working notes from the textual underground
Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground
i love a good collage, and a poem to boot. this piece from laura holly charman feels like a anti-self-hlep manifesto. instead of asking for the usual trope of certainty, happiness, or success, she’s asking to be disassembled and put back together in a way that only discomfort can do.
There’s a useful little door in Peter Carroll’s chaos magic that doesn’t require you to become a magician, buy the robes, or swallow the whole metaphysical pill.
The door is this question:
What happens if I believe this — for a while?
That shift changes the whole game. Belief stops being a fortress that you settle in and becomes a tool. Or maybe even a costume. Something you can put on, walk around in, test against the world, and then take it off again before you start mistaking it for your skin.
This is the part of chaos magic that still feels useful even if you keep both feet on the ground and a healthy amount of scepticism in your pocket. It treats belief less like a sacred possession and more like an interface. A way of selecting what becomes visible, what becomes possible, what your body reaches for next.
Most of us don’t experience belief that way. We inherit beliefs, absorb them, defend them, and confuse them with ourselves. A worldview becomes a room we forget we’re inside. We stop noticing the walls because they’ve been there so long.
Carroll’s move is mischievous: roll a die and inhabit a worldview for a while. Paganism. Monotheism. Atheism. Nihilism. Chaoism. Superstition. Not to find the winner. Not to discover the One True Lens. But to feel how each lens changes perception.
What do you notice as a pagan that you ignore as an atheist?
What becomes possible under superstition that vanishes under rationalism?
What does nihilism strip away?
What does monotheism gather into order?
What does chaoism loosen?
The point isn’t that all beliefs are equally true. The point is that beliefs do things. They organise attention. They open some doors and hide others. They alter the questions we ask, the risks we take, and the meanings we allow.
Robert Anton Wilson called these reality tunnels. A reality tunnel is not simply what you believe. It’s the whole perceptual apparatus that belief builds around you. The map doesn’t just describe the territory; it trains the traveller.
That’s where this starts to connect with writing, psychology, philosophy, and the everyday art of being human.
A writer can try on a belief to discover a voice.
A coach can help someone notice the story they’ve been living inside.
A blogger can use a post as a temporary model rather than a final verdict.
A person can ask, in the middle of an ordinary day, “What belief am I wearing right now, and is it still helping?”
This doesn’t mean treating life as make-believe. It means becoming more honest about the fact that we are already living through frames, assumptions, metaphors, inherited scripts, family myths, cultural software, old wounds, private hopes, and sentences we never consciously chose.
Chaos magic, at its most useful, says: if belief shapes experience, then learn to handle belief with care.
Don’t worship the model.
Don’t mistake the costume for the body.
Don’t let the map chain you to one road.
Try the lens. See what it reveals. See what it distorts. Then choose again.
For me, the enduring insight isn’t “nothing is true, everything is permitted” as some adolescent permission slip. It’s more sober than that, and stranger.
It’s the practice of epistemic agility.
The ability to move between frames without being captured by them. The ability to say, “This is useful, but not ultimate.” The ability to test a story without marrying it. The ability to remember that certainty can become a cage even when it began as liberation.
Maybe that’s the real magic here.
Not bending spoons.
Not commanding invisible forces.
But loosening the spell of the single story.
Learning to wear belief lightly enough that the soul can still breathe.
One of the traps in collaborative leadership is thinking that collaboration begins when we put people in the same room.
It doesn’t.
A room full of people can still be a room full of separate silos.
Everyone arrives carrying their own institutional habits, loyalties, scars, private pressures, and little rulebooks about how things are supposed to work. In health and care systems, this becomes even more tangled because the work is already complex, the stakes are high, and the organisations involved often have different histories, incentives, and ideas of what “good” looks like.
This King’s Fund report uses the language of collaborative leadership, but the bit that catches my attention is more basic and more human:
Before people can work together well, they need to agree how they’re going to behave with each other when the work gets difficult.
That sounds simple. But it might be one of the hidden foundations of collaboration.
Because the real test of collaboration is not how people behave when the workshop is warm, the coffee is decent, and everyone agrees with the slide deck.
The real test comes when money is tight, the data is contested, the history is messy, and someone around the table thinks another team is quietly protecting its own patch.
I’m back inside Tarot of Self-Discovery: A Jungian Guide to Tarot for Therapy, Inner Healing, and Personal Growth, and I can feel why the psychological approach to tarot keeps calling me.
