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. This is not a defect of thought, this web of connections is the thought itself.
Thoughts were never presented this way because of practical constraints: you need a physical format that makes thoughts 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.
If you use a sheet of silicon, new opportunities emerge.
rvmark tries to bring hypertext to a natural limit HTML didn't reach: 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 is always local to context. A point can 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.
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. It's impossible to know if a node is a root or a subnode; it is both.
The reason I compare nodes to notes and not ducks (or rabbits) is modulation. A trained ear can hear not just the dominant and the tonic, it can hear the dominant become a new tonic. The ear knows, when music does this, it will eventually return to the original tonic. Similarly, the node that's been modulated into is not experienced only as root, but also as subnode. It is thus 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.
In rvmark, the software does not curate information. There are no statistical models predicting what the reader wants, neither are there likes to aggregate community preference. 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 it themselves.
An author can hamper a user's navigation, but they can never constrain the 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. The only constraint is a medium that attempts to outsmart.
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; state 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 ran down as a child, in between the overgrown bushes the there persists.
Plaintext is better than specialized data formats. It reduces headaches
Through 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.
The Greek philosopher Proclus was headstrong to give paganism a fighting chance against Christianity. The elegance of monotheism could no longer be denied. Most philosophies had been monist, his own Platonism was no exception. How could Proclus save paganism if having more than one principle had become absurd?
His solution: the henad. Gods, to Proclus, were henads: not the One itself, but all-encompassing unities all-sorts.
How can multiple unities be all-encompassing? By overlapping. Each includes everything, including other henads. Yet each structures totality uniquely.
The Flemish humanist Joest Lips, better known as Justus Lipsius, responsible for repopularizing Stoicism in early modern Europe, writes the following in the introduction of his Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (la / nl / en):
Nam inopinatum quoddam stili genus instituimus: in quo vere possim dicere, omnia nostra esse, et nihil. Cum enim inventio tota et ordo a nobis sint, verba tamen et sententias varie conquisivimus a scriptoribus priscis. Want wij hebben voorghenomen eenighe onverwachte maniere van schrijuen: in de welcke / ick metter waerheydt mach seggen / dat alle saken onse zijn / en̄ datter niet en is dat ons is. Want aenghesien dat de geheele inuentie ende ordonnantie van ons comen / nochtans wij hebbē de woordē en spreecredenen verscheydentlijc vanden ouden schrijuers vercregen. We've adopted an unexpected way of writing, of which I can truthfully say that everything is ours, and nothing. For though the entire invention and arrangement are ours, we've collected the words and maxims from various ancient writers.
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 observation was already made by Hegel. (de / en)
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. Man, insofar as he wants to be actual, must be determinate, and to that end must limit himself. Whoever loathes the finite too much, he attains no actuality at all, but remains in the abstract and fades away in himself. [Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §92]
It's no accident that the man who identified Sein and Nichts would recognize that a creature of reines Sein is a creature of reines Nichts.
Humanity is still in "puerility." The closest it came to overcoming this 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.
There's a lot of charm in pretending you're not part of any tradition.
Imagine Descartes had given lip-service to the atomists, to the stoics, to Augustine, to Ramus -- would this have made him more enjoyable to read? would this have made his ideas more "clear and distinct"?
Let's not dismiss Descartes' stance with respect to tradition wholesale. It's plausible enough that he came up with cogito ergo sum without being aware of Augustine's si fallor, sum, and that he invented his model for the res extensa by making inferences off the progress of mathematical physics, rather than by plagiarizing the atomists.
But respecting tradition is less a matter of acknowledging influences than of verifying that you're really doing something new. If people didn't investigate the position of their ideas in history we would keep reinventing the same thoughts.
The problem here is, the fact that something has been said before doesn't mean it has had its proper impact. Many things are said too soon and need to be repeated. The newness of an idea is independent from the newness of its relevance. But someone just repeating some old ideas doesn't have the same rhetorical force as someone coming up with new ideas. Why would you pay attention to someone who just repeats stuff? The stuff may be worth considering, but it isn't very creative, you could better go back to the original.
So altogether I think it's worth it to, first, explain my actual influences, and second, explain my position with respect to tradition.
