Ted Nelson is a Mensch

- 4 minutes read - 771 words

In New York City, the Yiddish loanword mensch doesn’t just mean “man,” it means “a good person.” It means someone who does the right thing when nobody’s checking.

I think that Ted Nelson, coiner of the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in 1963, author of Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) clears that bar.

NB: I don’t know Nelson. So I’ll be making these observations based on public record about him. I’ll not be referring to him as “Ted Nelson” as I do “Sabrina Carpenter” as he has not endeavored to make himself the media product.

Cover photo: Ted Nelson presenting on Project Xanadu at The Tech Museum of Innovation, February 19, 2011. Photo by Daniel Gies, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Who Is Ted Nelson?

First, Nelson has labored to evangelize and visualize a hypertext document web. Falling somewhere between Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and Tim Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb, he had a different, and richer model of a web of interlinked documents. He’s spent six decades building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding again, Project Xanadu, his vision for a publishing system built on bidirectional links and transclusion (dynamic embedding of the contents of one text into another). Project Xanadu is the emergent space created by the interacting conversations between “XanaDocs” — Xanadu documents. Additionally, XanaDocs have their own dated snapshots. You might know this as “track changes” in Google Docs or “commit” from git. Thus you can “transclude” the bill of fare for a menu XanaDoc in your diary XanaDoc.

And on top of it all, the XanaDoc is a remedy against “fake news” or disinformation. Sources travel with their output. As sources are discredited, that healing passes through the system. As fact per se becomes part of an artifact, the expectation of veracity versus entertainment waxes.

The Paper Mind

The essential thing to understand about Xanadu, and about XanaDoc, is that Nelson fundamentally thinks in terms of paper.

In this, there’s something joyously (Papert and Nietzsche) child-like about Nelson’s approach.1 Imagine destructuring digital text, pasting the clippings to digital pasteboards and then remixing the paragraphs to create new things.

He’s been lent books that he’s physically processed into XanaDoc. And true to form: as a true mensch, of course, he writes a check for restitution to the lenders and gives a note of apology.

The Eulogy

Watching the Nelson videos, he’s not a woolly, “out there,” crazy academic type. He’s also not an “absent-minded professor.” And to whatever degree he maintains that Xanadu is The One Way, he’s far less polemical than many of the leaders behind the Free Software Foundation. Rightly, he would view such characterizations as slurs on his character. He’s complained to internet writers who have applied such a cliché to him.

Here’s my read.

He’s tender. He’s romantic. He’s got enough hippie in him to believe in the magic of candles and wine and Xanadu and he’s got enough East Coast WASP in him to believe that a good sportcoat is simply required, sometimes. And, to me, he offered a description of friendship, amicitia vera, of Douglas Engelbart that rivals Cicero. This elegy for Engelbart shows a profoundly caring soul.

If there’s any reason why you should chalk Silicon Valley up as a hellhole full of dysfunctional, emotionally stunted incels, this is it. Here you see a human being actually giving a true, heartfelt tribute to the passing of one of the true visionaries of computer culture, and the man-children in the audience are so alienated from their emotions that they’re literally giggling and snickering.

Their response reminds me of Hal from Infinite Jest:

Hal [a boy-genius] hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny

Watching other videos, Nelson speaks well and manages to hold his (self-described) hummingbird brain to quiescence well. He holds long speeches and is able to pull together thoughts from disparate disciplines and backgrounds nimbly.

Ultimately, I think that this must be part of what draws people into the mystery of Project Xanadu. In this sense, I suppose he’s working with the prophet’s toolkit. There’s something about the agility and the openness and the (perceived) warmth that draws you in. In addition, he could have done voice work, he’s got wonderful tone and excellent elocution.

Footnotes

  1. The child is the third of Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra — camel, then lion, then child — the stage past mere burden-bearing and past mere rebellion, where the spirit becomes capable of a “sacred Yes,” of play, of starting something new on its own terms. If we were in a XanaDoc, I could transclude that passage instead of paraphrasing it.