The Internet is a living collective portrait of humanity.

We can see on the Internet who we are and even how we get here, and paying a little bit more of attention, we can also see through the Internet the vast potential we have as a species. This is because the Internet is not only a product resulting from our past actions, but also guides us and provides the necessary opportunities for our future behavior to emerge.

Technology and society cannot be understood separately. They both constantly influence each other, co-evolving together as a whole.

As John M. Culkin said when presenting Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

We need complex technology to cope with complexity.

One way to organize and categorize the human past is by using the breakthroughs in technology as historical landmarks. According to this approach, our present, the moment we are living now fits in what we call the information age, also known as the computer age, the digital age or the internet age. Choose your favorite label, all ages make reference to the same story. Computers represented a big leap in how humans store, retrieve, manipulate and transmit information, and then the Internet extended the power of computers and transformed us into a digital society.

I agree with the rationale behind the guiding philosophy of Douglas Engelbart in order to face the increasing complexity of the world’s problems. It says that “any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions”.

As humans, we expand our abilities by developing new technologies, and Engelbart envisioned back in 1950 that “computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability”.

Now, 70 years later, computers are an integral part of our daily lives and we are in the process of connecting the entire planet to the same information exchange network.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

The Internet is not the same as the Web.

It is very common to use the terms of the Internet and the Web as synonyms without caring too much about the differences or the exact meaning. Depending on the context it’s not a big deal, but because with this text I want you to pay attention particularly to one of them, the Web, I am going to go over the main differences really fast to be sure we are in the same page before we explore the topic further.

The Internet is infrastructure, more specifically, information infrastructure. The Web is a system running on top of this infrastructure, like the email, for example.
We use the Internet with the objective to improve communication between humans and we use the Web as a non-physical place where we actually meet to communicate and coordinate with others.
The Internet links physical devices worldwide, the Web connects pieces of information with other pieces of information.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

We browse the Web, jumping from page to page using links as portals.

All the pieces of information scattered across the Web are interconnected through links. From static web pages with links in the form of blue underlined words that change the cursor of your mouse to a tiny hand when you roll over them, into dynamic pages with links of all imaginable forms and flavors.

Both the content and the use we have made of the World Wide Web have changed very quickly, but the underlying design remains the same, more than 30 years after the official date of its invention.

On a macro scale, looking at human evolution, the Web and the technologies that provided the foundations for the Web to exist are in their infancy, or as Jaron Lanier likes to put it out, “we are toddlers”. I coincide with Lanier’s line of thought. There is plenty of room to grow and improve what we know as the Web, as we are starting to understand what becoming a digital society means and implies.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

Links are pointers, not connectors. Links are unidirectional by design.

It’s easy to describe the Web as pieces of information connected to other pieces of information through links, but we have to be careful understanding well what “links” really are in this context because it can change completely our perception of the Web.

We use the word link as a shorter version of “hyperlink”. The “hyperlink” term was coined around 1965 by Ted Nelson to describe the mechanism used to connect hypertext documents. The behavior for the hyperlink in the moment of its conception was to connect pieces of information in such a way that the user could explore both ends of the link equally.

The concepts of hypertext and hyperlink inspired many initiatives, and some of them incorporated the terms into their projects, including the World Wide Web. But here comes the important part.

How the web is using the term “hyperlink” is not how it was initially defined. The Web incorporated the link and its apparent meaning, but not the functionality that gave birth to the name of the term itself, world-wide-spreading a misleading concept. Links on the Web behave as pointers, one-way jumps, not real connectors.

You can put a link on your page that points to my page and people visiting your page, because of that link, are provided with an opportunity of visiting my page too. But people visiting my page, can not reach yours from mine if I don’t put a link on my page pointing at your page.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

True connections on the web require extra effort.

Anyone who has experienced the Web is familiar with the behavior of the links.

If we imagine the Web as a vast ocean full of islands that represent webpages, the behavior of the links would be very similar to the operation of a catapult. We move around this imaginary world of islands of information, jumping from one to another, using catapults as one-way tickets to the next destination.

The browser gives us the option to point a catapult back to the island we visited previously, and we can pact with other islands to set catapults pointing each other to create a network that allows us to travel in both directions. But this scenario is not the norm, because the easiest-to-implement catapult design for the link does not include two-way communication by default, meaning that if we want something that resembles the behavior of a bridge but using catapults, we need to put some extra energy to make it happen.

A real-world example to illustrate how this additional effort is required in the current paradigm of the Web can be found on the concept of a backlink, “a link on someone else’s website that sends the reader to your site”, and the billion-dollar industry created along with it.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

Platforms manage connections for you. Some of these platforms rule the world today.

Suppose we both have a personal webpage and we want it to show that we are friends. In my page I make reference to yours and you do the same towards mine. We want to establish a connection that explains publicly our friendship relationship.

To keep this connection active and up to date on our respective sites, some degree of maintenance is necessary. If we don’t want to do it ourselves, a platform could take over. From social networks to search engines, online marketplaces and everything in between.

I need this item, maybe I’ll buy it later. Store it in my wishlist. Share it with my friends. Send a DM. Message read but not replied. Block this user. Follow this other one. Like this photo. Tag this photo. I like cats too, join this group. Search for it. Show me the newsfeed of this account. Watch this video. Write a comment. Upvote this other comment. Click that ad. Maybe I need this item too.

