“In my view, a lot of the Silicon Valley world that’s arisen since the turn of the century has essentially created gigantic fortunes trying to reconstruct the backlinks that were lost. For instance, if there were two-way links and everything knew what was pointing at it, all you’d have to do is count up all those things and find where there are the most links and you have Google. The information would be right there and it would be public, but because all that was thrown away, Google had to scrape the whole internet or the whole web every night and calculate the backlinks that might have been there and count up where the most of them where in order to sell it to people as a service, to advertisers in this case. […] Facebook is another one. If you had two-way links you’d know who was interested in what you are doing, you’d meet them. […] If you look at the big Silicon Valley success stories they are essentially privatizing the gap between what Tim did and what Ted knew needed to be done from decades earlier and that particular gap filling has created the fastest biggest fortunes in history. Isn’t that astonishing?”

Jaron Lanier’s tribute to Ted Nelson at the “Intertwingled” conference. (17:57)