Quote of the Day

by JS

Finally, we made it to the end of the tale. There was only one remaining question, and it seemed both obvious and cruel. His project had promised an end to forgetting, but in the end, only Gregory had been unable to forget. The deluge of information had arrived. The other programmers had drifted away. Only Gregory remained with his fingers on the broken Xanadu machine.

“Why?” I asked.

“Total insanity,” Gregory answered, both hands squeezing his face.

I just finished reading The Curse of Xanadu from an old issue of Wired. Considering the Xanadu project goals, just reading the piece as I did using Instapaper on an iPod over the internet is some unfamiliar flavor of irony, rich and complex and involving, one ingredient of which is certainly the way a project whose goal was organizing the world’s information could falter organizationally, and how other fundamentally disorganized technologies could so successfully self-organize and deliver the web as we know it today.