Video: Ted Nelson Possiplex book launch (Oct 8, 2010)

  • Ted’s grandmother Jean’s life was saved by switching from the Lusitania. I’ll arrange everything.  Arnold Genthe meet my friend Ellen Therri  (110 min )
  • ADD is a cognitive style, sometimes it goes away you adapt. He’s had moments of remarkable concentration. You have to be able to concentrate.  (113 min)
  • The reason I find stuff other people don’t is that I don’t look under the street lights.
  • Possiplexia: freezing, too many possibilities (126 min)
  • It is probably hard to open a bad bakery in France because the customers are sophisticated. There are not similarly sophisticated computer customers (127 in)
  • Alamo and Chewing Gum connection pointed out in PhD thesis.
  • How would Xanadu change the way we write? I can’t talk about how other people would use it.
  • Tolstoy used true (paper) copy and paste: his daughters would make 2 copies
  • The examples are text based. How does that work for video: Edit Decision Lists can apply to video (It came from Hollywood).
  • Hypertext being a serialization of graph structures of our minds. Each assertion is addressable for AI. : Well you’re on a different planet. I’m not interested in AI. (151 min)
  • Knoweldge Representation is an Idiotic Term (Knowledge implies belief, not provable belief)
  • I have not created a table of statements. I have created a book of sentences.
  • DW Griffith

Intertwingled: Morning Session # 2

Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see.  The individual document, at hand, is what we deal with; we do not see the total linked collection of them all at once.  But thy are there, the documents not present as well as those that are, and the grand cat’s cradle amoung them all.  -Ted Nelson, Literary Machines  (5:30)

This resonates with the Enlightenment thinkers.  The Encyclopedias they produces were intertwingled.

.. In real life, that is to say, On paper. (13:24)

Literature Debugged

Silicon Valley road to riches: Don’t worry, be crappy.  Get users locked in and spread.  The result is privatization.  Companies like Google have to reconstruct backlinks.  This leads to great fortunes and inequality.  -Jaron

Context-free openness (copy without context) leads to the decline of the middle class.  We’re concentrating wealth in people that can process the information, and not those who created it.

1970s: two types of computer types: hippies and military men.  The “draft” created a desire for anonymity.  CB Radio wanted to avoid cops because they wanted to drive faster than 55mph.  We had to preserve provenence and we have a social contract that rewards the people the data is about.

All simulation is political – the politics are in the rules and the data

We all know that being “apolitical” is supporting the status quo.