[Home](https://tednelsonfan.com/) / [Ideas](https://tednelsonfan.com/ideas/) / Intertwingularity: there are no subjects # Intertwingularity: there are no subjects A 1974 portmanteau for the fact that knowledge does not come in boxes. Life magazine's 1945 illustration of Vannevar Bush's memex, the desk of linked microfilm that Nelson names among the origins of his ideas. Photo: Time Inc. (Life magazine) (public domain), Wikimedia Commons. 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity); [Wikipedia, Computer Lib/Dream Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines); [his OneLiners page, 1999](https://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html). Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his. ## More ideas - ### Hypertext: writing that branches The word is his, from 1963. So is the idea that a text need not be a line. - ### Project Xanadu: the original hypertext project Founded 1960. Still not finished, and still the most complete alternative to the Web anyone has designed. - ### Transclusion: the same content, knowably, in more than one place Not a copy. A window onto the original, with the origin still attached. - ### The docuverse and tumblers: one library, every version The universe of documents, and an address for every character in it. - ### ZigZag: a spreadsheet with as many dimensions as you need Conceived at Datapoint in 1981; patented in 2001; built by a small team ever since. --- An independent fan and tribute site celebrating the work of Ted Nelson. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or the official site of Ted Nelson or Project Xanadu. His real sites are xanadu.com and hyperland.com.