The tree is a natural shape for thoughts. Books lie: human thoughts are not linear; thoughts are elaborative, tangential, qualifying, contradictory -- in short: a mess. Rather than a defect, this is the thought itself.
Thoughts were never presented this way due to practical constraints: you need a physical format that makes them economical. Even when thoughts were shaped like a palace, you couldn't build a palace to store them. They had to be flattened down into the shape of a wooden sheet.
Sheets of silicon easily contain a palace.
rvmark tries to bring hypertext to a natural limit HTML didn't reach: not a space of linked pages, a space of linked sentences.
Every node has a permalink; you can link to a single thought five or a hundred levels deep. It becomes the root of the tree when someone follows that link. No node is intrinsically privileged over any other node, any more than a HTML page is intrinsically privileged over any other page.
Embeds enable rvmark documents to be recursive: nodes can be their own ancestors and their own descendants.
Where trees signify what's essential and inessential, primary and dependent, rvmark sublates this implicit hierarchy. What's essential and what's inessential is always local to the immediate context. In a sense, a point can turn out to be inessential to itself.
But rvmark is also recursive in another sense. Every node is again a root of its own subtree. Whether a node is near the surface or buried deep, stored locally or on a remote server, it will be displayed the same.
In rvmark, the software does not curate the information. There are no statistical models predicting what the reader really wants, nor are there upvotes to aggregate community preferences. The author has full control over the structure. The reader has full control over how they navigate it.
The tree is an explorable space with a definite shape. We trust that users can map this space out themselves.
An author can hamper a user's navigation, but they can never constrain ability to navigate what the author has presented. Nor can a reader's choices constrain the author's ability to expose their work to those choices. If the author chooses to misdirect the reader or the reader chooses to close the application, that's the fulfillment of those promises, not a constraint of them. The only constraint is a medium that attempts to outsmart. rvmark will not do that.
There is a deeper conflict between user and author. Additional user affordances can limit an author's ability to design a text-space how they want it. I mean here quality-of-life improvements, such as the ability to see where a node lives in the hierarchy, where it has been transcluded, or a search functionality that allows you to fast-travel through the corpus.
The answer rvmark strives for is to make affordances available, but to make them illicit. Nothing is hidden; users are free to download rvmark files and traverse them. But it goes further than open-sourcing: the system makes no effort to hide developer affordances from the user. Canonical paths of nodes are visible in the URI fragment of permalinks; stack variables are visible in the querystring. The system is designed to make them implicitly available, maintaining the author's designed space as path of least resistance.
I find it funny that Gertrude Stein remarks this about her old family home. My family home is down the street from where I live now, and it no longer exists, was demolished over a decade ago. The lot stands shamefully empty.
Even though, when I break into the garden, I can only with difficulty make out the little forest paths I used to race down as a child, in between the overgrown bushes the there persists.
Though hyperlinks and cross-origin transclusion, rvmark gives you a way to structure the internet around yourself. It's a unique entry-point. It organizes what's important and what's unimportant. It displays what the exact relationships are between things. You can recreate the world in your own image.
Elevating yourself to a creator deity is hubristic. But think about what it is to publish your world: you're not the only one who has divided heaven from earth.
There is a far-right ideology, usually presented as a joke, called anarcho-monarchism. I'd like to suggest an opposite: monarcho-anarchism.
rvmark establishes a multistability of meaning. I'd make a comparison to music. Think of a node as a note. It is impossible to hear whether a note is a tonic or a dominant. This in the same way the eye cannot determine whether that famous drawing used by Wittgenstein is a duck or a rabbit. Notes are like that, and nodes are also like that.
The point that meaning works this way is trite. The reality that someone on the other side of a 6 sees a 9, or that blind men touching an elephant in different inappropriate places think the animal to be different things, has been made over and over again. Let me say something relatively new.
Other than the pun, the reason I compare nodes to notes and not ducks (or rabbits) is modulation. A trained musical ear can not just hear the dominant and the tonic, it can hear the tonic becoming dominant, that is, it can hear the dominant-identity of the note becoming harmonically functional in service of the tonic-identity. And it can hear the opposite as well.
The ear knows that musical pieces, when they do this, usually will return to the original tonic. So also, the would-be root node that's been modulated into is now accessed through a different modality of thought. The user reads the text with the knowledge that they can walk back up the tree and see what it was all in service of.
Jung at some point talks about the puer aeternus, the eternal child who remains perfect because they remain indeterminate. They have infinite potential because they have not committed themselves to any purpose. This same observation was already made, naturally, by Hegel.
Der Mensch, insofern er wirklich sein will, muß dasein, und zu dem Ende muß er sich begrenzen. Wer gegen das Endliche zu ekel ist, der kommt zu gar keiner Wirklichkeit, sondern er verbleibt im Abstrakten und verglimmt in sich selbst. [Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic § 92]
It's no accident that the theoretician who identified Sein and Nichts would recognize immediately that a creature of reines Sein is really a creature of reines Nichts.
The human race, if I may be so quixotic, still remains in eternal puerility. The closest it came to overcoming this condition was in the early internet. The GeoCities page functioned, for the first time, as a pure self-constitution. You defined purposefully who you are and where you stand in relation to others who defined themselves.
To be a person, or rather, to be wirklich as a person, is to maintain a homepage.
This possibility is approached first from the perspective of Tolkien, who in some stray letter to his son complains about political authority, and -- in the way Hayek and Thatcher do about "Society" -- the reification of "State" and "Government." He prefers us to directly speak of the person holding authority: the king. "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) -- or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy."
Secondly, from the perspective of Hoppe, who styling himself an anarcho-capitalist, and advocating to privatize the state entirely, all the same prefers monarchy over democracy, thinking it's a more honest way of expressing power, with cleaner political-economic logic, ultimately better providing stable outcomes for the market calculations of individuals. He frames this in terms of time-preference, pointing out that a monarch, ruling for life and passing his kingdom by inheritance, has an interest in maintaining stable beneficial relationships for himself, whereas elected politicians have an interests in cashing out these relationships as quickly as possible. He is more-or-less a Hobbesian anarchist.
Thirdly, from Sorelian syndicalism, asserting the necessity of national mythology in anarchist agitation.
An objection to Tolkien would be simple: whether you say "the State" or "King Charles" you're reifying in both cases. The latter is more insidious because it feels more concrete. King Charles and Keir Starmer are not literally showing up to your house to take your fuel allowance away.
Even if you say they make the decision, this is false. Every person who tacitly goes along is also responsible.
This is Tolkien's point. From a naive liberal perspective, "I was simply following orders [of the state]" sounds plausible; "I was simply following orders [of Adolf Hitler]" does not.
Rather than Sorel-Tolkien-Hoppe, which all pull in separate directions, the defining triad of monarcho-anarchism would be Stirner-Norton-Baudrillard, who together pull in one direction. Stirner says we should all declare ourselves owners of the entire world, Norton actually did so, and Baudrillard, analysing Bataille, identifies this as the only way out of capitalist oppression.
Rather than human rights (a spook), let us have the divine right of kings (reasonable). We must be careful not to degrade into international law (unipolar, totalitarian), monarcho-anarchism requires a return to the old ideal of universal monarchy (multipolar, liberating).