Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities either. Under current copyright law a web page with instructions that say "paste chapter 2, parag

Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities either. Under current copyright law a web page with instructions that say "paste chapter 2, paragraph 33 of someone else's book here" is not automatically legal. It may be construed as a derivative work. Ted wanted to have copyright licensing and retrieval costs squared away so that when you opened an article with a quote from a book in it, you bought the article, you bought just the quote part of the book, something stitched them together into a document you could see, and everyone involved signed away their right to object to such an arrangement. I suspect the reason why Xanadu wants tumblers is purely because organizing the entire world's knowledge into a single hierarchical number line looks mathematically neat, even though "give me everything in between page 63 of Snow Crash to page 4 of The Lord of The Rings" is not a meaningful question that can be answered. And again, requires a central authority to number catalogs and books so that they can be referenced in this absolutely batshit insane way. IMHO the biggest problem with Xanadu isn't the technical underpinnings, or the disregard for decentralization. It's the UX design, or lack thereof. Having 10 different documents open with a bunch of transclusions and links drawn between them is at best extremely distracting and at worst not at all usable. There's a reason why "spiderweb of documents tied with red string" is a visual shorthand for conspiracy theories. And, again, all that requires a central authority to be putting in the work of tying red string in between all the documents, because nobody actually bothers doing that when writing documents unless threatened with academic or legal sanctions.