The irony is certainly not lost on me. I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not

The irony is certainly not lost on me. I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter how much anyone might wish it. The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or something. This is astonishingly practical: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_... I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything I'll ever see. And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of fancy like this one? --- [1] Let's see: Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute with 67% comprehension. average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes. 24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed; one year of reading, no sleep: 691 GB; one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed: 34TB; compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php): 4.9TB. I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.