The web’s too often a lemon these days, but every now and again there’s a fountain of lemonade, and this one of those days. Thanks Angela for sharing 😉
I’m going to share something wild. It’s the story of the internet that we almost had. A forgotten dream, really, that was imagined decades ago.
But it might just hold the key to solving one of the biggest problems we have online right now: How creators get paid by AI.
Think about this for a second.
We’ve got these incredible AIs that are basically vacuuming up the entire sum of human knowledge from the web.
But that’s kicked up a massive, massive question.
When an AI learns from your Substack, or your exclusive article, your song, your art, your video, who pays you for that?
And what if I told you the answer to that super modern, futuristic problem wasn’t some new tech, but an idea someone had more than 60 years ago?
Yeah, way before the internet we know was even a thing.
And that gets us to the internet’s big fundamental problem.
It’s the very thing one visionary tried so hard to prevent all those years ago.
A world where our collective knowledge gets scraped up with absolutely no payment or even credit going back to the people who created it in the first place.
Sound familiar?
Ideas just being ripped away from their creators. WTF?
Then copied and pasted over and over again, losing all their original meaning.
And the creators, they get nothing. No credit and definitely no compensation. we have a system that just doesn’t value the act of creating things online.
So to find a way out of this mess, we have to go back. Way back.
We need to talk about this guy, a philosopher and tech visionary named Ted Nelson and his totally radical, almost mythical idea, Project Xanadu.
Now, to really understand how far ahead of his time this guy was, just look at this. Nelson dreamed up his global docuverse in 1960.
That is a full nine years before two computers sent the first ever message on the ARPANET and an incredible 29 years before the World Wide Web was even invented.
And Nelson has never, ever been quiet about how he feels.
To him, the web we use every single day isn’t some great achievement. It’s the cheap knockoff that replaced his far, far better idea.
So what was his grand vision?
Well, Xanadu was supposed to be this universal library where every single document was connected with permanent, unbreakable, two-way links.
You could actually see how ideas were connected to each other.
And here’s the killer feature.
It had a system for micropayments built right in from the very beginning to automatically pay creators any time their work was quoted or used.
So that was the dream, but that’s not the web we got, so let’s talk about that.
In Nelson’s eyes, what Tim Berners-Lee built was just a stripped down, oversimplified shadow of what Xanadu was supposed to be.
You know that thing we click on a hundred times a day? The hyperlink? Nelson absolutely hated it. He called them jump links. Just a blind, one-way leap into another document.
To him, it was like imitating paper, not inventing a whole new way for ideas to connect. It was a failure of imagination.
Xanadu promised two-way links that could never break, so you’d always have context and credit. The web? It gave us one-way links that break all the time.
Hello, 404 not found.
Xanadu also had payments built in. The web gave us free. Paid for by ads, and all the problems that have flowed from that.
Basically, Nelson’s whole point was that we got was completely backward.
He wanted computers to be organised like the human mind, messy, interconnected, associative.
Instead, we got a web that forces us to think like a computer with these rigid files and folders.
He literally sees modern computing as a prison for our minds.
Righto. So if Xanadu’s so brilliant, why aren’t we using it right now?
Well, the simple answer is, it was an idea that showed up decades before the technology needed to actually build it existed.
The web won because it was simple, maybe too simple, but it worked on the computers of the day.
Xanadu, on the other hand, was an absolute beast.
It needed processing power, storage, and networking that was basically science fiction back then.
And most importantly, there was just no way to make those tiny frictionless micropayments that the whole system relied on.
Which brings us to this little number, 402.
What on earth could that mean? Get ready for this, because it’s a pretty wild piece of internet trivia.
It’s the HTTP status code 402 Payment Required.
And what’s so fascinating is that Tim Berners-Lee himself actually put this code into the web’s original design.
It was a direct shout out to Nelson’s vision, but it was never, ever used.
Why?
A web browser can’t exactly have a credit card, and there was just no way for it to send and receive money.
But that was then. And now things have changed. A lot.
Which brings us all the way back to our first question. Has technology finally caught up to Ted Nelson’s 60-year-old dream? What’s different now?
Well, the good news, is it’s just about everything.
In 2009, we got internet native money.
In 2014, we got stable dollars that live on blockchains.
And in 2025, we’re looking at blockchains that can handle tons of transactions, almost instantly, for next to nothing.
All the pieces are finally here.
And here’s the bottom line.
The one thing, the main technical hurdle that stopped Xanadu dead in its tracks - the inability to do tiny, fast, cheap payments - that problem is solved.
The system of commerce that Nelson was dreaming about is now for the first time actually possible.
His original vision of a fairer, more connected digital world, it’s within our grasp.
Which leaves us with one last huge question.
Is it maybe time to look back at that mad loony dream from the Sixties?
Should we now be try to rebuild our digital world on these old, almost forgotten principles?
Well, it’s happening.
A few months ago, I reported how $70 billion cyber security giant Cloudflare is was dusting off 402 to make AI’s pay. I had them on the pod.
Then I featured the CEO launching in with some choice commentary and declaring himself the new AI Sheriff who make make the thieving varmints pay.
Microsoft has also begun quietly signing deals with major publishers using the same pay-for-use protocols. It even has a name now: Pay per crawl.
Whether this becomes the way creators are paid for their contribution to the web is yet to be seen.
But if a 60-year-old idea is still animating the biggest brains at the largest most innovative companies, there must be something in it.
Don’t you think?