There's also a lot of charm in pretending you're doing exactly the same as a tradition.
This is maybe what G.K. Chesterton called the romance of orthodoxy. The pattern of being supplied a prediction, and this prophecy then coming true, was, according to him, what made the world endlessly rich and colorful. Things have a definite meaning that way. Without it, we are always questioning that meaning, and can never properly marvel at it.
A philosophical example of someone who wouldn't admit divergence from a tradition would be Plotinus. Scholars call him and his students Neoplatonists, but he'd have scoffed at this term. He was a Platonist, full stop. All he was doing is explaining what Plato's viewpoints already were, and really Plato's viewpoints were wisdoms carried down from the ancients.
We must imagine he had a lot of fun trying to fit his own thoughts into the doctrines of Plato, and we can also have that kind of fun. Should we? Only in part. Yes, certainly, we can imagine that the thoughts we run into are in some way a fulfillment of thoughts that came before us, even unlikely ones, but that they are a fulfillment does not mean they are necessarily the same. Chesterton's view that this detracts from the fun we're having seems ungrounded. Fulfillment of prophecy is more riveting, because it has a lovely melancholic aspect, where you are now able to see what even the prophets could not see. You redeem their doctrine, you don't validate it, and that is both better as a narrative and more clear-eyed about what's really going on.
When describing my relation to earlier thinkers, I feel I must complicate the connections I draw, at least a little. If we can't think why previous initiatives failed, we also cannot think why this one might succeed.
As a child I was taught Windows 98. I was fascinated with every little affordance it gave you. Creating files and folders, setting screensavers, changing your desktop theme. Many sites offered free themes that could change everything about how your digital experience was styled. I'm sure such things are still on offer, but back then, giving people "freebies" as simple as a wallpaper was a vital marketing strategy. There was excitement about everything custom but little expertise about how to customize. Every downloadable file that could change something was an event. If you were swept up in this mania, soon you'd find that your web browser consists of more toolbar than website due to all the downloaded plugins. Computer viruses proliferated. People would install any program they'd come across, on the promise that they'd have an animated character walking across their taskbar.
What changed? Is it that the newness of this technology had such a big psychological effect, even on a child who'd never known anything else? I think part of it is that, as a policy choice by tech companies, computers stopped being customizable. Customizability was a liability. People don't know how to manage their own devices, so they shouldn't be allowed to. In Windows 98 it was possible to supply folders with a custom background, in Windows XP this was gone. A quarter of a century later programs have become "apps," not installed through an installation wizard but through an "app store," so that everything you do must pass through official channels.
As a child, even that first step was a loss. Folders, to me, were not directories to store data, they were theres. You could build villages with them. Folders could be streets and houses and rooms, and then files could be objects and people. Some things could be hidden! Shortcuts made it so that if you went into a room through a door, you could take the door back in the other direction. You could make an entire videogame, purely out of folders and simple files.
I never made this video game, but I also never lost the ambition.
I remember little of my childhood, but one of my earliest memories is a friend of my dad showing a screensaver with a gif of a dancing baby. The fact that he'd downloaded a screensaver was impressive to me, the baby not so much.
People think about internet memes a lot, but somehow when you have anything to say on them, it always feels like you're entering new territory. Memes are something you think, not something you think about. Maybe that's why they are always so unserious. Anything serious makes a person stop and think and reconsider, and then it's already too late for the meme to propagate. Lightness is an important quality of a meme.
When memes first became serious, it was under the guise of trolling and irony. The specific moment must've been "Project Chanology" on 4chan.
Note that contrary to what we now associate with 4chan, this moment was vaguely left-libertarian politically. Note also the origin of the Guy Fawkes mask and "Anonymous". "Anonymous" was simply the default name a person would post under on their website. They were all called Anonymous, so that was the name of their movement. And the Guy Fawkes mask referenced a folkloristic fool character called Epic Fail Guy, who wore the mask. It was all very unserious.
Why do I waste time talking about 4chan? First, because it influenced me. Second, because it influenced everyone else. Despite memes being unserious, they were very serious. Wars were fought over them. Really, the wars everyone is fighting today are escalations of these early wars over memes.
