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nishio committed Mar 14, 2024
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If one path to networked thinking was thus motivated by technical resilience, another was motivated by creative expression. Ted Nelson trained as a sociologist, was inspired in his work by a visit to campus he hosted in 1959 by cybernetic pioneer Margaret Mead's vision of democratic and pluralistic media and developed into. an artist. Following these early experiences, he devoted his life beginning in his early 20s to the development of "Project Xanadu", which aimed to create a revolutionary human-centered interface for computer networks. While Xanadu had so many components that Nelson considered indispensable that it was not released fully unto the 2010s, its core idea, co-developed with Engelbart, was "hypertext" as Nelson labeled it.

Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a "pluralism" (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences. This "choose your own adventure" quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard). Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope. The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his "World Wide Web" approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.
Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a "pluralism" (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences. This "choose your own adventure"[^ChooseYourOwnAdventure] quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard). Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope. The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his "World Wide Web" approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.

While Engelbart and Nelson were lifelong friends and shared many similar visions, they took very different paths to realizing them, each of which (as we will see) held an important seed of truth. Engelbart, while also a visionary, was a consummate pragmatist and a smooth political operator, and went on to be recognized as the pioneer of personal computing. Nelson was an artistic purist whose relentless pursuit over decades of a software system ("Project Xanadu") that instantiated all of his seventeen enumerated principles buried his career.

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[^benkler_linux]: Benkler, Y., 2002. Coase's penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm". Yale Law Journal, pp.369-446.
[^wiredglove]: A wired glove is an input device like a glove. It allows users to interact with digital environments through gestures and movements, translating physical hand actions into digital responses. The first wired glove was invented in 1977.
[^visionpro]: The Vision Pro is a head mount display, released by Apple in 2024. This device integrates high-resolution displays with sensors capable of tracking the user's movements, hand actions and the environment to offer an immersive mixed reality experience.

[^ChooseYourOwnAdventure]: "Choose Your Own Adventure," interactive gamebooks based on Edward Packard's concept from 1976, peaked in popularity under Bantam Books in the '80s and '90s, with 250+ million copies sold. It declined in the '90s due to competition from computer games.

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