Science & Tech Quote by Ted Nelson

Nelson isn’t praising the computer as a faster typewriter; he’s framing it as a rebellion against paper’s quiet tyranny. Paper forces thought to march in a single file: page after page, bound, numbered, flattened. His insistence on “all the connections and all the structures” is a manifesto for nonlinearity, a bet that the mind’s real shape is webbed and recursive, not chaptered and obedient.

The key move is his absolutist phrasing: “any structure in any form.” It’s utopian, almost daring you to object. In the 1960s and 70s, when Nelson was developing ideas that would become hypertext (and the famously over-ambitious Project Xanadu), this wasn’t just technical optimism; it was cultural agitation. Bureaucracies, libraries, and schools were built around paper’s constraints. If you could escape the page, you could also escape the gatekeepers and the habits of authority that the page smuggles in.

Subtextually, Nelson is arguing that knowledge isn’t a stack; it’s a network, and a medium should honor that. The computer “could hold” these structures, but he’s really talking about what it could legitimize: marginalia that doesn’t stay marginal, citations that behave like live wires, ideas that remain connected to their sources rather than cut loose and footnoted into oblivion.

There’s also a whiff of impatience in “this was the way to go” - not a tentative proposal, but a verdict. It’s the rhetoric of someone who sees the future as obvious and is frustrated the rest of the world is still stapling thoughts to sheets of dead trees.