Memes could, it was believed, be stolen, and stealing memes was a reason for collective punishment. Facebook stole from 9gag, 9gag from Reddit, Reddit from Tumblr, Tumblr from 4chan, 4chan from Something Awful, and they were all spiteful over it. In depictions from the time it's represented as a "human centipede."
It's possible that 4chan's creativeness came from its anonymity. The only way to signal in-group identity without a nickname is by expressing yourself in an in-group code: memes. As soon as the memes became known outside of the in-group, these identity signals were compromised, and new ones had to be invented.
I think it's tragic how 4chan's creativity seemed to end in the mid-2010s. All they've produced since then are various pepes and wojaks, new ways to insult people. My theory is that becoming politically far-right meant they had to form alliances with people who didn't get it, losing the drive to individuate themselves.
This gradual decline into fascist politics took place over a number of years. Starting from a general insistence on saying outrageous things to scare off the "normies" who didn't get the irony, they felt threatened by the fact that these same normies really didn't get it. 4chan was frustrated by their inability to gain institutional recognition, even though this inability was entirely of its own making. Outsiders marginalized 4chan because 4chan had positioned itself on the margin.
This threat made memes turn serious. First with the conflicts between 4chan and Tumblr, Tumblrites being a group of people especially concerned about wholesome inclusive language, and thus a group who had no patience for 4chan users calling each other "retards" and "faggots" as forms of endearment. Then their attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, a woman doing a very milquetoast video series on sexist tropes in video games. Then, finally, GamerGate, an attack on Tumblr-adjacent "social justice warrior" politics capturing gaming journalism, and shortly after, the growth of the alt-right and the mobilization behind the Trump campaign.
Could this have gone differently? It seems inevitable from the start. If your only self-constitution is through cultural markers others can't adopt, you must, after so many iterations, adopt the unadoptable.
You need to destroy everything that made people look up to you. The reason Project Chanology was not a stable state for 4chan was that it was much too popular. People still mythologize "Anonymous", they think it's some kind of hacker collective. 4chan very quickly categorized talk like that as "cringe". If people have some reason to praise you, they have some reason to join you, 4chan has always been insistent that there's no reason to join them. Rule 1: do not talk about 4chan.
The only way to convince other members of the in-group that you're part of the in-group is by communicating that you have no reason to care about being part of the in-group. You loathe the in-group, the in-group was "never good".
4chan was arguably the first international mass culture in human history. It consisted mainly of young men alienated from the society they actually lived in, who spent an unjustifiable amount of time familiarizing themselves with a complex cultural code belonging to people who presented themselves as nothing but image captions on a computer screen. Now there are probably lots of cultures like this. Really we're all part of cultures like this. No other culture like this had existed before.
They came from everywhere, were of every race and nation. They bonded over the strangest sexual interests. They had no preoccupation for fitting into traditional masculine societal roles. Why did they become fascist?
Really it's nothing unusual. Fascism always recruits from the forcibly deracinated. People who have anxieties about not belonging will naturally fight hardest for a place they feel they might belong. Feeling alienated from your community will also make you feel like it's been stolen from you.
This by itself doesn't explain much, since this fight to belong can resolve in a leftward direction just as well as a rightward one. It makes more sense for it to go left. If you are frustrated that you are a virgin NEET at 25, the straightforward thing to blame is that your community didn't properly socialize you, wasn't inclusive enough to people of your particular neurotype, prioritizes the harsh individualism of the liberal market over more communal forms of living. Somehow this simple analysis didn't work for them.
One way it can be explained is by an unwillingness to honor what you are, a profound self-hatred and a conviction that the way you've ended up is natural. There's some evidence for this. Here's an example: note the fascination with "lolcows" like Christine Weston Chandler. Lolcows are mentally unwell people stalked collectively, and milked for "lols". It's clear to me, I think this truth should be more widely acknowledged, that the reason people love looking at these characters is that they are paranoid they themselves might unknowingly be like that. It's easy for an autistic unemployed or underemployed person on 4chan to find some moment of self-resemblance in Chandler that makes them just suspicious enough to keep watching. This suspicion is epistemic, you can't get rid of it based on facts, since it concerns precisely your ability to discern facts, to be socially self-aware. Thus you have to get rid of it performatively. You have to laugh, loudly, and make sure everyone has understood you are not this person, then look attentively if they agree. Well, it's an anonymous forum, they don't know you, the tension never resolves.