It gives me a language I trust.
Tarot, in this frame, is not about predicting the future or handing my authority over to a deck of cards. It is a way of working with symbol, image, projection, shadow, inner dialogue, and the strange intelligence of the unconscious. The cards give form to things that often move below the level of ordinary speech.
That part feels right to me.
But there is another layer underneath it.
A while ago, one of the bots pointed out that I sometimes lean on Jung and psychology to legitimise my use of tarot. As if I need a respectable intellectual witness standing beside me before I’m allowed to admit that these images matter to me.
It caught me because it was true.
There is a part of me that imagines the tribunal before anyone has even said anything. The rational people. The sceptical friends. The religious voices. The ones who might think tarot is airy-fairy, superstitious, unserious, or somehow dabbling with the dark side.
So I prepare my defence.
It’s not fortune-telling.
It’s Jungian.
It’s archetypal.
It’s therapeutic.
It’s inner work.
It’s symbolic psychology.
All of that may be true. But if I’m not careful, the psychological frame becomes body armour. I start using Jung as a permission slip rather than as a companion.
The cleaner truth is simpler:
Tarot is one of the symbolic languages I use to think with.
That sentence does not need defending.
I use walking to think. I use blogging to think. I use dreams, books, myths, conversations, notes, memories, and old fragments from the archive. Tarot belongs in that same family. It is a reflective technology. A deck of charged images. A small theatre of archetypes I can lay out on the table.
The cards don’t tell me what to believe.
They give me something to notice.
They interrupt the obvious story. They give the unconscious something to point at. They let an image speak where my usual explanations have become too polished, too rehearsed, or too defended.
Then, as if the deck wanted to join the conversation, I drew the Eight of Swords.
A figure bound and blindfolded, surrounded by blades, caught in a prison that may not be as fixed as it feels. It was hard not to laugh. There it was: the whole psychology of the note in one image. The imagined tribunal. The respectable arguments. The invisible limits. The part of me that thinks it has to prove its way out before it can simply step forward.
The swords looked like other people’s imagined judgements.
The rationalist sword.
The religious sword.
The “don’t be weird” sword.
The “be respectable” sword.
The “prove this is legitimate” sword.
And maybe one more: the Jungian defence itself.
Useful. Sharp. Valid. But still a sword.
The Jungian lens still matters to me. It gives me useful maps: projection, shadow, complexes, anima and animus, individuation, and the dialogue between conscious and unconscious life. I don’t want to throw that away.
But Jung doesn’t need to rescue Tarot for me.
And I don’t need to rescue myself from seeming strange.
The barefoot philosopher can have a book on Jung, a notebook, a cup of coffee, and a tarot deck on the same table. No apology required. The only real requirement is honesty about the practice.
I am not asking the cards to rule my life.
I am asking them to help me see the story I am already living inside.
The question is not whether tarot is legitimate. The question is which imagined authority I am still letting hold the sword.
And the question this leaves me with is:
Where am I still asking respectable systems to bless the parts of me that already know how they work?
I finished reading Rebecca Blood‘s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. The book may be obsolete in its instructions, but not in its philosophy. That often happens with books written before a medium becomes an industry. They describe a culture before it becomes a market.
What I found myself responding to wasn’t the “how to blog” advice. It was, why did weblogging exist in the first place?
Back in the early 2000s, a weblog wasn’t primarily a content strategy or a personal brand. It was more like an intellectual commonplace book opened to the public. It was thinking in public. A running conversation with yourself and with a small circle of curious strangers.
Rebecca Blood understood this because she was writing while the form was still discovering itself. Nobody knew what a successful blog looked like because success wasn’t yet measured in followers, SEO, newsletters, funnels, or monetisation.
Chapter 2, Why Blog?, is probably the heart of the book because her answer isn’t really about publishing. It’s about attention.
A weblog asks:
That’s a radically different set of questions from today’s:
The medium slowly became a performance.
Ironically, as the tools became better, much of the spirit became thinner.
I don’t think blogging died. I think weblogging disappeared.
A weblog implied movement. It was literally a log of a journey through the web and through one’s own thinking. You’d link to an article, quote a paragraph, add three observations, wander off on a tangent, and invite someone else into the conversation. The links mattered as much as the words. The blog wasn’t a destination; it was a node in a larger conversation.
