Recently, @ned the CEO of Steemit Inc. changed the location listed on his profile from "A vision in a dream." to something else, but what is the significance of "A vision in a dream."?
After an opium-influnced night in 1797 the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed a poem titled "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" in which he describes Xanadu, the summer palace of the Chinese Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
https://web.archive.org/web/20170709233230/steemit.com/@ned
So why does it matter that @ned makes reference to Xanadu? Ted Nelson is the man who coined the word Hypertext and he's been working on Project Xanadu since 1960. It's mission statement is clear: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." Watch the video from 2013 below to hear Ted talk about his visionary brainchild.
This may not look a lot like Steemit in its current form, but when you compare it's accomplishments to the original 17 rules of Xanadu, the picture becomes strikingly clear.
Original 17 rules
- Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
☑ STEEM witness servers satisfy this rule. - Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
☑ STEEM is open source and anyone can run it independently. - Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
☑ This is true of STEEM. - Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
☑ Yup - Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
☑ Check. - Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
☑ Pretty much. - Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
☑ Yes - Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
☐ STEEM does not have this rule satisfied. - Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
☐ STEEM does not have this rule satisfied, but hopefully will in the future. - Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
☑ Definitely. - Every document can have secure access controls.
☐ STEEM does not have this rule satisfied, but hopefully will in the future. However, nothing stops you from posting encrypted information to the blockchain. - Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
☑ We got this covered. - Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
☐ This would be a nice feature. - Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
☑ Blockchain FTW! - Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
☑ True in a way. - Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
☐ Blockchain is publicly auditable. - The Xanadu client–server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.
☑ STEEM is open source.
12 out of 17 isn't bad and is definitely enough to make me suspect this isn't coincidence. Now let's checkout a Javascript version of Xanadu Space released a few years ago found here: http://xanadu.com/xanademos/MoeJusteOrigins.html
I've found a tutorial on github written by ldodds titled "How to make your own Xanadu demo" and it looks pretty easy. Adopting it to becoming a STEEM front end wouldn't be to bad of a task for the right developer. I see no problem with inserting "Xanalinks" into posts and having the custom front end display them in full Xanadu Docuverse glory. Finally we can be free from the constraints of paper that have held back the human imagination for a millennium!
If any of this intrigues you and you'd like to work on making it a reality please feel free to contact me! I also think I should contact Ted Nelson and see if we can get him on Steemit. I think he'd love it!
I'll leave you with some links for further reading and research:
http://xanadu.com/
http://hyperland.net/
http://alph.io/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson
https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
https://web.archive.org/web/19970507103350/http://www.datamation.com:80/PlugIn/issues/bestof/xanadu.html
