"Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything"
About this Quote
A buried complaint masquerading as a neutral observation, Ted Nelson is poking at the quiet tyranny of the folder tree. “Computers are hierarchical” lands less as description than diagnosis: the dominant metaphors of personal computing (desktop, folders, files) don’t just organize information, they dictate how thinking is supposed to be organized. The deadpan punchline is that these hierarchies “have to mean everything” - not because they’re inherently natural, but because the interface makes them unavoidable. You don’t merely store your work inside a structure; you translate your work into that structure, whether it fits or not.
Nelson’s context matters. He’s the prophet of hypertext who spent decades arguing that knowledge is not a set of nested boxes but a mesh of links, references, revisions, and reuse. Hierarchical file systems, born from earlier constraints and bureaucratic logic, are great at keeping accounts and terrible at representing how ideas actually live: overlapping, versioned, quoted, and connected across contexts. The subtext is a critique of “user-friendly” design that smuggles ideology. A desktop implies ownership, a single workspace, a single place for each thing. A folder implies that an item belongs to one category at a time. That’s not just UI; it’s metaphysics.
His line also hints at cultural inertia: once a metaphor becomes default, it becomes invisible. People stop asking whether the tree is the right shape for knowledge - and start blaming themselves when their lives don’t fit neatly into directories.
Nelson’s context matters. He’s the prophet of hypertext who spent decades arguing that knowledge is not a set of nested boxes but a mesh of links, references, revisions, and reuse. Hierarchical file systems, born from earlier constraints and bureaucratic logic, are great at keeping accounts and terrible at representing how ideas actually live: overlapping, versioned, quoted, and connected across contexts. The subtext is a critique of “user-friendly” design that smuggles ideology. A desktop implies ownership, a single workspace, a single place for each thing. A folder implies that an item belongs to one category at a time. That’s not just UI; it’s metaphysics.
His line also hints at cultural inertia: once a metaphor becomes default, it becomes invisible. People stop asking whether the tree is the right shape for knowledge - and start blaming themselves when their lives don’t fit neatly into directories.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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