free 'comet' ID to play with things without needing to buy an ID at all. I'd argue the modern internet is what's closed off and feudal with large companies running our applications and requiring us to give them our data in order to interact with each other. Sure you don't technically need to do this (I created r/hnblogs and I want people to run their own websites), but the reality is most users won't do this, so how default applications work on the network matters. Right now they work almost entirely on a large company server/client model.
The 'galaxy' and 'star' urbit nodes are basically governance and infrastructure nodes, they allow a network consensus to determine changes that might have to happen to the network over time. They also incentivize people to operate portions of the network for other users (IDs can move between stars freely). A lot of this when compared to flaws in existing internet infrastructure comes out ahead to me - or at least not worse. (CAs, ISPs, etc.).