This week’s WIRED’s Classics newsletter unpacks stevenbjohnson’s 2013 piece about the lost art of hypertext. It may not have been the future of fiction, but in a way, it’s still with us.
It all starts on Wikipedia. Maybe you look up, say, the men’s marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics. That leads you to aarticle about the “strangest” marathon ever. The games that year were tied to the St. Louis World’s Fair, and all of a sudden you’re reading about that, then about world’s fairs in general, then about their influence on urban planning, then about lakefront parks in Chicago, and before you know it, you’ve lost your sense of time and the sun has gone down.
At this point, clicking from link to link to read a sequence of stories is a fixture of life on the internet. For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people also thought that stories might be written this way. Some techno-optimists became convinced that hypertext—“a branching path of overlapping narratives and detours that the reader navigated through the then-novel convention of clicking on textual links”—would be the future of fiction.
In a way, then, the lost art of hypertext persists in each of our digital lives, every day and all the time. What was the last truly great internet rabbit hole you fell down? What sorts of unexpected places did it lead you? Let me know in
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