Everest Pipkin

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Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.

As someone interested in providing more agency in our computing environment I am on the lookout for pieces of our current computing environments that can be enriched to provide a more malleable experience. Window management is an area that I keep coming back to given how prevalent the domain is. I will provide a recap of what window management is, how it’s used today, and how modern applications have evolved to deal with current deficiencies. Then I’ll provide a compositional approach for window management to move towards and discuss how I think this could make applications more malleable.

LN 040: The venerable hyperlink

Decades after hyperlinks transformed humanity's information and text into a densely-linked graph, mainstream OSs have yet to afford users their benefits in personal computing.

Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die

Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas.  The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the wonder.  Half a dozen of us were invited back a week later; and then again, and again, for several delicious months.

Visionary lays into the web

Ted Nelson is a visionary who is credited with coining the term hypertext, but he is highly critical of what the internet has become.

The lessons of Xanadu

“The longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry”

The Curse of Xanadu

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight

Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)

The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution

This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.