Ted Nelson, radical computing, and software for stoners
What if every piece of knowledge were connected non-hierarchically through a futuristic web that defied the earthly operating systems we hold dear and instead felt like the cosmic realization of Daddy Internet’s home truth that all things are one and all knowledge is connected, man???
To the computer scientist (he prefers “systems humanist”) Ted Nelson, the information hierarchies that govern our devices—folders, subfolders, files, documents, discrete programs, etc.—simply recreate the boring ones we invented at the office. Why would an ephemeral tool of limitless organizational capacity feel anything like that?
Starting in the ‘60s (!), he set about designing hardware, software, programs, applications, and interfaces that could connect every dot in the universe, with the goal of making information easier to find, navigate, and distribute.
Many of his innovations, like Walky Thinky (“a one-handed typing device…[f]or taking notes while walking or driving”) were disasters. He released Project Xanadu (kinda like the internet + G**gle Docs + Wikipedia + git diffs, pictured in the crappy GIF at the top of this email) seven years ago. Development had begun in roughly 1960.
And yet his ideas permeate our experience of computers and the internet. Many would argue that a link’s promise of intellectual teleportation is only possible because of Nelson’s theory of “hypertext”, which anticipated the spread of the “hyperlink” by about a decade. In 1967, he wrote: “Hypertext diverges from plain text in that the reader’s possible sequences diverge from plain sequence. Is he to have choices? And how are they to be expressed?”
A descendant of Nelson’s ideas that’s actually in use might be the platform Are.na. If you’ve never used it, it’s like Pinterest but headier: you can collect images, videos, GIFs websites, PDFs, text, even other are.na channels… pls get one: let’s follow each other!
But more than Nelson’s tech innovations (which I’m not equipped to seriously evaluate), it’s the futuristic spirit of his manifestos that moves me… and, of course, their *passionate* graphic design.
In their best moments, Nelson’s documents read like inspired marijuanalogues, and as with actual late-night pontification, they occasionally deliver revelation… that flavor of utopia that’s beautiful and ridiculous and maybe—as long as you remember to look at the note you wrote in your phone the night before—possible.
Here are some faves:
“I write this at the brink of a new world.”
Nelson’s original proposal for Xanadu
“The system as presently designed will have one feature not currently available in any information system anywhere: the provision for the spin-off of alternative arrangements and drafts of anything.”
“How can we IMPROVE on paper? We foresaw a new screen literature of parallel, interconnected documents.
Take the Xanadu system for a spin. (Loading sometimes takes a while.
Peep Nelson in that wacky Herzog doc on technology.
Finally—bizarrely—you can peruse mountains of his junk mail.
QUICKLY!
In other cybernews, I recently learned that the word “pixel” = “a picture element”!!!!!! Great alt name for this newsletter. Above is a grid of pixels zoomed in, like, a lot, from Wikipedia user Kprateek88 via a CC-BY-SA license.
love,
alex
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