Massive Nelson fan here. My question right now is knowing that Ted's moved from, "the alt Internet" to a, "really bitchin' writing tool" what's the current state of development? What's Christina Engelbart up to?

If the right people just starting designing software again we could accomplish so much. SV is essentially dead in terms of meaningful innovation. All it would take is developing a better operating system, a better web browser, a better personal computer. The competition has lowered the bar so low. Certainly something could be done. #as #we #may #continue #to #think

Ive seen this abomination batted around every so often as 'the internet that could have been'. Glad it wasn't.

Some of my own critiques.

1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

2. With automated paywalls (to charge and to pay), would lead to scammed content like a infinite scrolling page at 1 cent a page, to not get immediately blocked.

3. The idea was that you could also charge for your content. What would happen is your stuff would get scraped, added to aggregators, and charged more while you get nothing.

4. You pay for seemingly legit content and pay for scams. No way to charge back.

5. With all this micropayments and stuff, would necessitate DRM on all 'pay' content. It would be the only way to stop downloading/archiving/reuploading with micropayments that go to me. I view DRM on everything as a computing hellscape.

6. Nelson's extreme secrecy was what caused his system to never get any traction. Those Mosaic and A-Pachy folks were like 'set up a fresbsd box and make a free website.' None of this goofy money crap.

Ted Nelson had really good ideas, but he stood in his own way.

He wanted to build a closed-source system that he owned and controlled. He was a bad project leader and got nowhere. His patents prevented others from using zigzag structures. Decades later, when some people wanted to build an open-source GZigZag, he first said it was okay to use the name, then turned sour on it and prevented them from using it.

If someone wants to do it again, they shouldn't involve Ted Nelson in any way our use anything he has control over, whether a trademark or a patent.

The Curse of Xanadu https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

> unlike Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee never read about Bush’s memex. He built a system that connected people like never before—but made little effort to facilitate the connection of ideas. There are no trails on the World Wide Web—instead, there are misattributed quotes, dead one-way links, constant plagiarism scandals, and widespread misinformation and mutual distrust. It’s often said that we’re living in a ‘post-truth society’. The words we write and videos we share have become entirely unmoored from the ideas underlying them. Strangely, the Web has facilitated more disconnection than was ever possible before.

> Ted Nelson, in his own oblique and dodgy way, predicted the failure mode we’re now seeing: “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” We built our global information-sharing system quickly, efficiently, and technically, when we should’ve treated it as a philosophical and aesthetic puzzle as much as a computational one, and built carefully and precisely.

Agreed: nothing is more important than the foundation that you built, especially if it may make or break society.

I first heard about project Xanadu on Serial Experiments Lain.

Gwern has some good comments on Project Xanadu and why it failed: https://gwern.net/xanadu

Mostly, he says, its biggest problem is that what it was trying to do (beyond the sort of thing the web actually ended up doing) just isn't that useful.