Intertwingularity: there are no subjects

A 1974 portmanteau for the fact that knowledge does not come in boxes.

Everything is deeply intertwingled, Nelson wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974. In an important sense there are no subjects at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly. The word is intertwined crossed with intermingled, and it names the reason hierarchies fail: any filing system that puts a thing in one place has already lost most of what the thing is connected to.

The claim is against hierarchy, sequence and the folder. His OneLiners page puts it as a joke: calling a hierarchical directory a folder doesn't change its nature any more than calling a prison guard a counselor. Underneath the joke is a consistent position held since 1965, that the file structure should be built for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate, and that the paper simulation most software settles for (pages, folders, one-way links) is a failure of imagination.

Others have taken the word up. Peter Morville used it in Ambient Findability (2005) and titled a 2014 book Intertwingled; David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (2008) argues the same case for the digital disorder. Chapman University named its 2014 celebration of his work Intertwingled, and Springer's 2015 volume of essays about him carries the title too.

For a site about him it is a warning. Every page here files him under one heading (biography, ideas, works) that he would say does not exist. The cross-links are the apology.

Sources: Wikipedia, Intertwingularity; Wikipedia, Computer Lib/Dream Machines; his OneLiners page, 1999. Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his.