You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media

1. The original Xanadu (Coleridge's) came billed as "a Vision in a Dream," designated doubly unreal and thus easily aligned with our era of "operational simulation" where, strawberry fields, nothing is "real" in the first place since no place is really "first" (Baudrillard, Simulations 10). But all great dreams invite revisions, and these days we find ourselves perpetually on the re-make. So here is the new Xanadu(TM), the universal hypertext system proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson--a vision which, unlike its legendary precursor, cannot be integrated into the dream park of the hyperreal. Hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse or implosion where referential or "grounded" utterance becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the imaginary. We construct our representational systems not in serial relation to indisputably "real" phenomena, but rather in recursive and multiple parallel, "mapping on to different co-ordinate systems" (Pynchon 159). Maps derive not from territories but from other map-making enterprises: all the world's a simulation.