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> His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades I was at that service and several people spoke a

> His memorial service was full of amazing people whom he’d met and worked with in the Valley over the decades I was at that service and several people spoke about how his ideas did not really get the backing they deserved, Ted Nelson not the least of them. This makes more sense when you realize that what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked far more than he wanted to invent cool new tech, but while people were happy to have him as a member of staff he needed to be given freedom to play with organizations and no one was ready to try anything as radical as he had in mind. I remember there was a period where Google was trying to make him a permanent fixture and he said in a private conversation something to the effect of it feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue, not engage with his ideas.

gumby 4y ago
> what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked Yeah, people were at the center of his thinking, not machines. Again, crazy farsight by today’s standards. > feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue This is hard: classic imposter syndrome makes ppl feel afraid to ask a dumb question. > not engage with his ideas. A separate problem; some of the drivers of this I touched on in another comment; would be interesting to read what you think. I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does. Ted’s good, radical, and farsighted ideas didn’t get the attention they deserved either, but I feel a lot of that was self inflicted. And the amount they deserved might have been less than he thought. Come to think of it, Ted should recast trans Lu soon as a web3 idea. His charge-for-everything approach would fit right in.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does. I'm quite confident he was talking about both Doug and himself. Ted definitely saw Doug as a kindred spirit with a great vision for how the world could be different who was ignored.

gumby 4y ago

> what Doug really wanted was to transform the way people worked Yeah, people were at the center of his thinking, not machines. Again, crazy farsight by today’s standards. > feeling like being surrounded by a bunch of young people who just wanted to admire him like a statue This is hard: classic imposter syndrome makes ppl feel afraid to ask a dumb question. > not engage with his ideas. A separate problem; some of the drivers of this I touched on in another comment; would be interesting to read what you think. I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does. Ted’s good, radical, and farsighted ideas didn’t get the attention they deserved either, but I feel a lot of that was self inflicted. And the amount they deserved might have been less than he thought. Come to think of it, Ted should recast trans Lu soon as a web3 idea. His charge-for-everything approach would fit right in.

Hermitian909 4y ago
> I remember feeling that Ted was talking about himself, as he chronically does. I'm quite confident he was talking about both Doug and himself. Ted definitely saw Doug as a kindred spirit with a great vision for how the world could be different who was ignored.