Category: web

Ted Nelson – an experience of water and interconnection

An excerpt with Ted Nelson explaining his work, in Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold.

Back to the very early times, times of speculative concepts of a connected world… in the early 60s, many years before the first Apple personal computer, a young thinker, Ted Nelson, had his own ideas about creating a computer network.

The web as we know it took a different route, but Nelson’s ideas are still dormant.

It was an experience of water and interconnection.

I was with my grandparents in a rowboat in Chicago, so I must have been five years old and I was trailing my hand in the water.

And I thought about how the water was moving around my fingers, opening on one side and closing on the other, and that changing system of relationships where everything was kind of similar, kind of the same and yet different.

That was so difficult to visualize and express,

and just generalizing that to the entire universe that the world is a system of ever changing relationships and structures struck me as… a vast truth… which it is!

And… so interconnection and expressing that interconnection has been the center of all my thinking, and all my computer work has been about expressing and representing and showing interconnection among writings especially.

And writing is the process of reducing a tapestry of interconnection to a narrow sequence.

And this is in a sense illicit.

This is a wrongful compression of what should spread out.

And today’s computers they’ve betrayed that because there’s no system for decent cut and paste and they’ve changed the meaning of the words “cut and paste” and pretended it was the same thing.

So a guy named Larry Tesler, whom I consider to be a good friend, nevertheless changed those words and I consider that to be a crime against humanity and he doesn’t understand why.

Because humanity has no decent writing tools.

In any case, this is the problem: interconnection and representation and sequentialization all… similar to the issue of water.

So here we have a parallel presentation that shows the quotation connected to its original context.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and where is that from? That is from the King James Bible.

So we can step down to the next quotation.

“Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight” and that is from the Alphabet of ben Sira.

And so as we pull back we can see successive pages coming up to connect with their sources or with their linked contents.

His vision of links never materialized.

By some he was labeled insane for clinging on.

There are two contradictory slogans.

One is that continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

On the other hand, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

I prefer the latter because I don’t want to be remembered as the guy who didn’t.

No, to us you appear to be the only one around who is clinically sane.

No one has ever said that before.

Usually I hear the opposite.

Thank you very much for talking with us.

It was wonderful.

Marvelous.

What a team.

Yes, now it’s your turn.

A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society

Back in 2009 Jaron Lanier spoke about the idea of a different system for the fabric of the “social web”, and a different business model to support it. He connected this notion to the original ideas of Ted Nelson, which have never been tried. He spoke about the ideas of micro-payments and a web that’s not free, but affordable. In 2018 I posted a short video here with the excerpt from that conversation.

Since that time, Jaron Lanier continued to expand on these ideas. In 2018 he published “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now“, which got a lot of attention from the general media at the time and a couple years after it.

I think the best example of how much attention he got on the book was his appearance on The View. It was a year of a lot of scrutiny of social media platforms – 2018 was the same year in which Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called for a Senate hearing on the repercussions and missteps on elections, misinformation and Cambridge Analytica.

Later in that same year, Jaron Lanier published with E. Glen Weyl an 18 page article on Harvard Business Review called “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society“. In this article they articulate the concepts of Data Dignity and MIDs. They also go over some ideas for regulations and the underling principles to support this system.

The year after that, in 2019, the New York Times published a series with three video episodes in which Lanier describes these ideas and concepts with compelling visual interpretations.

In 2020 Netflix launched a documentary called “The Social Dilemma“. Once again, in this documentary Jaron Lanier (along with many others) described in more detail some of the ideas he’s been thinking for decades. The documentary received a lot of attention and appraisal.

Big ideas take time to develop.

I’m particularly interested in hearing more from Jaron Lanier about these ideas on digital society when they start to intersect with virtual reality. Lanier has a lot of experience and context on VR and it will be interesting to see how the growing notions of the “Metaverse” will work from his perspective.

Although big ideas are essential, on the digital world implementation is everything. If we don’t get to a point where people start building new and engaging platforms from these ideas, they will continue to live in the realm of ideas, and we will continue to wonder (like Ted Nelson) how the world could be if we moved in another path.

The real question to me is who has the influence and the resources to move us in that direction?

Missing out

People are so afraid of missing out. They are rushing in, they are buying things sight unseen, and I’m telling you, it’s going to be a mistake. They have to learn how to reset and not come from a place of fear. Fear of “if they don’t do this they will never be able to do it”.

You will always be able to do everything you need to do people. Don’t rush time.

