A Linkless Internet

From the essay:

"The foundational idea behind PageRank is that a ‘web page is important if it is pointed to by other important pages’. Brin and Page realised that the web is not just a lexical environment but a social one, in which links correspond to prestige, and the sites at the centre of the networks tended to be the most reliable ones."

"Early plans for what became the hypertext protocol of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web were presented as tools for documenting how human minds tend to move from idea to idea, connecting external stimuli and internal reflections. Links treat creativity as the work of remediating and remaking, which is foregrounded in the slogan for Google Scholar: ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’"