I like to read him as a Brechtian. He's not too pessimistic about the possibility of a revolution or whether a revolution can achieve anything useful. He's just someone who has a sharp understanding of what a revolutionary mindset looks like, and it's not what you expect. For example, you'd expect a revolutionary mindset to look forward at progress, but it instead looks backward at disaster. These paradoxes stem, I think, from the conviction that whatever needs to be done can never be legible from the present hegemonic frame. You need to step out of it.
How? Some idiosyncratic clarity must flash up to you for a moment and give you something to act on. And this cannot come from anything specific, but at best from impressions created by constellations. Juxtapositions of images, maybe, so that the message is somewhere between them. Images maybe of the past, but also irreducibly in the present. (Benjamin seems to insist you can never really have images of the past, since they need to be reproduced up to the present moment, and thus are always a product of the powers that be.)
The collapsed tree structure is excellent for this. I'd like to imagine myself to be doing some form of Passagen-Werk of the internet of 1995-2015, though that's not entirely true. It's not entirely true that Benjamin was doing a Passagen-Werk about 19th century Paris either, there's lots of lesser related stuff in there.
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter.
I'm unsure what to make of Deleuze and Guattari, but I do know I have to make something of them. My instinct is to be hostile, not because they attack tree-shaped metaphysics (rvmark is ultimately not tree-shaped), but because they seem to want to liquidate everything, while my instinct is rather to create spaces with a very definite shape. They grant that their prefered "rhizome" can locally crystalize into arborescences without this necessarily undermining the thing, but they don't attach much importance to this fact. I attach a lot of importance to it. The fact that something can be both an arborescence and a rhizome, or rather, that a rhizome can manifest as an infinite number of arborescences depending on from what angle you look at it (and they're all looking at each other), that is the entire point to me.
Another reason I'm distrustful of them is that their philosophy feels almost misanthropic. They're so enthusiastic about these cancerous objects sprawling everywhere and devouring everything discrete, it's anathema to any human project, whatever you take human to be. I'm sure they were personally deeply empathetic left-wing people, but their imagery delights in everything dangerous and throbbing. In their world all things melt and still nothing dies. It's no wonder you get someone like Nick Land, just by the aesthetics of it.
It appears to me that, up until this point, "new media art" has not lived up to the best potential in its name. It has only meant art using new media, rarely art creating new media. rvmark tries to do this experiment. It's a piece of infrastructure-as-art.
I'd suggest that others adopt this practice as well, there's something to be said for it. Creating new media forms has been left to private capital and public research engineers. Any artist with activist leanings will recognize the problem. The arts and humanities, who ought to be most fit, have been left out. This is not entirely due to political-economic forces, but also due to complacency.
Maybe the social unrest generated by this situation is reaching a tipping-point. The dangers of platform capitalism are more evident than ever. We cannot afford to be pessimistic. The mass adoption of BlueSky in 2024 gives some indication that exodus is possible. "At least do something"-politics is rightly dismissed as a thought-terminating cliché, but it's unquestionable that doing something, even if it has little chance of making a positive difference, beats doing nothing, which has no chance of making a positive difference. That is no reason not to remain critical. It is heightened criticism that leads to a flourishing of different modes of expression. We don't create new media only to individuate ourselves, but also because existing media are inadequate.
Note also the inadequacy of "art". Art is itself a medium, it has its own interface.
Let me clarify: mediums are interfaces. Books go in bookstores, libraries, bookshelves, you can read them on the train or in your bed. It doesn't much matter what book it is, it interfaces with the world as a book, and that is what makes literature a medium.
Art is the same, it goes in galleries, museums, art books. Sometimes it is posted on Instagram and sold as an NFT. To really create media as art, you must interface differently. But you must also interface the same.
