> unlike Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee never read about Bush’s memex. He built a system that connected people like never before—but made little effort to facilitate the connection of ideas. There are no trails on the World Wide Web—instead, there are misattributed quotes, dead one-way links, constant plagiarism scandals, and widespread misinformation and mutual distrust. It’s often said that we’re living in a ‘post-truth society’. The words we write and videos we share have become entirely unmoored from the ideas underlying them. Strangely, the Web has facilitated more disconnection than was ever possible before.

> Ted Nelson, in his own oblique and dodgy way, predicted the failure mode we’re now seeing: “This is not a technical issue, but rather moral, aesthetic and conceptual.” We built our global information-sharing system quickly, efficiently, and technically, when we should’ve treated it as a philosophical and aesthetic puzzle as much as a computational one, and built carefully and precisely.

Agreed: nothing is more important than the foundation that you built, especially if it may make or break society.