Hyperlinks made the internet what it is today but AI and megaplatforms could spell its extinction
Wikipedia would be no fun without the rabbit hole, and the internet without links is just an online book written by a robot.
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The original idea for the world wide web emerged in a flurry of scientific thought around the end of World War II. It began with a hypothetical machine called the “memex”, proposed by US Office of Scientific Research and Development head Vannevar Bush in an article entitled “As We May Think”, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945.
The memex would help us access all knowledge, instantaneously and from our desks. It had a searchable index, and documents were linked together by the “trails” made by users when they associated one document with another. Bush imagined the memex using microfiche and photography, but conceptually it was almost the modern internet.
The true value in this early idea was the links: if you wanted to explore more, there was an easy, built-in way to do that. Anyone who has spent hours following random links on Wikipedia and learning about things they never knew interested them will recognise this value. (There is of course a Wikipedia page about this phenomenon.)
Links have made the web what it is. But as social media platforms, generative AI tools and even search engines are trying harder to keep users on their site or app, the humble link is starting to look like an endangered species.