If you've never done much computer programming, this seems absurd. But computer programmers know that creating new interfaces for existing systems is not special. Systems can have many interfaces, they should have many interfaces. The new media we invent, if they are digital media, can also have many different interfaces, and thus be many different media.
rvmark is a markup language, a static site generator, a federation protocol, a social-political movement, an art movement, a manifesto, and if all else fails, it degrades gracefully to an art piece. This is what I believe media art ought to attempt.
I don't know enough to speak very confidently about Ted Nelson, and this section of the site will probably keep getting updated as I get to know more. But on the whole it appears to me that I'm much more on the side of HTML than whatever he was trying to accomplish with Xanadu. He appeared very concerned with authorship rights and reliable bidirectional linking, like so many people appear to be. I wouldn't say I don't care for such things, but I would say that getting them right is not only difficult, it is structurally impossible and not even desirable. To the extent that they are desirable sometimes, let's implement some useful facilities to let people take care of them themselves, on their own time, when they judge it necessary.
Why do I think it's impossible? I'll make a very naive observation about authorship rights: copy-paste exists, and as long as copy-paste exists, it will be more convenient than whatever attribution schema you come up with. And don't get it into your head that it shouldn't exist. Many people have gotten that into their heads and it's led us nowhere good. Another basic observation: forcing reliable bidirectional linking takes away an author's autonomy to link one-way and to have these links break, or eventually point to things they didn't anticipate. I think this is a horrible thing to take away from a person. In fact, note this: really the two things pull against each other. If links can't break or point to something unexpected, what in God's name is the added value over transclusion except attribution, and what does this kind of attribution accomplish that isn't also accomplished by a footnote? Some new paradigm of navigation, where you zigzag back and forth between texts. I think that kind of navigation has been oversold. We see it in popular outliner software and when all is said and done the benefits are minimal. You end up with a large list of backlinks that don't mean anything to any human person and never get used.
This, it seems to me, defeats a lot of Ted Nelson's program. Obviously much of the stuff I'm doing is deeply indebted to him, transclusion and stretchtext and the like, but I won't pretend I'm following in his footsteps.
When Gertrude Stein says there is no there there, she is, in reality, not at all talking about the fact that her house was demolished. She says that, had her house still been there, it would've been no use.
Her point is maybe a pragmatist one. She was a student of the pragmatist William James, and though she rejected his theory of stream of consciousness, it shows here that she was his student. She extends the pragmatist principle to space itself, and holds that as long as a location has no purpose to a person, it is no there to them at all.
Locations, if we are allowed to extrapolate, are like icons you see on the map in an open world videogame. In most open world videogames not all buildings are accessible. The doors are not interactive and the insides are not modelled. This is how people in modernity experience the world. When you walk in a city, you never stop to note that every building has an interior. We are conditioned not to note this, because it's improper to leer into people's windows and try to make out what kind of space exists there. Besides this, it is simply not viable for someone who commutes 20 kilometers every day to know personally every location they pass by. This makes the only theres that are there to us those sparse theres we've mentally categorized as there -- where we work, sleep, play, visit, buy, and on a regular basis, and in a way appropriate to who and what we are. If we stop and think just how sparse these places are in so big a space, it shocks us. This is one of those realizations that can make us seem alien to ourselves.
Gertrude Stein seemed to find it normal. That she is alien to herself was to her obvious, the notion that she should not be almost oppressive. Thus visiting a place she once lived was uncomfortable, because at such times she would be haunted with thoughts that aren't hers. We call these thoughts memories and they're really something unjust, because they are hard to make sense of functionalistically. Why do we remember the spatial layout of our old family home, even when it is no longer there and of no use to us? The space is still there, you can find it, Stein did find it, the there is gone.
When I was a child, me and my brother would go into the forest beside my family home, and all the openings inside this forest, including hidden ones accessed by huddling beneath a shrub, would become locations: one moment a castle, another moment a cavern. In this way we would go around the garden, and we would eventually end up back where we started, and now that space would have a new meaning.
Maybe a videogame could be made following this logic, where you loop through the same spaces, decorated differently to signify that the there is different. This would be possible to implement in rvmark.
In any case, it seems possible for the same place to be multiple theres.