The inevitable plenitude of the exhausted possibility. For a time I had two assistants, Chris and Alex, who were like biblical brothers. One could design and one could tinker, one had eyes one had fingers. They vied for my favor (O David!) as perhaps my own children do (O Eamon! O Jeremiah!).
Once in the early days of the second generation of hypertext (as of this writing, the web makes a third), we were talking about what quaintly was known as the navigation problem (Odysseus!) and how the reader could be lost in the plenitude. Alex had solutions which, I think, involved buttons on buttons (the hypertext Mummer, or what Grahame Weinbren calls “the pit of so-called ‘multi-media,’ with its scenes of unpleasant ‘buttons,’ ‘hot spots,’ and ‘menus.’ ”) Chris wasn’t fazed:
“In the future it won’t be a problem,’ he said, “because everything will be linked.”
He hadn’t heard of Susan Sontag’s notion of pornography as death. (What is left when every surface is tongued?) The web.