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I wish there was still hope for Ted Nelson's concept of Hypertext. Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as something intrins

I wish there was still hope for Ted Nelson's concept of Hypertext. Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as something intrinsically decentralized. The idea was that we, as individuals, would participate in new forms of discourse and creation through the "media" of hypertext _without_ intermediaries other than (perhaps) agents we would create for ourselves on an individual basis (like your own personal "max headroom"). Instead what we got are giant "media" companies acting as middle-men, cattle-herders or disinterested extractive entities that are pursing goals totally unrelated to the actual services they provide to the people who use "their media". Why do we need colossal-scale datacenters for social media anyway? Could there be a totally decentralized solution consisting of just the people and their devices? Or is that just a pipe-dream or sitcom plot like "Pied-piper" on the Silicon Valley TV show?

spot 8y ago
Nelson's concept was more centralized, and that's why it failed. Having no implementation didn't help.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  It is only the media itself that is centralized in Nelson's vision. Today it is the giant middle-men that are "centralized" and call themselves "media". According to Jaron Lanier, Xanadu (Ted Nelson's concept) was all about "two-way" connectivity, not in a trivial sense like client/server websites today but deeply as in a "we're all authors" sense. > "A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network > and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] > network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network > with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are > linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. > It's a small simple change in how online information should > be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for > culture and the economy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    How does this compare to Urbit?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    The two-way connectivity was between documents (or actually, pieces of media, regardless of type), not in the "we're all authors" sense (the latter was common back then, and in fact the early web browser was also an editor and server). The Xanadu idea was that if a link was created from A → B, it would be visible in B as well. They have some cute 3D renderings of XanaduSpace on their website that makes it clearer: http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm Lanier further claims this would make Google redundant (since you'd "just see where most of the links led" - it's not clear to me how you'd do that without processing (ie, scraping with a bot) all the documents and their links), and also Facebook because, apparently, what we were missing is a way to see who is linking to our content, so we can "meet people who share out interests" (personally, this is what I see forums or Reddit being used for, whereas Facebook was primarily about people you knew personally).
- sp332 8y ago
  There is an implementation in Javascript. https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645 https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645 "A Xanadoc file is a text file containing a list of URLs, which each have an encoding declaration, a character offset and length to read. It describes a compound document that is composed from these specific sections of other documents." This page says the demo only works in Firefox but I didn't notice any trouble with Chrome. Just give it a few seconds to load.
FabHK 8y ago
Related, I was sad to see that in the neighbouring Soyuz-ballistic-descent thread most references to news and updates were not the informative NASA blog [1], but Twitter "tweets". Talk about unnecessary centralisation. [1] https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/
nabla9 8y ago
The biggest roadblock is Nelson's need to control it. Nelson had great a concept but he is bad businessman and not good enough software developer. Ted Nelson actively sabotaged attempt to create open source implementation. He initially seemed to approve it, but turned against it. Nelson has patented zzstructure, so there is little you can do until the patent expires (I think it will expire very soon)
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Yes, to be fair, I really only want to comment on the concepts that Ted Nelson wrote about. The concepts are great and I wish they had been baked into the internet as we know it. I don't think there's much use now (40-ish years later) to attempt actual implementations of Ted Nelson's stuff according to his specifications. So much has changed. Perhaps it would be an interesting curiosity? It is sad, however, to think about how we imagined cyberspace as a dual plane of existence, how it was going to be a liberating and life-changing experience that makes people better versions of themselves. Only some of that came to be and, increasingly, in cyberspace we're just "product" being handled disinterested "social media" monoliths.
rsync 8y ago
"Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as something intrinsically decentralized. The idea was that we, as individuals, would participate in new forms of discourse and creation through the "media" of hypertext _without_ intermediaries other than (perhaps) agents we would create for ourselves on an individual basis" This exists, and is ubiquitous, and has succeeded beyond everyones wildest expectations. You may, for free (or almost free), control a public, routable IP address and run any kind of publishing platform or online community on it that you choose to - from a listserv to a full blown Drupal CMS. You have exactly what you have always wished for. It turns out, however, that all the people that used to just watch TV ... still just want to "watch TV" (whatever that means these days ...)

spot 8y ago

Nelson's concept was more centralized, and that's why it failed. Having no implementation didn't help.

crispyambulance 8y ago
It is only the media itself that is centralized in Nelson's vision. Today it is the giant middle-men that are "centralized" and call themselves "media". According to Jaron Lanier, Xanadu (Ted Nelson's concept) was all about "two-way" connectivity, not in a trivial sense like client/server websites today but deeply as in a "we're all authors" sense. > "A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network > and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] > network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network > with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are > linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. > It's a small simple change in how online information should > be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for > culture and the economy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson
- thanatropism 8y ago
  How does this compare to Urbit?
- icebraining 8y ago
  The two-way connectivity was between documents (or actually, pieces of media, regardless of type), not in the "we're all authors" sense (the latter was common back then, and in fact the early web browser was also an editor and server). The Xanadu idea was that if a link was created from A → B, it would be visible in B as well. They have some cute 3D renderings of XanaduSpace on their website that makes it clearer: http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm Lanier further claims this would make Google redundant (since you'd "just see where most of the links led" - it's not clear to me how you'd do that without processing (ie, scraping with a bot) all the documents and their links), and also Facebook because, apparently, what we were missing is a way to see who is linking to our content, so we can "meet people who share out interests" (personally, this is what I see forums or Reddit being used for, whereas Facebook was primarily about people you knew personally).
sp332 8y ago
There is an implementation in Javascript. https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645 https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645 "A Xanadoc file is a text file containing a list of URLs, which each have an encoding declaration, a character offset and length to read. It describes a compound document that is composed from these specific sections of other documents." This page says the demo only works in Firefox but I didn't notice any trouble with Chrome. Just give it a few seconds to load.

FabHK 8y ago

Related, I was sad to see that in the neighbouring Soyuz-ballistic-descent thread most references to news and updates were not the informative NASA blog [1], but Twitter "tweets". Talk about unnecessary centralisation. [1] https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/

nabla9 8y ago

The biggest roadblock is Nelson's need to control it. Nelson had great a concept but he is bad businessman and not good enough software developer. Ted Nelson actively sabotaged attempt to create open source implementation. He initially seemed to approve it, but turned against it. Nelson has patented zzstructure, so there is little you can do until the patent expires (I think it will expire very soon)

crispyambulance 8y ago
Yes, to be fair, I really only want to comment on the concepts that Ted Nelson wrote about. The concepts are great and I wish they had been baked into the internet as we know it. I don't think there's much use now (40-ish years later) to attempt actual implementations of Ted Nelson's stuff according to his specifications. So much has changed. Perhaps it would be an interesting curiosity? It is sad, however, to think about how we imagined cyberspace as a dual plane of existence, how it was going to be a liberating and life-changing experience that makes people better versions of themselves. Only some of that came to be and, increasingly, in cyberspace we're just "product" being handled disinterested "social media" monoliths.

rsync 8y ago

"Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as something intrinsically decentralized. The idea was that we, as individuals, would participate in new forms of discourse and creation through the "media" of hypertext _without_ intermediaries other than (perhaps) agents we would create for ourselves on an individual basis" This exists, and is ubiquitous, and has succeeded beyond everyones wildest expectations. You may, for free (or almost free), control a public, routable IP address and run any kind of publishing platform or online community on it that you choose to - from a listserv to a full blown Drupal CMS. You have exactly what you have always wished for. It turns out, however, that all the people that used to just watch TV ... still just want to "watch TV" (whatever that means these days ...)