SO GOOD. "If you dislike the chaotic appearance of dynamic force layout, consider using fisheye distortion instead."

i can relate to the way this is written

Design of causal diagrams: Barr art chart, Lombardi diagrams, evolutionary trees, Feynman diagrams, timelines

Power, authority and influence increasingly rely on information networks. Although networks seem to have abolished the old hierarchical structures, such structures are now recast through networking effects that reproduce the power divide between central actors and peripheral content. The race for visibility, both for ranking high in search engines and for accumulating influence in social networking platforms, produces an implicit behaviour of accumulation of links or 'friends'. The resulting ‘self-referentiality’ is aimed at confirming one's own position in the network and linking to actors who are always already central. The power gained by connections to and from these centres overrules most of peripheral connectivity and suppresses the potential for dissent within a sphere of influence. This social phenomenon directly accounts for the creation of new public spheres of a global order, which include the production of borders between these spheres.
Exodus is the compound name for a 'research engine' into algorithms and visual strategies for searching the internet, revealing the structural properties of web content and its inherent distribution of influence. Exodus promotes bridging behaviour across the web's new borders of power.

Wanted to see a meta-timeline of Wikipedia timelines...so I made one today! (Still some text encoding to fix, etc.)

Just for kicks. Themes: semantic web (e.g. linked data, conversational interfaces — though these are considered to be web 4.0 by some?), metaverse (a.k.a. living in the ether/augmented reality), brain-computer interfaces(!)

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested,” writes Lanier in his book. “What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”

The issue isn’t one of taste. “I want to define a line,” said Lanier, “between subjective judgment of what future generations might like or care about, and just this basic functioning mechanism of civilization and culture. If it’s the case that future generations don’t like things the length of books, and prefer things that have a graph structure and are made of little pieces, then my hope is that whatever they do with that is done well. But what I think is crucial for it to be sustainable, and to be more than a single generation’s fling before the collapse of civilization, is that whatever they do respects the integrity of each personal point of view and grants the idea of personhood with an almost mystical stature.”