
Old ideas come back as researchers envision a more structured Web (2015) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-future-of-the-web-is-100-years-old
======
biastoact
An old idea I’d love to see come back would be the mashup. There was a moment
where it appeared possible that all the ‘next big things’ would be built using
a mix of services. Gmail mixed with Facebook chat mixed with RSS feeds all
overlayed on a Yahoo Map with contextual YouTube pops. In the end all we
really got were Google Maps next to physical addresses on websites, social
share buttons, and Facebook Logins. (I know there are more but wide adoption
is scant).

It would be killer to see a collection of micro-mashable services emerge to
expose data, manipulation, visualization, sharing and interactivity (and
probably billing).

It should, for example, take a day to build a page that lets you analyze real
estate deals based on proximity to McDonalds locations, crime events, R v D
political donations, and mentions (or lack of mentions) of Kanye West by local
Social Media users.

By the way, I’m not saying this is a good idea, it is probably a bad idea. I’m
just saying ideas like this should be almost as easy to hack together as a
formatted blog post.

~~~
ozten
Free APIs fueled the Mashup revolution. The dried up or became restricted as
businesses deprecated them and moved towards eyeballs and ads.

~~~
jacquesm
Moved back to.

------
8bitsrule
Otlet's full story is an interesting one.

Here are couple of major pieces by Alex Wright:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/health/17iht-17mund.13760...](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/health/17iht-17mund.13760031.html)
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-
se...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-search-of-
the-proto-memex/371385/)

and a -long, detailed- look at the plans for the Mundaneum / Palais Mondial /
Mondotheque: [http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/The_Smart_City_-
_Ci...](http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/The_Smart_City_-
_City_of_Knowledge)

------
pdfernhout
One error in the article: the name Xanadu came from "The Skills of Xanadu"
sci-fi story by Theodore Sturgeon in 1956 about a world with nanotech-based
wearable networked mind-interfacing computers for sharing knowledge, skills,
and more.

I asked Ted Nelson in person about this at IBM Research around 2000 when he
came to gave a talk. He thanked me for reminding him of the exact name of the
story which he said he had been trying to recall.
[https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08](https://archive.org/details/pra-
BB3830.08)
[https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1956-07](https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1956-07)

That "Skills of Xanadu" story seems to have inspired many people in different
ways even if they had forgotten it. It turned out it inspired a supervisor at
IBM Research to go into materials science research (the nanotech aspect). He
had not consciously remembered reading that story until I reminded him of it.

That said, Theodore Sturgeon himself probably took the name from Coleridge’s
poem.

In answer to the question posed at the end of the Nautilus article: "Should
the web remain free, flat, and open? Or would a more controlled and curated
environment lead, paradoxically, to greater intellectual freedom?", I like
Manuel De Landa's insight on meshworks and hierarchies when thinking about
seemingly either/or design issues between fire/chaos/anarchy and
ice/order/hierarchy.

From the conclusion of De Landa's essay "Meshwork, Hierarchy, and Interfaces":
[http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm](http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm)
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and
meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of
electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet,
may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms
of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the
services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand,
the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better
state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by
former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the
lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the
level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not
only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still
would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they
may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of
hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for
certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying
decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open
and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and
mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To
paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to
save us."

Other perspectives on how life exists at the interface between chaos and order
by Patrick Grim and Hans Moravec (both people I've had the pleasure of hanging
out with and learning from):

Patrick Grim:
[http://www.pgrim.org/articles/vitanew23.pdf](http://www.pgrim.org/articles/vitanew23.pdf)

"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds" (with Trina
Kokalis, Ali Tafti, and Nicholas Kilb), World Futures: The Journal of General
Evolution 56 (2000), 179-197.

"Boom and Bust: Environmental Variability and the Emergence of Communication"
(with Trina Kokalis) Research Report #04-01, Group for Logic and Formal
Semantics, SUNY at Stony Brook.

As Grim et al essentially points out, if things are very ordered, there is no
point in communicating because nothing is unknown. If things are very
disordered, there is no point in communicating because things change too fast
for communications to be useful. It is in the middle ground between order and
chaos where communication has the most value -- where things are indeed
changing, but are changing slowly enough so that communicating about them can
be of value.

Hans Moravec:
[http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...](http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html)
"No complete theory yet explains our existence and experiences, but there are
hints. Tiny universes simulated in today's computers are often characterized
by adjustable rules governing the interaction of neighboring regions. If the
interactions are made very weak, the simulations quickly freeze to bland
uniformity; if they are very strong, the simulated space may seethe intensely
in a chaotic boil. Between the extremes is a narrow ``edge of chaos'' with
enough action to form interesting structures, and enough peace to let them
persist and interact. Often such borderline universes can contain structures
that use stored information to construct other things, including perfect or
imperfect copies of themselves, thus supporting Darwinian evolution of
complexity. If physics itself offers a spectrum of interaction intensities, it
is no surprise that we find ourselves operating at the liquid boundary of
chaos, for we could not function, nor have evolved, in motionless ice nor
formless fire."

I wrote something similar to an "Advocates and Skeptics" mailing list in 2006
(inspired by my graduate studies in Ecology&Evolution -- including hanging out
with and learning from Larry Slobodkin and Lev Ginzburg) and quoted here:
[https://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-
and-P...](https://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-
Virgle.html) ".. I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we
should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is
only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more
the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home
office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as
part of a forest. Still, I try to see _both_ the peaceful majesty of the trees
and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which
are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as
big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive
resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely
someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen
silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds
they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or
insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and
yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert
sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I
try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of
plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from
eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each
bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a
marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the
awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational
structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so
well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I
can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping
through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of
creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually _really_ see
none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice
time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I
must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical
delusion of [my] consciousness". :-)"

My wife has her own "Confluence Framework" take on all this too:
[http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/p/confluence-
sensemaking-...](http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/p/confluence-sensemaking-
framework.html)

No doubt other have though similar things. I'm wondering how far back that
idea goes of life (or thought) existing at the boundary between order and
chaos? Certainly it is present in the Yin/Yang ideas of Chinese Philosophy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang)

And my wife lists over twenty frameworks at the end of her Confluence
Framework essay.

So given all that, it is no surprise that we may have to think about good
design for the internet as embracing all of meshwork, hierarchy, and
interfaces as Manuel De Landa's essay suggests.

