Xanadu was the home and base for comic book character Mandrake the Magician. It was Kublai Khan’s capital in the Mongol empire. Coleridge wrote of it as a paradise of sorts.
For Netopia, however, a different vision of Xanadu is more interesting. What if the problems we struggle with in today’s internet could have been avoided? No fake news. No trolling. No content theft. No flame wars. No phishing. Sound to good to be true? Maybe it is but bear with me.
Ted Nelson (b 1937) is a digital pioneer from the early days of electronic communication. He coined the term hypertext (you know… clickable links – the core of how we navigate the internet). And he designed a system for how information could be accessed and organized with this concept. The name? You guessed it: Xanadu
In the Xanadu project, the hypertext is guided by 17 rules – such as:
- 3 Each user is securely and uniquely identified (=no trolls)
- 9 Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document. (=no copyright theft)
- 10 Every document is uniquely and securely identified (= no unauthorized copies, no fake news)
… not only did Ted Nelson anticipate many of the problem’s with today’s internet, he also worked solutions to the into the Xanadu design.
But the real game-changer is rule number 7:
Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
Many of the ideas from Xanadu were realised on a grander scale as the World Wide Web. But www-links are one-way only! Ted Nelson’s comment:
HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT– ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.
Netopia’s favourite thinker Jaron Lanier explains (from Who Owns the Future [2013]):
It’s a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn’t have vaster implications for culture and the economy
Maybe in a parallel universe, Xanadu is what World Wide Web is in ours. Or maybe Xanadu was just too complex and simpler systems prevailed. Regardless, when somebody pretends the problems of today’s internet are complete surprises or inevitable side effects of technology – remember that Ted Nelson predicted them all in the 1960s. Perhaps some could use a reminder?
