Long live hypertext!

Quoted The hyperlink is dying! by Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce.bsky.social) (Bluesky Social)

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal…

Quoted from: Podcast: Google and Meta Are A Threat to Journalism (Matt Pearce and Paris Marx)

Elsewhere, Pearce expands:

Following hyperlinks in search of accurate information is annoying, inefficient and increasingly filled with scammy clutter. On the fenced-in internet of tomorrow, AI-powered portals controlled by a small handful of powerful international companies will treat us like stationary consumers who passively expect knowledge and content to come to us, not the other way around.

That … isn’t great for a lot of reasons.*

Ryan Broderick writes about the risks of being fed information (and bad actors being able to flood feeds in misinfo):

Fascism in the digital age really only has one coherent unifying goal which is false consensus. Memes, conspiracy theories, AI-generated slop — all of it is meant to be inescapable across the web. To create a feeling like something must be true or real because it’s everywhere, as we’ve seen with the Springfield, Ohio, story this month.

The magic of links

Links — connections between ideas — are the magic system of the Internet. They power the open web, enriching online writing. Generative AI is the parasitic dark magic counterpart to the link.

What makes the Internet the Internet is the ability to hyperlink. Without it, you’re in a walled garden, and those have an admission fee: your self, proxied by the record of your entire online life.*

Hypertext transforms thinking

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

Online writing is not the same as book or magazine writing, even op-ed or letter-to-the-editor writing. To understand online writing, you also need to understand its ecosystem: online, we think together, iterating on each other and boosting ideas we like by linking to them. Online writing is conversational, social, and deeply embedded in remix culture (all the more suitable for back-linking). It’s interconnected in a way and degree that’s not possible for print formats. Much of the power of online thinking is how ideas synthesize out of the collective.

When we link in our writing, we are doing the same work as algorithms on platforms — deciding what is worth reading — but we aren’t subject to the harmful incentives that turn silos into Dante’s Inferno.

Hypertext relies on longevity

But along with walled gardens undermining the hyperlink, the open web faces another challenge: the brittleness of links when websites can just close down with no notice and online archives may be in question.

Zach laments that “The Old Web Is a Slowly Decaying Corpse“:

At one point in my life, there was a common refrain that “the Internet never forgets.” What you wrote, what you posted, and what you shared with the world would forever be preserved for all to see; so be careful.

Turns out that’s a crock of shit.

The Internet has a limited and fallible memory just like everything else does. Sure, that website you loved as a kid might still be around, and the content might be the same, but… it also probably isn’t. The things you link out to can disappear, redirect, or change without you ever knowing.

Like everything else, hypertext requires maintenance. Without being valued — without being linked to — without being visited — pages on the open web will wither away, replaced by 404 pages, scammy redirects, and genAI regurgitations. Without links from trusted sources, people will be lost in search, wallowing in genAI and content made to get clicks.

So link. Link widely, with abandon, to sites on the open web. Link to your own writing, and to other bloggers. Follow links. Archive pages. Shun platforms that disallow linking. Send webmentions or pingbacks. Engage on websites instead of social platforms. Reward writers and curators with attention, and disavow genAI “answers.” Value context and sources, not just “facts.”

Long live the open web — long live the link!

Further reading:

How design’s oldest org torched a decade of discourse by Carly Ayres

To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands by Hanaa’ Tameez (Nieman Labs)

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