Today’s blogs often feel self-contained. They rarely acknowledge they’re part of a wider ecology of ideas. Hyperlinks have become citations or SEO signals instead of acts of generosity.
Early bloggers wrote because they wanted to participate in the web. Today many people write for platforms. Those are almost opposite impulses.
The old web rewarded connection. You linked because you’d found something worth sharing. Someone linked back. Rings of conversation emerged almost accidentally.
The platform web rewards capture. Keep people here. Optimise engagement. Don’t let them click away.
One imagines the web as a network of paths through a forest.
The other imagines it as a shopping centre.
That difference changes not only how we publish but how we think.
Decentralised leadership is surprisingly simple:
Leadership is not about holding responsibility. It’s about continually distributing it.
Jonas Gröner’s essay adds an important nuance, though. Distribution isn’t dumping tasks onto people. It’s creating conditions where others can genuinely grow into responsibility.
A distilled version might look like this:
A decentralized leader works to become progressively less indispensable while making the community progressively more capable.
The idea that struck me most in the piece wasn’t actually decentralisation itself. It was his redefinition of success:
A successful group is one where the passing on of knowledge, responsibility, relationships, and resources becomes normal.
That’s a subtle shift. Instead of asking, “How do we build a stronger leader?”, the question becomes:
“How do we build a system where leadership keeps moving?”
The hermit crab image captures this beautifully. The goal isn’t for one crab to find the biggest shell and keep it forever. The whole colony thrives because shells are passed along at the right moment, allowing everyone’s growth to continue.
Once upon a time, I was a news junkie. Devouring multiple newspapers and magazines. I wanted to know what was happening in the world. Partly because of my job — I was an infantry officer — and partly because I just liked knowing what was going on in the world. Then something changed.
The business model incentives shifted toward engagement instead of accuracy. Headlines became optimised for reaction, not information. The work of explaining the world gave way to keeping us agitated enough to keep on clicking.
Journalism’s Logical Fallacy
I like this Kurt Vonnegut quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Who are you pretending to be? That’s an honest question. Approach the answer with brutal honesty and you’ll be surprised by what you discover. And let me tell you, it’s a hard question to answer. Your defensive system will kick in almost immediately with, “I’m not pretending to be anyone; I’m just me. Straight up!”
Push a little harder.
Oh, why do I ask myself such brutal questions on a Saturday?
5am on a Saturday morning. I see this view every day, but today the cloud formation caught my attention. Prospects of a new day.
We’re behind enemy lines now.
Big tech. Algorithmic feeds. Scrolling culture. Newsletters. Inboxes. Synthetic sludge.
If we want the signal to travel, we have to be willing to disrupt the pattern wherever people already are.
The Monk still wants everything to be pristine. He remembers the old web, where people came to your site, bookmarked it, subscribed to it by choice, and came back every day to see what new thing you posted.
Part of him still believes that if the hearth is warm enough, people will find their way back to it.
But the habits have changed.
Readers and creators have been trained to scroll instead of click. They wait for the feed to tell them what they should read.
There are still remnants of the old web if you search with the right kind of eyes. But there’s no denying the dominant behaviour has shifted. The blog can’t only be a destination anymore. “If you build it, they will come” is no longer valid.
The Monk, if he wishes to survive, will have to adopt the guerrilla mindset.
Move fast. Strike hard. Finish up rapidly.
going crazy from the heat…i’m on my way down to All Saints Church in Sutton Courtenay for the #1984symposium and to pay homage to Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell. As I make the pilgrimage down to Sutton Courtenay, what I’m holding in my mind is this: Orwell didn’t predict the future. What he did do was give us names to patterns that recur whenever power seeks to dominate perception:
Telescreen
• Contemporary echo: smartphones, smart devices, CCTV, digital surveillance
Newspeak
• Contemporary echo: euphemism, jargon, slogan-thinking, language control
Doublethink
• Contemporary echo: ideological contradiction, tribal cognition
Memory hole
• Contemporary echo: deleted records, rewritten narratives, flooded archives
Two Minutes Hate
• Contemporary echo: outrage cycles, pile-ons, algorithmic fury
Big Brother
• Contemporary echo: personality cults, symbolic power, surveillance state
Thoughtcrime
• Contemporary echo: self-censorship, social policing, ideological conformity
Prolefeed
• Contemporary echo: infinite scroll, distraction media, low-grade content loops
Unperson
• Contemporary echo: deplatforming, erasure, algorithmic invisibility
If you want to get a taste of what we gave up when we sold our souls to social media platforms for convenience and “reach,” read Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. There’s no going back, for sure, at least not physically, but maybe philosophically. Mentally and spiritually, you could find your way back. Just saying…
You will have the whole spectrum of experience at your fingertips, not as some tidy menu of moods, but as a roaring carnival of sensation, memory, dream, dread, hunger, laughter, grief, lust, silence, and starlight.
