In Creating Anonymous Summaries, AI Flattens Out All the Fascinating Architecture of Thought That Makes the Internet Hum

We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct.

In Associationism and the Literary Imagination (2007), Cairns Craig observes that ‘Freud’s technique of “free association” invites the patient to do exactly what the associationist aesthetics of the empiricist tradition had always insisted readers do in experiencing a poem.’ He cites the late-18th-century essayist Archibald Alison, who described reading a poem as ‘[letting] our fancy be “busied in pursuit of all those trains of thought”’ of the poet.

Freud’s technique imagined a new context for association in which a therapist would be capable of observing and analysing every link among a patient’s ideas

For Nelson, references and, thereby, links should point back to their sources. If you quote a writer in text, then that text should link to the original document, and the reader should be able to view the quoting document and the original side by side, much as Bush envisioned for the layout of the memex. Nelson in a sense imagined a universal version of Pope’s Dunciad – a history of human thought in which the user could trace how lines and phrases moved from one work to another.

Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce developed Storyspace as a software for creating hypertext fictions, choose-your-own-adventure-type stories in which the reader decides how to navigate episodes that are connected by links. Joyce used the software to write what is considered the first full-length hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story (1987). He wanted to create ‘a story that changes every time you read it.’ The reader’s path through the nodes and links of the work builds the story’s plot. This work along with Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) make up what’s come to be called the ‘Storyspace school’ of hypertext literature. While these works achieved critical attention in the mid to late 1990s, they haven’t had a lasting impact. However, the software and tools developed to make hypertext fiction possible have remained prevalent. Of course, the most famous hypertext system is the World Wide Web, which advanced upon earlier ones by allowing users to link between sites hosted on servers located around the world. Note-taking and organisation applications also have incorporated hypertext functionality.

Despite the different domains, Brooks’s critique echoes ideas expressed by Bush and Nelson in their plans for hypertext systems. Links reveal a creative process that tends to stay hidden in the writer’s mind – the process of connecting ideas and constructing something bigger: arguments, stories and even poems. Bush and Nelson posited that links exhibit natural patterns of thought – the ways the mind leaps from one idea to another – but also patterns of how we read and write. We read a passage, and it sparks connections with five other things we’ve previously encountered. Paraphrase is heretical because it flattens the tensions, ironies and conflicts of poetry. In his theory of hypertext, George Landow describes Bush’s memex methods as ‘poetic machines – machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination.’

The web made the investigative process Bush described possible by preserving trails of association. When we navigate the web via links, we are in a sense travelling through the series of connections made by someone else, not unlike reading something they wrote.

The web represents the largest assembled repository of collective memory, both in the individual web pages hosted and in the links that allow users to traverse them. How will this repository be supported and developed if users rarely make it past the homepages of Google or ChatGPT?

Yet despite the uniformity and regularity that print seemed to demand, Pope found a way to capture the interplay of opposing voices in print in a manner that represented the cacophony of 18th-century London’s urban environment. The web may still change in ways that surprise us.