Time for good trouble 🇺🇦

@jerrymichalski

Champion of trust among humans. It fixes things. Also working to curate a shared memory, so we can make better decisions together.

Portland, OR

Joined July 2006

2.2K Following

7.9K Followers

41.2K Posts

jerrymichalski retweeted

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

2 months ago

An MIT engineer published a 13-page essay in The Atlantic magazine in July 1945 describing a desktop machine called the Memex. It would store every book, every photo, and every letter a person owned, let them browse the contents by clicking links between documents, and let them save trails of related thoughts. He invented the personal computer, hyperlinks, Wikipedia, and the World Wide Web in a single magazine article 50 years before any of it existed. I read it cover to cover in under an hour and walked away convinced I had just read the blueprint for the world I live in. His name was Vannevar Bush. The essay is called As We May Think. The context for what he wrote matters because it explains how a single person could see so far ahead. Vannevar Bush was not a futurist. He was not a science fiction writer. He was the most powerful scientist in the United States during World War II. He ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated the Manhattan Project, the development of radar, the proximity fuse, mass production of penicillin, and almost every other major American scientific breakthrough of the war. He had personally directed the work of 30,000 scientists. He reported directly to President Roosevelt. When the war was ending in the summer of 1945, he sat down to write something that had been forming in his head for years. The essay was published in The Atlantic in July 1945. It is 13 pages. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan three weeks later. Here is what he saw, and why one essay accidentally became a blueprint for the world I live in. His opening problem was specific. Scientists were producing more research than humans could read. The body of human knowledge was growing exponentially. Any single researcher had access to a tiny fraction of what was relevant to their work. Most discoveries were being lost not because they were wrong, but because nobody could find them. Bush called this the central problem of the post-war world. Information was abundant. Attention was scarce. The bottleneck was no longer producing knowledge. The bottleneck was retrieving it. He proposed a solution. He called it the Memex, short for memory extender. The Memex was a desk-sized machine. The user sat in front of it. It had screens. It had a keyboard. It used microfilm because the transistor had not been invented yet, but the function he described is exactly what a hard drive does today. The user could store every book they had ever read, every note they had ever taken, every photo they had ever owned, and every letter they had ever written. All of it accessible in seconds. That alone would have been a stunning prediction. He described a personal computer in 1945. There were no personal computers. The first electronic computer in the world, ENIAC, would not be unveiled for another year, and it weighed 30 tons and filled a room. He was describing a machine the size of a desk that could hold everything a single person knew. But the desktop machine was the small idea. The big idea is the part that almost nobody who quotes the essay actually understands. Bush argued that the way humans store information in books and libraries was wrong. Books are organized by category. Library shelves are organized by Dewey decimal. Any given fact has one position in the hierarchy. To find it, you have to know the category it lives in. He pointed out that this is not how the human brain works at all. The brain does not store information by category. The brain stores information by association. You think of your grandmother and immediately remember a song. The song reminds you of a vacation. The vacation reminds you of a meal. The meal reminds you of a person you have not thought about in years. Each thought triggers another, not because they share a category, but because they are linked. Bush proposed that information storage should imitate the brain. Documents should be linked to other documents directly. Click on one, jump to another. Click on a footnote, see the source. Click on a name, see the person's other writings. He called these connections "associative trails." This is hypertext. He invented it on paper in 1945. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who actually built the World Wide Web (WWW) at CERN in 1989, has cited this essay directly as his inspiration. The HTTP protocol, the HTML standard, the entire system of clicking from one document to another that you use a thousand times a day, descends from an idea Bush sketched on paper before the bombs dropped on Japan. The third part of the essay is the part that hit me hardest. Bush argued that the user of the Memex would not just consume information. They would build their own trails through it. They would save sequences of documents that mattered to them. They would annotate them with their own notes. They would share their trails with other people. Other researchers would inherit those trails and extend them. He was describing personal annotation, social bookmarking, link sharing, the entire creator economy, and the collaborative editing model behind Wikipedia. He was describing it in 1945. He was describing it in plain English in a popular magazine. He even predicted that some users would build trails so valuable that they would be paid to produce them. He said professional trail-blazers would emerge as a new kind of expert, paid to organize and connect knowledge for others. This is, more or less, every newsletter writer, every YouTube explainer, every modern educator. He saw the entire economy of online knowledge work coming. The fourth thing he predicted is the one that should make you stop and put your phone down. Bush wrote that the Memex would extend the human brain. Not metaphorically. Literally. He argued that the machine would become an external memory that humans would access as easily as their own thoughts. The boundary between the brain and the machine would dissolve in normal use. People would stop thinking of the Memex as a separate device. They would think of it as part of how they thought. This is exactly what has happened to the smartphone in the last 15 years. You do not memorize phone numbers anymore. You do not memorize directions. You do not memorize most facts. You offload everything to a glass rectangle in your pocket and treat the rectangle as part of your own mind. Bush predicted this in 1945. He thought it would be a triumph for human civilization. The strangest part of reading the essay in 2026 is realizing how few people have actually read it. The essay is free online at The Atlantic. It is in the public domain. It is 13 pages. You can read it in 30 minutes. Steve Jobs read it. Doug Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse, said the essay was the foundation of his life's work. Tim Berners-Lee said it was the foundation of the web. T ed Nelson, who coined the word "hypertext," said it was the seed of his entire career. Every single major step of the digital revolution came from people who read this essay carefully and decided to build it. The man who wrote it died in 1974 at age 84. He lived just long enough to see the early internet take shape, and just early enough that he never saw it become what it is now. He never saw a personal computer in a home. He never used a search engine. He never followed a hyperlink in his life. He just wrote down, in 13 pages, the world the rest of us would spend 80 years building for him. You are reading these words right now on a device that is the Memex. You found this post by following an associative trail that did not exist when he wrote the essay. You will probably share this post with someone else and extend the trail. He saw all of this before he had any reason to believe it was possible. The blueprint for the world you are living in is one click away from you, and most people who use it every day have never read the original.