All types of platforms for all types of connections.

What these platforms offer, most of the time for free, is maintenance for your connections and the opportunity to create new ones when using their service.

Apparently, the deal seems all advantages for the user and it is undeniable that many of these platforms really contribute to improve our daily lives. But we must understand and be aware that by delegating the responsibility in the management of our connections we are losing control over them. From the individual perspective, the control granted is almost imperceptible, but at the scale that these companies operate, the accumulated control is easily translated into an immense source of power.

More users means potential for more connections. To more connections, more power. The more power, the more capability to influence society, for better or for worse.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

Platforms need your attention because they want you to create more connections to manage.

An established strategy in this industry consists in (1) attract people by promoting the advantages and the benefits of the service (2) transform people into users by convincing them to allow the platform to manage their connections (3) seduce users to create as much connections inside the platform as possible until the point that the mere idea of changing to another platform is inconceivable, because the work that implies exporting all the connections is overwhelming or simply because there is fear of losing them, what in summary, can be described in this one sentence: turn users into prisoners by kidnapping their connections.

What is happening is similar to the following situation, and is not exclusive to tech platforms.

Imagine. You are invited to join a community, they give you a place to stay and all the tools and resources you need to decorate and fill your new house so as to make yourself comfortable. They also throw parties and organize a wide variety of activities to create bonds within the community. But the moment you want to move to another community and you ask for the way out, the responses are evasive or the procedure is extremely inconvenient. Moving all the things you built here by yourself is exhausting, so it’s easier to stay or leave everything behind.

Independently of the particularities in the strategy used by each platform, what all of them need at the end in order to survive is that you use their service. If you don’t know them yet, they have to introduce themselves first. If you already have a relationship with them, they will encourage you to keep using them. In both cases, they need your attention to start the pertinent discourse.

This is why we can say we are living in an attention-based economy.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

The Web established the rules for a game of inequality that platforms learned to master.

Browsing the Web, our journey looks more like a guided tour than a solo trip. The site we are visiting chooses and provides us with the opportunities for our next jump. Once on the new website, the same dynamic repeats again. Each webpage then, can be perceived as a filter of reality, as a unique and limited perspective about a specific topic. The act of deciding which links go in a page implies leaving other links out of it, and for those lucky links that passed the selection process, a different level of relevance is attributed to them, depending on their position in the page, their format and their behavior.

It is important to understand the implications of being a big player in the ecosystem of the Web, the responsibility this platforms have at managing the connections between pieces of information and the power that comes with them, but I don’t want to focus your attention and my energy on this now.

I want you to realize that we are building, regardless of the size or the intention, on top of a a system that treats us, by default, as tourists instead of travelers, a system that has been designed in a way that limits and conditions our online experience.

Particularly, a seemingly subtle design decision that created inequality of power under the idea of “linking”, misinterpreting or underestimating the original ideas from the hyperlink concept, moving us away from the opportunity to explore human connection in ways we can not fully understand yet.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

Unidirectionality of links is a major flaw in the design of the Web.

As cybernetics would say, it is time to steer the ship, because “if you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” (Lao Tzu). It is time to iterate the Web, and therefore, our relationship with it.

The very inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, thinks the same. His proposal emphasizes and focuses on the importance of updating the link as we know it now. Seems that maybe it is time to truly interconnect all the pieces of information that compose the Web.

It is impossible to know with certainty what will happen when we expose a new creation to the world, how it will behave, what the consequences will be. From the present, we can only imagine and speculate, and good or bad intentions may or may not influence the final result. The only certainty we have about the future is that it is uncertain.

This does not exempt us from the responsibility of our actions. There will always be bad actors trying to exploit the system for a personal benefit, but with the appropriate access to resources and information, we can cooperate not only to mitigate the negative effects but also to provide the necessary environment for collective development.

The Web has matured. Its users also did it and the new generations have grown up with the Web as an integral part of their reality. We invented new technologies, improved old ones and have systems and tools at our disposal that we didn’t have before.

It is time to review the past, what happened and what did not, learn from all the accumulated experience and outline a plan that allows us to act differently if we really want to overcome the urgencies of the present while working collectively for a long-lasting positive impact for our society and for the rest of the ecosystem.

Other pages linking to this page:
The Hyperlink Delusion

The Hyperlink Delusion

About

This website is an experiment, a sandbox where I can play with my thoughts and export them to the world.

Although the website can be accessed from any device, the design of the experience is primarily intended for the desktop, and optimized for my personal use. It plays with explicit bidirectional links between internal pages and a generous preview, which added to the keyboard navigation using the browser shortcuts, allows me a very fast interaction.

The content is stored in Markdown files, the format I use to take notes, not only for practical reasons such as centralizing the content in one place or standardizing the formats to work with, but as an exercise to consolidate my note-taking system as well as to test it as a system to communicate and share ideas with others effectively.

The website is built from a template, and the code is public, but it’s a mess. Write me if you want to comment anything.

The design is influenced by the template itself, and highly inspired by Ted Nelson’s ideas and Andy Matuschak’s notes, as well as many other sources I cannot recall, and therefore, accredit.

Introduction

The design of the Web

Consequences

Conclusion

This website is an experiment, a sandbox where I can play with my thoughts and export them to the world.