It reintroduces the social computing environment, emphasis on the word computing. The Old Internet and timesharing systems like ITS and Unix were based around this model:
https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-...
So you have a standard identity layer, instead of a million little fiefdoms of identity competing for sign ups. You have proper one-to-one connections between individual users on the system, with modern cryptography inbetween.
You have a functional, very very small kernel out of which the rest of the system is built. This kernel and core concept is a sort of distillation of the ACID concept from database systems, so that your computer has transactions and forgives mistakes.
It bakes the social layer and the community layer of the Internet into the protocol. Urbit tries to be community-aware and politics-aware and handle this gracefully. This sort of formal acknowledgement of necessary human factors in technology is certainly in line with Curtis Yarvin's previously expressed views on social organization. (And is mostly what people are talking about when they say he 'baked neoreaction' into Urbit. This accusation strikes me as intellectually dishonest on multiple levels, but I'd rather not digress on it.)
If nothing else it's a very interesting piece of new research in computer science, you should be excited about it.
EDIT: Curtis I know you're lurking, can I get an invite?