“Another interesting moment happened around 91ish or so when Tim Berners-Lee came out with the idea for HTML on the web and all this and what was striking about this is that the first time I saw it and anybody I knew saw they said, “wait a second, this is weird because it doesn’t have the backlinks, it’s like one directional, you can link to something but it doesn’t know it was linked to”. And everybody knew that the whole point of hypermedia was the context, because the context is where meaning comes from, without context it’s just bits, right?”

Jaron Lanier’s tribute to Ted Nelson at the “Intertwingled” conference. (14:50)