The Curse of Xanadu (1995)
wired.com
wired.com
Newspapers are going out of business because it is difficult to be compensated for information/content made available over the internet.
It is also interesting to interpret many successful internet firms that offer blogging, Facebook, as steps towards the Xanadu vision of everything being editable.
This article is a very nasty piece of work. Nastiness breathes from the commas and drips like Spanish moss from Wolf's fine sentences. Everything in the piece is contrived to promote disapproval rather than understanding. This hatchet job could be a textbook for a course in persuasive writing: every word, every detail has been chosen for its connotations of folly, decay, and despair rather than its accuracy or appropriateness.
The inaccuracies begin in the first sentence (there is no Marin Boulevard in Sausalito), but I will not chronicle them here; a partial list can be found at http://www.xanadu.com.au/ararat.
Reports of Xanadu's death have been greatly exaggerated. Nowhere did Wolf mention that "Xanadu" is my own living trademark, now registered and completely divorced from the software he takes such pains to disparage and misrepresent. This is a negligent, damaging omission of fact. If that software is not finished, I will find another way to achieve transclusive literature and register it under the classical Xanadu trademark.
Wolf makes a big, fat technical claim that sure makes us look stupid: "Even today, the technology to implement a worldwide Xanadu network does not exist." Why, how silly of us not to notice - well, dang! - how could we have missed it? (Strong vapors indeed must I have exhaled to have intoxicated such able mathematician-generalists as Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, and K. Eric Drexler, superprogrammer/superbusinessman John Walker, and the rest of the Autodesk management.)
Since I started in 1960, some type of Xanadu design has always been doable with the technology of any era. That is because "Xanadu" has always referred to a specific data service of documents, versions, links, and transclusions - at whatever speed. The Xanadu Operating Company server that Wolf misrepresents is simply a re-addressing box, which translates address positions among virtual documents, versions, links, and transclusions across a distributed, expandable, address space of contents. The box is designed to supply the addresses of the desired pieces to the user's front-end machine, which sends for the pieces and displays them, composited in virtual documents, showing their interconnections and outreaching connections to other materials. (The user's front-end machine functions like Mosaic and Netscape, which I believe were based on our work.)
Actual delivery of the pieces is obviously a problem of a different kind, a bandwidth problem, subject to more conventional engineering and computer science. The issue we addressed was addressing itself - virtual addressing in a hypermedia world, in which everything can be reused and recomposited.
Wolf seriously garbled the idea of transclusion. To say we planned to have only one copy of anything on the network is ridiculous. There have to be copies - actually instances - throughout the network and on the user's machine. A key problem is how to resolve these many instances into a single virtual object, not troubling the user about their different locations. (Note the problems caused on the Web by making no distinction between a document's identity and its address. The result is mirror sites, et cetera.) Literal copying is not forbidden in a global Xanadu scheme, it is essential; but each copy retains its original identity and ownership as a remote instance. That is the point. The different copies have to be functionally united into one logical identity.
With regard to enfilade technology, Wolf willfully ignores our exact and careful distinctions in order to make our intentions and claims appear ridiculous.
I would like a knowledgeable and trustworthy third party to examine our original 1970 work, under nondisclosure, and publicly verify the novelty of the work for that time, noting how long thereafter that particular work took to appear in published literature. To the best of my knowledge, it was well over a decade, and I have seen no indication that the later work has been replicated.
Perhaps Wolf talked to people who thought I didn't understand computers because I wanted things to be very different, and still do; another person's behavior may seem like ignorance, confusion, or insanity when that person is simply living in another paradigm. But from the beginning of my work, proceeding from a basic understanding of how things were in the computer world, I have wanted them to be different and worked fiercely toward that goal.
And of course, those Johnny-come-latelys at Xerox PARC and the Media Lab have treated me as ignorant because my detailed designs and hopes for the media future have almost nothing to do with theirs.
My ideas may have been too startling and sweeping for many people, but if those who heard me in the '60s and '70s would examine what I actually said, rather than what they thought they heard, they would be very surprised. Most people heard only every other word at best. They heard the thrust and intensity of my vision but not my exact words; what they heard was based on their preconceptions, preoccupations, and levels of awareness at the time. And some were so eager to mishear and put me down that they would mishear and misremember no matter what.
I continue to hold exactly to my original vision, that transclusive hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future, under whatever brand name.
There are far more varieties of interactive media than anyone has yet tried; but I believe that open transmedia - unique in power to aid understanding and to solve the copyright issue - represents a vital singularity in the great family of media cosmologies; until this is disproven, I continue to stake my life and career on it. If I am right about the centrality of transclusion to the media of the future, it may all have been worth it, and we will see who understood media design after all. The ferocity and harsh intent of Wolf's statement and his varied and repeated assertions of my incompetence and ignorance, however strange or contorted the charges, require that the magazine back up these accusations.
I demand that Wolf, and the editors and publishers of Wired, restate their charges as a testable bill of particulars - open to the judgment of its readership - regarding my inability to delve, "ignorance of advanced software," lack of technical knowledge, and absurd notions; insofar as they may have been material to the clarity, lucidity, grounding, and validity of my work, ideas, and predictions in the '60s and '70s; specifically identifying any technical errors, deficiencies, exaggerations, lacunas, false assumptions, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, shortcomings, fantasies, hallucinations, and absurd notions as they may be able to exhume, anywhere in my designs, predictions, published articles, or recorded speeches; whether leading me to think the wrong thing, or the right thing by mistake, as is so quaintly averred; so that such defects may be subject to public verification or disproof; so that we can settle clearly whether my ideas were free-floating delirium or sound conjecture; whether my continual pursuit of hypermedia represented a "fantasy" of "ignorance" or a clear deliberate search among possibilities and alternatives to obstruct my media designs; and whether I was right for some wrong reasons or whether I was right, period; so that the degree of damage from these remarkable corkscrew accusations can be properly assessed.
Wolf calls the general idea that we need freedom and availability of information to avoid disaster a "very hackerish assumption." Perhaps. But it is an ideal I believe in, bound up with the ideals I learned from the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically, that ideal seemed to be what Wired stood for. Wolf's piece is a perfect example of such a disaster. Wolf himself is indeed an innovator in electronic media. By combining the word processor and the poison pen, he has created a new electronic literary genre all his own. But to quote him once more, "In books, television, and radio, the truth is a slave to a good story, and convincing lies are remembered, while dry, factual refutations are forgotten." Indeed. Well, I say let us remember properly. That is the Xanadu ideal.
Theodor Holm Nelson
Project Xanadu
It should also be pointed out this response is from 1995, and I sort of started writing a half-hearted response but that's just dancing on somebody's grave at this point.
As to the attribution; noted -- thanks.