You will be able to wander from the first spark of desire to the last breath of surrender, from the mud of the body to the outer rings of imagination, from the old gods whispering in the basement to the unborn versions of yourself knocking on the roof.
Every door will open.
Behind one, childhood.
Behind another, apocalypse.
Behind another, a jazz band made of ghosts playing in a neon desert while your future self sells maps to people who have forgotten they are already lost.
You will taste cities you have never visited, remember lives you have never lived, fall in love with faces assembled from myth and electricity, argue with your ancestors, bargain with your demons, dance with machines, and wake up laughing in the ruins of some belief you used to call reality.
And the strangest part?
It will all feel intimate.
Not distant. Not abstract. Not like information.
Like weather moving through your nervous system.
Like the universe leaning close and saying, ‘Here, try this skin, this sorrow, this madness, this miracle, this one bright unbearable hour of being alive.’
I finished Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie.
The first part was a nostalgic trip through the 80s. I enjoyed that; however, I bought the book for the second part, Sean Manseau’s Phonomancy work. a bit disappointed. Read like a drug-fuelled psychodelusional trip through his own ego consciousness.
Maybe my discomfort stems from me seeing more of myself in Manseau than I care to admit.
Shadow gold.
I asked this question a couple of years ago. I would rephrase the question now. The world definitely doesn’t owe you a meaning. You have to make it for yourself. It’s built slowly from the choices you make that compound over time. You can be free without direction. You can have direction without freedom. What really matters, though, is whether you can wake up and choose the same life again.
I’m wondering if invoking the ends justify the means argument to support why it’s ok to use AI in creative endeavours is a little extreme. I was reading Moody Warlock‘s blog post last night about using AI for DND worldbuilding. His main argument against the use of AI is that there is no blood, sweat, and tears involved in the process. That using AI is a shortcut to the end result. For him the journey to the end is the main point. For him, if there is no struggle, then the end is hollow. This is what conjured up the ‘ends justify the means’ idea in my head. For me, if a DM creates a brilliant campaign that their players enjoy, then in my mind, what does it matter if they used AI or not in the worldbuilding? The point, or the end, is the players having a great gaming experience.
Folks like to lean into the idea that creativity equals originality. That an artist, writer, or DM has to conjure up a story or a piece of art out of thin air. They forget that Shakespeare was the original remix artist.
A lot of Shakespeare’s work was built from existing stories, chronicles, myths, poems, and older plays. In modern language, you could absolutely say he remixed. He borrowed plots, characters, situations, legends, and historical material, then transformed them through language, structure, psychology, theatrical pacing, and emotional depth.
For example, Romeo and Juliet was not an original plot. Shakespeare drew heavily on Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which was itself part of a longer chain of Italian and French versions of the story.
His Roman plays — Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus — drew from Plutarch’s Lives. His English history plays and Macbeth drew heavily from Holinshed’s Chronicles. The Folger notes Shakespeare’s reliance on Holinshed and Plutarch as major source texts.
Othello comes from Cinthio’s Italian tale Un Capitano Moro / “A Moorish Captain.” Shakespeare follows the basic plot, but changes its moral atmosphere, invents or reshapes characters, and makes Iago into one of literature’s great engines of psychological manipulation.
Hamlet also existed before Shakespeare. The story goes back to the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, recorded by Saxo Grammaticus and later retold by François de Belleforest. Shakespeare’s genius was not that he invented “prince must avenge murdered father”; it was that he turned the revenge tale into a philosophical drama about consciousness, delay, grief, performance, corruption, and being itself.
So yes: Shakespeare was a remix artist. But in his world that was normal. Renaissance writers didn’t worship originality in quite the same way modern culture often does. They valued imitation, adaptation, transformation, and rhetorical brilliance. The question wasn’t always, “Did you invent the story?” It was, “What did you do with it?”
