Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Though the Mundaneum was shuttered after the Nazis invaded Belgium, a young grad student in the sixties discovered it and now it's a museum that no one ever visits (probably because the Wiki tells you all you need to know).

“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”

Card catalog!

More futurist over-reaching: The Telectroscope as early YouTube.

[New York Times]

Even without accepting futurist Ray Kurzweil's theory of an imminent singularity (in which technological progression advances so quickly that 60-year-old Kurzweil will still be around when scientists learn to indefinitely prolong life), looking at how far we got in the last century (punch cards to iPhones), it seems like it'll take under a hundred years to make an implantable Internet-ready device connected directly to the brain.

As for spam, I'd like to assume there'd be more of a lock on that before I had the Internet in my brain, but of course there won't. But that's a fair trade-off for being able to look up anything. Just today I needed to check IM logs to remind myself who the hell I was talking to; I could really use a way to instantly look up people at parties. Not in a creepy way; just to remember all their damn names.

Ladies and gentlemen, various Silicon Valley millionaires present, The Seastanding Institue, "an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities 'with diverse social, political, and legal systems.'" In other words, a project funded in part by PayPal founder Peter Thiel to create a libertarian utopia made of "vast clumps" of seafaring homesteads in international waters. And, of course, they've got a 300-page manifesto. They're not nuts, of course! Not like all those other people who want to start Utopian ocean micronations!

The brains behind the project are Google engineer Patri Friedman and former Sun Microsystems programmer Wayne Gamlich. The chairman of their "institute" is with Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. ("There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," he says. Good luck!)

They plan to build "scaled-down" oil rigs called "spar platforms," only with houses on top instead of oil stuff. It's basically a big concrete tube with ballasts on the bottom. Once they build many of the spar platforms, with all their private money, they will have a lawless libertarian utopia ruled by enlightened self-interest, and money. They will support themselves with "aquaculture or tourism," which means fishing, probably?

We just need to quote a block of this now because it's too blindly stupid to summarize:

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," [Friedman] said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.

"You can change your government without having to leave your house," he said.

Long story short, Peter Theil will give you half-a-million dollars for any batshit scheme you come up with. Let's all try it! I am going to build a giant Libertarian cloud city. The king and queen will be clones of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand I've been working on. Also, it will have lasers, and talking monkey sidekicks for everyone.

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies [Wired]