michael_nielsen

"As We May Think" seems to me like the writings of Locke or Montesquieu: a set of ideas that decisively influenced major parts of our cultural operating system. In one case, the US Constitution (& the many others influenced), in the other, the web & computer software more broadly

... Stallman on free software (the GNU manifesto and the GPL), @timberners_lee on "Information Management: a Proposal" (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html …), and perhaps Satoshi on Bitcoin (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf  ) - time will tell.

In particular, Engelbart, Kay, and @timberners_lee all return to the theme of information overload, in different ways. @timberners_lee's title is "Information Management: A Proposal".

Of course, information overload is intrinsically an insoluble problem. Understanding is so valuable that we will always push ourselves to our limits in managing information, no matter how good our tools become, & feel uncomfortable as we push up against them.

Better tools expand the limits of the information we can manage, but do little to change our desire to go still further, because that desire is only very weakly a function of the quantity of information we can currently manage.

I say information overload is "insoluble", but that's a pessimistic way of framing it. A much better way is that it's an open-ended problem: we can always do better. I won't be surprised if many grand vision documents of the future will also focus on that problem.