$ihtesham2005's tweet photo. An MIT engineer published a 13-page essay in The Atlantic magazine in July 1945 describing a desktop machine called the Memex. It would store every book, every photo, and every letter a person owned, let them browse the contents by clicking links between documents, and let them save trails of related thoughts. He invented the personal computer, hyperlinks, Wikipedia, and the World Wide Web in a single magazine article 50 years before any of it existed. I read it cover to cover in under an hour and walked away convinced I had just read the blueprint for the world I live in. His name was Vannevar Bush. The essay is called As We May Think. The context for what he wrote matters because it explains how a single person could see so far ahead. Vannevar Bush was not a futurist. He was not a science fiction writer. He was the most powerful scientist in the United States during World War II. He ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated the Manhattan Project, the development of radar, the proximity fuse, mass production of penicillin, and almost every other major American scientific breakthrough of the war. He had personally directed the work of 30,000 scientists. He reported directly to President Roosevelt. When the war was ending in the summer of 1945, he sat down to write something that had been forming in his head for years. The essay was published in The Atlantic in July 1945. It is 13 pages. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan three weeks later. Here is what he saw, and why one essay accidentally became a blueprint for the world I live in. His opening problem was specific. Scientists were producing more research than humans could read. The body of human knowledge was growing exponentially. Any single researcher had access to a tiny fraction of what was relevant to their work. Most discoveries were being lost not because they were wrong, but because nobody could find them. Bush called this the central problem of the post-war world. Information was abundant. Attention was scarce. The bottleneck was no longer producing knowledge. The bottleneck was retrieving it. He proposed a solution. He called it the Memex, short for memory extender. The Memex was a desk-sized machine. The user sat in front of it. It had screens. It had a keyboard. It used microfilm because the transistor had not been invented yet, but the function he described is exactly what a hard drive does today. The user could store every book they had ever read, every note they had ever taken, every photo they had ever owned, and every letter they had ever written. All of it accessible in seconds. That alone would have been a stunning prediction. He described a personal computer in 1945. There were no personal computers. The first electronic computer in the world, ENIAC, would not be unveiled for another year, and it weighed 30 tons and filled a room. He was describing a machine the size of a desk that could hold everything a single person knew. But the desktop machine was the small idea. The big idea is the part that almost nobody who quotes the essay actually understands. Bush argued that the way humans store information in books and libraries was wrong. Books are organized by category. Library shelves are organized by Dewey decimal. Any given fact has one position in the hierarchy. To find it, you have to know the category it lives in. He pointed out that this is not how the human brain works at all. The brain does not store information by category. The brain stores information by association. You think of your grandmother and immediately remember a song. The song reminds you of a vacation. The vacation reminds you of a meal. The meal reminds you of a person you have not thought about in years. Each thought triggers another, not because they share a category, but because they are linked. Bush proposed that information storage should imitate the brain. Documents should be linked to other documents directly. Click on one, jump to another. Click on a footnote, see the source. Click on a name, see the person's other writings. He called these connections "associative trails." This is hypertext. He invented it on paper in 1945. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who actually built the World Wide Web (WWW) at CERN in 1989, has cited this essay directly as his inspiration. The HTTP protocol, the HTML standard, the entire system of clicking from one document to another that you use a thousand times a day, descends from an idea Bush sketched on paper before the bombs dropped on Japan. The third part of the essay is the part that hit me hardest. Bush argued that the user of the Memex would not just consume information. They would build their own trails through it. They would save sequences of documents that mattered to them. They would annotate them with their own notes. They would share their trails with other people. Other researchers would inherit those trails and extend them. He was describing personal annotation, social bookmarking, link sharing, the entire creator economy, and the collaborative editing model behind Wikipedia. He was describing it in 1945. He was describing it in plain English in a popular magazine. He even predicted that some users would build trails so valuable that they would be paid to produce them. He said professional trail-blazers would emerge as a new kind of expert, paid to organize and connect knowledge for others. This is, more or less, every newsletter writer, every YouTube explainer, every modern educator. He saw the entire economy of online knowledge work coming. The fourth thing he predicted is the one that should make you stop and put your phone down. Bush wrote that the Memex would extend the human brain. Not metaphorically. Literally. He argued that the machine would become an external memory that humans would access as easily as their own thoughts. The boundary between the brain and the machine would dissolve in normal use. People would stop thinking of the Memex as a separate device. They would think of it as part of how they thought. This is exactly what has happened to the smartphone in the last 15 years. You do not memorize phone numbers anymore. You do not memorize directions. You do not memorize most facts. You offload everything to a glass rectangle in your pocket and treat the rectangle as part of your own mind. Bush predicted this in 1945. He thought it would be a triumph for human civilization. The strangest part of reading the essay in 2026 is realizing how few people have actually read it. The essay is free online at The Atlantic. It is in the public domain. It is 13 pages. You can read it in 30 minutes. Steve Jobs read it. Doug Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse, said the essay was the foundation of his life's work. Tim Berners-Lee said it was the foundation of the web. T ed Nelson, who coined the word "hypertext," said it was the seed of his entire career. Every single major step of the digital revolution came from people who read this essay carefully and decided to build it. The man who wrote it died in 1974 at age 84. He lived just long enough to see the early internet take shape, and just early enough that he never saw it become what it is now. He never saw a personal computer in a home. He never used a search engine. He never followed a hyperlink in his life. He just wrote down, in 13 pages, the world the rest of us would spend 80 years building for him. You are reading these words right now on a device that is the Memex. You found this post by following an associative trail that did not exist when he wrote the essay. You will probably share this post with someone else and extend the trail. He saw all of this before he had any reason to believe it was possible. The blueprint for the world you are living in is one click away from you, and most people who use it every day have never read the original.$

