Pylimitics

It’s not documents (books, articles, stories, notes, posts) that are important, even when they encapsulate fantastically important, incisive ideas. It’s the connections among and between documents that are the most important. Browsing the web is valuable because of hypertext. Ted Nelson coined that word back in 1965, when there were only a handful of real-world implementations of anything of the sort. He was inspired, in part, by Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think twenty years earlier. And Bush, for his part, was inspired by John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, published all the way back in 1706. Locke’s work led to Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia in 1728. Tim Berners-Lee? He didn’t come up with his proposal for the world-wide web until 1989.

The point here is that a human’s idea can lead to another human’s idea. That’s what Isaac Newton was talking about in 1675 when he said “if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And by the way, he didn’t originate that phrase; it (probably) came from Bernard of Chartres about five centuries earlier.

Search engines, since Google, have been great at links. But lately, again led by Google, the idea seems to be that what you want instead of a long list of relevant links is an AI-generated summary that doesn’t have any links at all. It’s the embodiment of Ted Chiang’s assessment that ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.

If all you get is a summary, it’s blurry already. Good luck using that to inspire new, incisive ideas. For a much better discussion of this, have a look at Collin Jennings’ essay in Aeon.