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"Amazingly, Herzog concludes that Ted is the only sane person in the computer field." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY]

At the time Ted conceived his visionary ideas, the magazines were full of pictures of guys in suits standing in front of secretaries typing into screenless hardware, and business machines with racks of IBM tape-reels. There was little non-corporate networking (except for the beginnings of PLATO), and only dreamers talked of making all information available to everyone. Wikipedia is a kludge by comparison.

My read was similar, I also couldn’t get through Lo and Behold which set off bullshit alarms [0] and just gave me the impression of confidence being used in the place of actual explanation.

It feels like an emperor has no clothes situation. For some reason people think it signals high status or intellectualism to like Herzog so they say they do.

I haven’t watched all of his movies so this may be unfairly harsh, but that was my initial impression.

Portal podcast also came across that way to me. First interview with Thiel was interesting, but I stopped somewhere after the next couple.

Too much “the media doesn’t want us to talk about this” and “the Clintons are a globalist conspiracy against the people”.

If you have real arguments then make them.

Don’t just confidently state things as fact without backing them up.

Thankfully when Sam Harris was on he at least pushed back on some of the bullshit.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Bqx6li5dbEY

⬐ baryphonic

Okay, I'm curious: why did Ted Nelson set off the BS-meter in Lo and Behold?

Project Xanadu may have been the longest vaporware project in history, but Nelson himself is well-respected by many others, some of whom are near-universally respected (e.g. Alan Kay and Woz).

⬐ fossuser

I saw the documentary on Netflix and was excited that it might be about Licklider and that part of computing history which I had read some about.

I have a natural aversion when people talk about things in kind of vague mystical ways (the fingers running through the water), or when they confidently state something without stating why (complaining that copy/paste was some disaster to humanity, but not actually saying or explaining anything about it).

I like when documentaries or experts love their topic and revel in breaking it down and explaining it clearly. Some of the smartest people I know are also the first to help explain a complicated topic they're interested in to a curious lay person.

The documentary did the opposite for me, taking an interesting topic and using confusing non-explanations to make it seems more confusing than it is.

This really bothers me because it makes the curious person think it's beyond their understanding, when usually it's the person explaining that's just making it hard to understand. It felt like the director was pushing more complexity because it made it seem more 'magical', but magic is the opposite of clarity.

This could be unfairly uncharitable since it's only a short clip (and I don't know much about Ted Nelson - though I have read a lot about and respect Kay and Woz), but my impression from this was negative.

⬐ baryphonic

I enjoyed the film, but it was not what I expected going in. (To be honest, the Ted Nelson scene is one of the few I remember from the movie. Though I do recall he wandered around the National Radio Quiet Zone to meet some eccentric folks, and he also went to the room at UCLA where one of the first ARPANET messages was sent to SRI.)

I would ultimately like to see a well-made, intelligently crafted documentary (or even documentary mini-series) about the actual creation of the Internet that does emphasize that it's not some arcane subject that only wizards can understand (though it should portray the people who invented this stuff ex nihilo as the geniuses that they are).

I do agree with Ted about copy-paste though. ;)

Thanks for sharing!

Ted Nelson who coined the term _hypertext_ in _1963_ claimed in Werner Herzog’s documentary “Lo and Behold” that his original idea for “copy and paste” would always link back to the original. This article below based on the Herzog interview has more context but not the exact _quote_ (context pun intended) that I remember from the documentary.

Full interview of Ted Nelson from “Lo and Behold”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY

> Nelson, who was featured in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Lo and Behold, believes that instead of the existing formats we use online, where text often mirrors the constraints of paper, we should have a system of two-way links that would allow readers to see the context of any quotation...

> There are a few offline examples, such as the Talmud and the Rosetta Stone, where text is read side-by-side. Nelson believes this is how online documents should be constructed.

> “As far as I’m concerned, this is the way literature should develop,” he says. “I don’t consider this technology, I think it’s literature. Being able to see visible connections between pages seems to me absolutely fundamental.”

> Nelsons says this setup would be the ideal format for reading annotations, additional details, correspondence, and disagreements: “It’s essentially a different genre of writing.”

> As Nelson sees it, our current use of online documents is very limiting. He’s particularly disturbed by how we use the words cut and paste. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, cut came to mean “hide this piece that I’ve just marked in an invisible place,” and paste became “plug whatever’s in this invisible place to where I’m pointing.”

> “To me that was an outrage because no one has yet got a decent re-arrangement system that allows you to see the all the parts of the arrangement as you’re writing,” Nelson says. “Those words meant something entirely different until 1984.

> Balzac, the French novelist, carried a razor blade around his neck for cutting up his manuscript. Tolstoy would cut up his manuscripts and leave all the pieces around the floor. This is true cut-and-paste, where you’re re-arranging on a large scale and able to see the relationships between parts.”

> Ironically, Nelson is friends with Larry Tesler—the man responsible for our modern use of cut and paste—but still calls their mislabeling “a crime against humanity.”

https://qz.com/778747/an-early-internet-pioneer-says-the-con...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

I suspect this comment is aimed at segments like this one with Ted Nelson of Hypertext fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY

On first viewing, I too felt it was incomprehensible wordsoup in some sense - but upon learning more about Nelson and the history and context around which his ideas were developed, I've grown to find this interview almost magical.

Here is an interview in which Ted Nelson explains his vision to Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY The interview is included in 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' documentary. The whole documentary is rather critical of the impact the Internet revolution had on our society, but Herzog seemed to really admire Ted Nelson's alternative vision for the global network.

There's someone who definitely spent a lot of time on this, definitely check out Ted Nelson's ZigZag structure: http://xanadu.com/zigzag/

It is exactly that, an attempt to structure data in a similar way that our thoughts are formed. I believe it was this video where he shortly explained that concept; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY

Although it might be a different video since Ted Nelson is all over the place with his documents and videos.