love reblogs that point me in new directions. internet at its best.

"Oh, Ted Nelson. You are forever the love child of Gary Gygax and Don Quixote.

One day, I hope to have a museum of utopian visions of computer systems. It will feature Nelson’s Xanadu, Engelbart’s NLS (and Hyperscope), Donald Bitzer’s PLATO, and Jef Raskin’s Canon Cat and Archy.

Beautiful, doomed visions of what might have been, all of them."

the historical difficulty of utopianism is precisely that it doesn’t have a messiah, or a similarly overarching, emotionally powerful actor. So that the tension between utopianism and messianism is frequently to the unfair advantage of the messianic. I believe more and more that if we can have utopian movements we’ll do better than if we have messianic movements.