Suze Orman

Building is how we reboot the American dream

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

Marc Andreessen

It’s Time to Build

The mind boggles

I love discovering new words and learning about the definitions and meanings behind it. The word “boggle” is quite fascinating.

According to the Merriam-Webster’s definition:

intransitive verb

  1. to start with fright or amazement: be overwhelmed
    // the mind boggles at the research needed
  2. to hesitate because of doubt, fear, or scruples

transitive verb

  1. to overwhelm with wonder or bewilderment
    // boggle the mind

(Overwhelming is another one of my favorites)

The word boggle basically is telling us that wonderment and fear are connected. That to marvel and to doubt are related feelings of the same nature. That to be amazed can be frighting. To be astonished can cause you to hesitate.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was called “Parole”. In Portuguese that means “palavra”, or in English “word”. It was a very simple game. Take a few plastic cubes that have printed letters. Shake these cubes in a container, and organize them in a plastic plate. Now turn an hourglass for one minute and write as many words as you can with those random letters.

After moving to the US, I was delighted to learn that this game actually existed here too (long before it went to Brazil actually). And of course you probably know the name of “Parole” in the US: Boggle.

The Website Obesity Crisis

It has been almost five years since this presentation by Maciej Cegłowski. Since that time, the real topic seems to be forgotten.

We talk about website optimization and static sites, but we continue to forget about his main issue. Simple informational and text-based websites that are still loading 1.5-5MB (just to display news or articles).

It seems to me that with the mobile revolution (both in devices and in network speeds), the ideas outlined in that presentation have completely faded into obsolesce. Yet, the web could be much faster if we just had better tools and best practices to address the problems.

Perhaps adding that Google Maps embed to your restaurant site is not needed if the user can just get a link to it. Maybe we could find better tracking tools that don’t need to load twenty different JS scripts in the background.

Over the past few years, the results of these technical choices are clear. People decided to search for tools to remove these bloated sources. Ad Blockers continue to rise, pop-ups to deactivate ad-blockers are needed for editorial industries to economically survive.

Simply trying to discover who’s tracking us, and what data is being sent to advertising networks has become an impossible task. New initiatives, such as the Brave Browser, appeared to try to solve some of these issues. But the massive results we expect are still not there.

As 5G networks start to be rolled out world-wide (slowly), we have another great opportunity to address some of these lingering issues. The real question is… Are we going to take this chance? And when?

An optimistic view of the web

Eric Bailey wrote a great article over at CSS Tricks outlining some of the key factors that make the web such a strong platform.

I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.

Eric Bailey

The “state of the web” is an ever-changing topic that interests me a lot, and it is refreshing to see an optimistic point of view focused on the strengths of the web, rather than the issues surrounding it.

Link to the article below:

What the Web Still Is

500 Days of Summer

A few years ago I watched 500 Days of Summer for the first time, and it was so powerful to me at that moment, that I had to watch it again, just a few days after.

In 2019 the movie completed 10 years since it was released, and I feel I should watch it over and over again.

I’ve seen a couple of videos on YouTube celebrating and remembering the movie. The two videos below are with the main actors in the movie — Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

These videos are worth watching because they explain the real perspective from the film, which is primarily (almost solely) focused on Joseph’s character Tom.

“Hear what she says. She is very honest.”, Zooey Deschanel, talking about Summer, her character in the movie. That is the key to this movie, and what made it so powerful to me at the time. Tom was not really listening during this relationship, and that caused a series of effects that ultimately lead to the beginning and end of the movie.

Just watch it, it will make more sense after. I should do the same, and then watch it again every time I come back to this post for a reminder.

A great insight to start the New Year

Think about that for a minute, because it’s really important. Somewhere along the way, we’ve all bought into the idea – without consciously realizing it – that to be motivated and effective we need to feel like we want to take action. We need to be eager to do so. I really don’t know why we believe this, because it is 100% nonsense.

Yes, on some level you need to be committed to what you are doing – you need to want to see the project finished, or get healthier, or get an earlier start to your day.  But you don’t need to feel like doing it.

Heidi Grant

I believe this is such a simple concept, that sometimes it feels too easy to think about, and we want to look for a better idea, hack things and find a more complex explanation.

The fact is that the “act of doing” things consistently, regardless of inspiration or motivation more often than not leads to better results. Maybe not better, but definitely to results. I think the “better” part comes from perfecting the act by repetition or iteration.

In 2020, I want to experiment the idea of producing more and more, and see if the aggregate will lead over time to something greater.