Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #3

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performance of a network when its large.

The underlying technology has scaled

by a factor of a million

in computational speed,

in bandwidth of communications,

in storage capacity and it

may go for another decade

to a factor of a billion

or even a trillion.

Nothing in the history of

mankind has ever worked

as a technological contribution

over that span of growth.

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.

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