Literary Machines Book Chapter 2: Proposal for a universal electronic publishing system and archive
It’s odd that I started reading Ted Nelson’s book Literary Machines after coming up with a loosely held (so loose it’s not yet written down) manifesto for a local-first, userless web. That’s where things are at though. The book is out of print. I’m reading a PDF version that I downloaded from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/literarymachines00nels .
These quotes (and probably some commentary) from chapter two are following from the notes related to chapter 0 and 1 (Hypertext) that are here: notes / Literary Machines (book) .
Civilization … has to do not with things
but with the invisible ties
that join one thing to another.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For details about typing the letter “e” with the acute accent (é), see notes / Typing HTML entities in markdown documents.
For details about how I got the newlines to appear in the blockquote when it’s rendered as HTML, see notes / Forcing a linebreak to appear in HTML that’s rendered from Hugo markdown.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy
The question which divides us is whether it is
crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.Neils Borh
quoted in Kenneth Brower,
The Starship and the Canoe p. 46