That’s the real Shakespearean magic: he took already-circulating material and made it feel inevitable. He didn’t just copy old stories. He metabolised them. He turned borrowed plots into living theatre.
I’m not invoking Shakespeare to justify copy-and-pasting from AI. I’m saying if a DM has an idea and they use AI to bring that idea to life for their players, then why care if they used AI to get there?
We’ve seen this argument before: a new technology arrives and appears to threaten an existing way of life.
Photography versus painting comes to mind. When the camera entered the scene, some painters dismissed photographs as mechanical, soulless, and requiring no real skill. The argument was simple: anyone could point a camera and press the shutter. The machine did all the work.
But once artists began using the camera, something became clear. Put a camera in the hands of a layperson and you may get a good picture. Put a camera in the hands of an artist and you can get art.
Generative AI has ushered in its own existential crisis for humanity.
But that is another story.
Existential Consent
Consent is the move most people miss when they talk about uncertainty.
We have better words, or at least more familiar ones. Acceptance. Surrender. Choice. Courage. Faith. We reach for them because they’re already waiting on the shelf, already worn smooth by use. But each one bends the thing slightly out of shape.
Acceptance feels too passive, as if life hands you the terms and all that remains is to stop arguing with them. Surrender carries too much defeat in its mouth, too much collapse, too much kneeling before an indifferent force. Choice sounds cleaner, but it often feels too abstract, too singular, too much like a decision made once at the crossroads before the story begins.
Consent is different.
Consent is active. It’s relational. It has to be renewed. You don’t consent once and then walk away with a certificate of inner alignment. You consent again when the weather changes. You consent again when the road narrows. You consent again when the thing you thought you’d agreed to reveals another clause in smaller print.
It’s not consent to this or that preference, this or that arrangement, this or that version of the future. It’s consent at the level of being here at all.
I see the board. I see the pieces. I don’t control the whole game, and I know it. But I am here, and I consent to play.
That sentence doesn’t make the board fair. It doesn’t make the pieces equal. It doesn’t pretend the rules were negotiated in advance or that everyone sat down at the table with the same number of options. Existential consent isn’t a spiritual bypass around injustice, grief, constraint, or fear. It’s not a velvet cloth thrown over the hard facts.
It’s the hard fact underneath the hard facts.
At some point, if you’re going to act, you have to stop waiting for reality to become a contract you would have written yourself. You have to stop treating uncertainty as evidence that the game hasn’t properly begun. It has begun. It began before you understood the rules. It began before you could name the stakes. It began before you knew what kind of player you were.
Most people are waiting for certainty-as-control. They want the moment when the variables align, the risk evaporates, the outcome becomes visible, and the next move presents itself without remainder. They call this prudence. Sometimes it is prudence. Often it’s paralysis wearing prudence’s coat.
Because that moment doesn’t come.
Or if it comes, it comes too late to matter. By the time all the information has arrived, the door has usually changed shape. The chance has passed into memory. The life that needed your participation has moved on without you.
The difference between the one who acts and the one who waits is rarely information. Everyone is under-informed, improvising from partial maps, making moves inside weather they can’t command. The difference isn’t confidence either. Confidence is often retrospective. We call it confidence after the move has worked.
Consent is the inner click that says: I’m in.
Not because I know how this ends. Not because the universe has promised to be benevolent. Not because the risk has been neutralised by enough research, planning, preparation, prayer, or positive thinking. I’m in because this is the life in front of me, these are the terms on the table, and refusing to play is also a move.
That’s the part we forget. Waiting isn’t outside the game. Avoidance isn’t neutrality. Refusal isn’t purity. Every non-move spends something. Time. Attention. Vitality. Trust in oneself. The field doesn’t freeze just because you haven’t consented to its motion.
Existential consent isn’t optimism. Optimism still wants to smuggle in a favourable outcome. It still says: play because it’ll probably be all right. Existential consent says something harder and cleaner: play because you’re here.
It’s not faith in the sense of believing the story has a hidden benevolent author. It’s closer to a vow made without witnesses. I consent to the terms. They’re not fair. They’re the terms. And I’d rather be in conscious relation with the life I have than remain suspended above it, waiting for a life I can approve of in advance.
There’s a strange freedom in that. Not the freedom to control the board. Not the adolescent fantasy of unlimited options. A smaller, fiercer freedom: the freedom to stop negotiating with existence as if it were waiting for your signature before proceeding.
