Why don’t we have the best version of the internet?

We missed the virtual boat on Project Xanadu.

Project Xanadu was a version of the world wide web that never came to be, but it was the better one. Experience it firsthand at Visiting Xanadu: https://visitingxanadu.weebly.com/a-xanadu-interactive-experience.html

Project Xanadu was not championed except for by a very few. Perhaps it was misunderstood or poorly advocated; in either case we are certainly worse off for it.

Project Xanadu was the unrealized creation of Theodor Nelson in which in which only one version of each piece of information existed, and links were never broken...

Xanalogical structure and transclusions

In its current state, the internet has no “top” – it can be entered from any of a million ways (Wesch, 2007). Vannevar Bush, creator of the Memex (memory + index, a proto-hypertext system) noted the issues with indexing: “our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.” Bush continues, stating that effective indexing would allow us the “privilege of forgetting” the things we don’t immediately need, with some assurance that we’ll be able to find them later if required. Nelson describes his own ingenious invention succinctly: “Xanalogical literary structure offers uniquely integrated methods for version management, side-by-side comparison and visualizable re-use, which lead to a radically beneficial and principled copyright system”.

Instead of hyperlinks, we would have had transclusions – better than links because they connect to the original, revealing the true relationship. Transclusions are a fundamental attribute of the internet, and because they cannot be accomplished on paper would have been invaluable. Nelson had already solved all these problems by foreseeing them before they came to pass; the real heartbreak being of course that the mess the internet is today might have been avoided. Project Xanadu, a pristine, glittering organizational structure with a single version of everything. A single version of the truth.

But we didn’t use the internet for that. Instead we have “fragile ever-breaking one-way links, with no recognition of change or copyright, and no support for multiple versions or principled re-use. Fonts and glitz, rather than content connective structure, prevail.” (Nelson, 1999).