In the context of Chandler’s effort to escape the confinement of tree-based models of information organization, I quoted Ted Nelson‘s famous line about “intertwingularity” in Dreaming in Code:
People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
This quotation can be found on many Web pages, bbut when I went to source it for the endnotes, I couldn’t locate the authoritative original statement. I found the same quote in David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous, and — knowing that Weinberger is a scrupulous attributor — I asked him if he knew its original source. He, too, found it hard to pin down, but now reports a definitive answer (courtesy Frank Frank Hecker — more details on Weinberger’s errata page).
It turns out it’s exactly where I first looked for it, in Nelson’s book Dream Machines, the 1987 revision, on page 31. (Nelson only used “deeply” once, the second time; the word doesn’t appear before “hierarchical” in the original — it must have crept in across multiple reuses.)
I spent hours hunting through Nelson’s volume — a reissue of both Dream Machines and Computer Lib in one book, with one starting from the front and the other from the “back”, upside down. I guess I should have looked harder.
On the other hand, my failure to locate the quote might also have been the result of thei books’ unconventional format. These books are true miscellanies, examples of the havoc a fertile mind and a page-layout program (or an X-acto knife) could wreak on the conventions of book design in those heady early days of desktop publishing. (Think of the old Whole Earth Catalog, if you’ve seen that.) Chunks of text are scattered in different typefaces, mixed up with graphs and hand-drawn flowcharts and ALL-CAPS EMPHASIZED TEXT. It is a format designed to frustrate the simple linear quest to attribute a quotation.
This whole tiny story is, in its way, a tribute to the “intertwingularity” of Nelson’s work itself. You have to give the man credit for finding a form that matched the content of his digital-liberation ideas — even when he was stuck using paper.
[tags]ted nelson, intertwingularity, david weinberger, everything is miscellaneous, dreaming in code[/tags]
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