openpolitics.com

But sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at once: too many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction, digressing from open parallelism.

It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and the new software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going back to the previous version. The other participants, less committed, went their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.

.. On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came to see me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had cooked up. I was polite, didn’t say anything negative about it, and took him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow system, doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely wrong way), has taken over the world.

Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a good and decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the same as mine at some level of abstraction.

All that said, I don’t think Tim and I agree on anything in the universe. He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy mechanisms of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of ideas and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy, files and exposed directories are highly destructive.

.. (“Most people don’t want to publish,” said arch-publisher William Jovanovich to me in 1966. I said everyone did. “Oh, you mean VANITY publishing,” he said. Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL publishing is vanity publishing.)

.. Only trivial links are possible; there is nothing to support careful annotation and study; and, of course, there is no transclusion.

.. The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and integrity of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure we had no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking behind the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite successful.

During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:

1. that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2. that I am a drug addict;
3. that I am mentally defective;
4. that my every utterance in the course of my life has been incoherent and offensive;
5. that my work was driven by ignorance;
6. that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded twits attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7. that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant “repairman” (on account of a job he once had);
8. that we were all clinically insane.

.. Jackal’s article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and subtlety of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion.

.. But my concern is that .. these unspeakable individuals may have destroyed one of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the original, and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.