Silicon Tanks: Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson is a man who saw the future of the internet long before it appeared. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," which formed the basis of the World Wide Web. But the internet we use today is merely a pale and distorted shadow of the philosopher's original vision.

Nelson dreamed of a decentralized universe of knowledge, but received a centralized network with broken links and plagiarism. In the new episode of "Silicon Tanks," ForkLog figured out why the ideas of the American visionary are more relevant today than ever.

Who is Ted Nelson?

Theodor Holm Nelson is not just a pioneer in IT. He is a philosopher and sociologist who viewed computers not as calculators, but as tools for expanding human intelligence and culture.

The future philosopher was born in 1937 to actress Celeste Holm and director Ralph Nelson. Nelson's childhood was spent behind the scenes of Hollywood and Broadway, which, according to him, helped him see the world as a complex system of interconnected stories and settings.

In 1960, when computers occupied entire rooms and worked with punch cards, he was already thinking about a global information network for everyone.

Nelson was not a programmer in the classical sense. He was an architect of ideas. His main goal was to create a system that would organically reflect the non-linearity of human thought. After all, we do not think in order, from 'A' to 'Z': our thoughts jump around, create associations, and return to old ideas. Nelson wanted computers to work in the same way.

It was from this philosophy that the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" were born. For Nelson, it was not just the opportunity to click on a blue link. It was a way to connect all of world literature, science, and art into a single, ever-expanding web of knowledge.

Xanadu Project: the internet we lost

Nelson's ideas were embodied in the Xanadu project — his magnum opus. It was not just a system, but an entire philosophy, a global repository of all written information of humanity. Xanadu was meant to be a unified network where each document was linked to others. The project was announced in 1960, long before the emergence of ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern internet.

Technically and ideologically, Xanadu was the complete opposite of what the World Wide Web (World Wide Web, WWW) of Tim Berners-Lee has become.

Key Principles of Xanadu

In the modern internet, a link is a one-way street. Document A can refer to B, but the latter "does not know" about it. If the owner of B deletes it or changes the address, the link in A will become broken. This is the main reason for the erosion of information on the web.

In Xanadu, all links were bidirectional and unbreakable. If A referred to B, then B automatically referred to A. It was impossible to delete or move a document without leaving a trace. The system ensured that no link would ever break. This maintained the integrity and preservation of context.

Transclusion (transclusion) is one of Nelson's most revolutionary ideas. Instead of copying and pasting a quote from one document to another, Xanadu allowed users to "include" the original fragment directly. The user saw the quote as part of the new text, but in reality, it was a "live" fragment of the original, loaded from the source.

This solved several problems at once. Firstly, plagiarism was eliminated. It became impossible to pass off someone else's text as your own, as it always remained linked to the author. Secondly, the context was preserved. The user could at any moment refer to the full original quote and see in what context it was used. Thirdly, if the original author made edits, they were automatically reflected in all documents where the transclusion was used.

Permanent versioning - every document in Xanadu had a complete and unchangeable history of all its versions. It was impossible to delete anything irretrievably. The system stored every change, allowing for comparisons between different states of the document and tracking its evolution. In essence, this resembles version control systems like Git or even the principles of blockchain, where each new entry remains in history forever.

Nelson developed a system that automatically rewarded authors. Every time someone viewed a document or a fragment of it through transclusion, a tiny fraction of a cent ( micropayment ) was automatically sent to the content owner's account. It was an elegant business model embedded in the architecture of the network itself. It encouraged citation and the use of others' works, making the process profitable for all participants.

Why does Nelson criticize the modern web?

When the World Wide Web created by Berners-Lee appeared in 1990, it quickly gained popularity due to its simplicity. But for Nelson, such simplicity was detrimental. He calls HTML "hypertext for dummies," which distorted his original concept.

Nelson's main complaints about the WWW:

• one-sided links create chaos and dead pages (404);
• The absence of transclusion has led to a culture of copy-pasting, copyright infringement, and a loss of connection with the original source;
• The advertising model instead of micropayments turned users into products, not customers;
• Web pages mimic paper documents, although the digital space allows for the creation of much more complex and interconnected structures.

"HTML is exactly what we fought against: constantly breaking links, quotes without attribution, lack of version control and copyright management," wrote Nelson in the book Literary Machines (1980).

Nelson's Legacy in 2025: from Web3 to NFT

Nelson's ideas, which seemed too complex and utopian in the 20th century, are experiencing a renaissance today. The concepts underlying Xanadu are remarkably resonant with the principles of decentralized technologies:

• immutability and transparent transaction history in the blockchain is the realization of Nelson's dream of a system where information cannot be secretly altered or deleted;
• Non-fungible tokens solve the problem of proving ownership of a digital object — this is a step towards the idea of transclusion, where the author retains control over the work;
• smart contracts and royalties — automatic reward payments to authors upon the resale of NFTs — a direct embodiment of the Xanadu micropayment system.

What is the result?

Nelson is not just the inventor of the term "hypertext." He is a visionary who saw the potential and risks of the digital world long before it became widespread.

His project Xanadu was unable to compete with the simple and pragmatic WWW, but turned out to be the intellectual foundation for the next generation of the internet.

Perhaps the war for the future of the network is not yet over, and the principles of Xanadu — integrity, context, ownership, and fairness — will still find their embodiment in the next generation of the internet.