Hyperlinks are about to become extremely unimportant, I think. “Pretty soon” you are just going to have intelligent agents which are going to collect and organize data for you. What would be the role of a traditional hyperlink within that? It would be totally morphed, because you would be handed a set of thematically interlocking texts distilled down into a digest of information (like Wikipedia), which you could then take any number of standard actions on any individual element of it.

In other words, you’ll soon be able to navigate through information in any direction, zooming in, out, etc. Working with text is going to become more like working in Photoshop or Illustrator: editing layers, expanding, drilling down, etc. Hyperlinks, in an information-usage like that come to mean something entirely different: they could be thought of almost like macros, set actions taken upon data to achieve a specific result. You could trade datawake narratives with other people, so that they could experience a given set of data nodes in a roughly similar way as you.

So to rephrase that then: hyperlinks become more of a narrative record (a script) of actions taken upon data, as opposed to a way of organizing data. Cause really, what a stupid way to organize data from a computer’s perspective. It’s obviously a natural and totally human way of doing things, but there are infinite other options available to a computer that is seeking to derive patterns out of data…