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

3 months ago

@duolingo you likely hear this all the time, but it's worth emphasizing: your constant, no-opt-out "upgrades" to the family plan piss me off every time. please turn them off.

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

4 months ago

@buildwithduda I don't know what you've done to https://t.co/VFI4HcfbSn, but I can't find the sites I built to edit them. And you're very hard to reach.

Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

4 months ago

@poetengineer__ Happy to talk about any of this. I have 28 years behind me happily curating a single mind map. It's extremely useful.

Who to follow

John Hagel

@jhagel

Work and play on the edge - views breathtaking, experiences deep and satisfying, learning limitless. Please read The Journey Beyond Fear https://t.co/mlMqslkFID

Michael Parekh

@MParekh

Ex-Goldman Sachs partner. Internet analyst since 1994. I've covered every tech wave. This AI one is different. Daily takes → AI: Reset to Zero ↓

Doc Searls

@dsearls

Books: https://t.co/e3wRYgXFZv, @Cluetrain. Blog: https://t.co/wxYeU3TPID. Involvements: @VRM @CustomerCommons @TWiT (FLOSS) @Reality2cast @ucsbcits @BKCharvard @Ostrom_Workshop

Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

4 months ago

@poetengineer__ @poetengineer__ , you may enjoy a talk with @john_under, who designed the working UI that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report.

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

4 months ago

@poetengineer__ For anyone wondering how visualization might be useful or practical, try wandering here: https://t.co/SV4TqGhuRt

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

4 months ago

@poetengineer__ Love this! I'm not frequenting X much (because: Elon), so a friend pointed me to your post. I've added you to my 28-year-old Brain, thus: https://t.co/eCWnHf7WVB

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

5 months ago

Dear @ScanSnap_US: your hardware is super, but your software is barely tolerable. I'm doing one of your obstreperous software updates now, which are worse than any other app I use, and it almost makes me want to uninstall.

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jerrymichalski retweeted

The Green Party

@TheGreenParty

5 months ago

Help us make hope normal again. Join the Green Party now.

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

10 months ago

Check out my latest article: People are More Trustworthy Than We Think They Are https://t.co/DxwLJZt79N via @LinkedIn

jerrymichalski retweeted

Adrian Bott @Cavalorn

over 10 years ago

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

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jerrymichalski retweeted

Governor Newsom Press Office

@GovPressOffice

11 months ago

DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GCN

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jerrymichalski retweeted

The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

12 months ago

How did we get here?

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Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

12 months ago

@actblue Anyone asking for money without offering new ideas *first* I reply to with "stop." Soon it'll be marking all those messages as spam, in the hopes of gumming up your works. I think quite a few progressives are pissed like I'm pissed. (part 3, last one)

Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

12 months ago

@actblue More to the point, I'm at a state relative to the US Democratic Party where I won't send a dime their/your way until I hear from a Democrat or three with new ideas and a very new path to regaining traction and leadership. The old model is hopelessly broken. (part 2)

Time for good trouble 🇺🇦 @jerrymichalski

12 months ago

@actblue You appear to have sold my phone number to every Democrat running in every race. My messaging inbox runneth over with their solicitations, to the point where it impedes my normal messaging. (part 1)