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 through 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: 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.
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.
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 to use Windows 98. This was a marvelous piece of technology, I was fascinated with every user affordance it gave you. Creating files and folders, setting screensavers, changing every aspect of your desktop theme. At that time, many sites offered free "themes" that could change everything about how your digital experience looked and sounded. I'm sure such things are still on offer, but at that time, giving people freebies as simple as a desktop wallpaper was understood to be a vital marketing strategy for businesses. There was an excitement about everything customizable, but little user expertise about how to customize, so that every little downloadable device that could change something, no matter how small, was an event. If you were swept up in this mania, soon you'd find your web browser to consist of more toolbar than website due to all the plugins you'd have downloaded. Computer viruses proliferated in such an environment, where people would run whatever program they'd come across, only on the promise that they'd have some animated character walking across their taskbar.
Where did this magic go? Is it really that the newness of this technology had such a profound psychological effect, even on a child who'd never known anything else? I think part of it is that, as a conscious policy choice by tech corporations, computers stopped being as customizable. Customizability was increasingly seen as a liability. People didn'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 ability was gone. Now, 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 want to do with your device must pass through official channels.
For me, as a child, even that first step in this direction was a real loss. Folders, to me, were not just directories to store data, they were real 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, I imagined, an entire videogame, purely out of folders and simple files.
I never made this video game, but I also never lost the ambition.
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 quite explicitly 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 by 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.