Interactive Computing: A Counterculture
In 1974, Ted Nelson self-published a very unusual book. Nelson lectured on sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago to pay the bills, but his true calling was as a technological revolutionary. In the 1960s, he had dreamed up a computer-based writing system which would preserve links among different documents. He called the concept “hypertext” and the system to realize it (always half-completed and just over the horizon) “Project Xanadu.” He had become convinced in the process that his fellow radicals had computers all wrong, and he wrote his book to explain why.
Among the activist youth of the 1960s counterculture, the computer had a wholly negative image as a bureaucratic monster, the most advanced technology yet for allowing the strong to dominate the weak. Nelson agreed that computers were mostly used in a brutal way, but offered an alternative vision for what the computer could be: an instrument of liberation. His book was really two books bound together, each with its own front cover—Computer Lib and Dream Machines—allowing the book to be read from either side until the two texts met in the middle. Computer Lib explained what computers are and why it is important for everyone to understand them, and Dream Machines explained what they could be, when fully liberated from the tyranny of the “priesthood” that currently controlled not only the machines themselves, but all knowledge about them. “I have an axe to grind,” Nelson wrote,
I want to see computers useful to individuals, and the sooner the better, without necessary complication or human servility being required. …THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION. … A chant you can take to the streets: COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE! DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD![1]