You can grieve and consent. You can doubt and consent. You can be afraid and consent. You can consent without liking the terms, without understanding the whole pattern, without being sure you’re ready.
Readiness is another mirage. Sometimes the consent comes first, and readiness gathers around it.
What holds isn’t certainty about outcomes. Not certainty about the future self who’ll have to live with the consequences. Not certainty about the hidden meaning of events. Only the certainty of participation.
I am here.
I see enough to know I don’t see everything.
I don’t control the whole game.
And still, I consent to play.
I’ve been testing the Kospet Tank M4 special edition smartwatch. It’s a fraction of the cost of something like the Apple Ultra smartwatch. Performance so far has been top-notch.
I’m not asking what happens to productivity or output. I’m asking what happens to meaning.
When thinking is distributed across human-AI systems, something genuinely new appears. Not better thinking or faster thinking. A different category. Meaning that emerges from the interchange itself, that no single node, human or machine, can claim to have authored.
You can’t point to the moment you had the idea. You can’t separate what you thought from what the system returned. The origin dissolves. What remains is only the pattern that emerged between you.
This isn’t collaboration in the old sense. Collaboration assumed distinct agents contributing discrete parts. What I’m describing is closer to emergence. The meaning appears in the space between, and neither party can reconstruct how it got there.
We’ve organised centuries of intellectual life around authorship. Around the idea that meaning originates in a single location like a person, a mind, or a signature. Kant thought this. Woolf wrote that. The work points back to its source.
Networked thought makes that gesture impossible. The meaning that appears doesn’t have a return address.
I don’t know yet whether this is loss or liberation. Probably both. What I know is that it forces a different question: if meaning doesn’t require a single author, what else have we been wrong about?
This short clip from Ted Nelson in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is less about technology and more about a philosophy of connection. Nelson reflects on the core insight that has guided his life’s work: reality is not made of isolated things but of relationships, connections, and ever-changing patterns.
As a child, Nelson recalls trailing his hand through the water while sitting in a rowboat. Watching the water flow around his fingers gave him a profound realisation:
The universe is a system of ever-changing relationships.
That experience became the foundation of his thinking. Everything he later did with computers was an attempt to represent those relationships rather than flatten them into simple sequences.
Nelson sees interconnection as the fundamental truth of reality. His life’s work has been about finding ways to express and visualise those connections, especially between ideas and writings.
One of the most interesting observations in the clip is Nelson’s claim that writing reduces a rich tapestry of interconnected ideas into a narrow sequence of words.
He sees traditional writing as a necessary but flawed medium because it forces us to move through thought one line at a time when reality is actually networked and multidimensional.
This is essentially a critique of linear thinking.
Nelson’s famous project, Project Xanadu, aimed to create a system where every quotation remained connected to its source and every document could maintain visible relationships with other documents.
In the clip, he demonstrates parallel documents where quotations remain linked to their original context. This is very different from today’s web, where links are largely one-way, and context is often lost.
The web succeeded commercially, but in Nelson’s view, it abandoned much of the deeper vision.
Nelson argues that our current tools betray the complexity of human thought. He even jokingly describes modern “cut and paste” as a crime against humanity because it severs connections rather than preserving provenance and context.
His concern is ultimately epistemological: how do we know where ideas come from and how they relate to one another?
When Herzog asks about being considered insane for pursuing his vision for decades, Nelson rejects the idea that persistence is madness. He prefers “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” to the cliché definition of insanity.
The film ends with one of Herzog’s most memorable lines:
“To us, you appear to be the only one around clinically sane.”
It’s funny, but it also captures Herzog’s admiration for Nelson’s refusal to accept the limitations of conventional thinking.
What struck me most is that Nelson isn’t really talking about computers. He’s talking about a way of seeing.
The internet most people experience is a collection of pages. Nelson imagined a living ecology of ideas—where every thought remained connected to its origins, every quotation retained its context, and knowledge resembled a web of relationships rather than a stack of documents.
In many ways, this is what I’m trying to do with my blogging practice: my fascination with associative trails, and my interest in hypertext as an epistemology are closer to Nelson’s vision than what I see on modern publishing platforms. This blog, with its links, references, fragments, and wandering paths, is my way of trying to keep the dream alive.
Reality is not a line. It’s water.