Judith Shulevitz has written an article called Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore in The Atlantic, about social engineering, and the ways that we have learned to perform social engineering on ourselves, and allowed our employers to engineer us to their requirements.

In the article she mentions an historical experiment conducted in the USSR, that ought to garner more attention than it does.

Last week I thought about political novel writing, and reminded myself of that trilogy I had read in the eighties. I could not remember the name of the trilogy, the individual novels that comprised it, or the author. I tried googling but could not find a query that would reveal what I wanted.

Then a series of serendipitous events unfolded.

This paper addresses the question: is there a politics of representation concerning digital knowledge schemes?

I will look at the history of hypertext, and locate it within a specific trend in cultural politics. I will then show how some of the ambitions of the hypertext visionaries, specifically Ted Nelson, have been realised in general terms in the world wide web, and in educational terms in a software called CmapTools.