“Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.” – Lord Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad-gita, Chapter 7.7
In his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell reminds us of the Greek myth of the labyrinth. To fulfill his quest, Theseus needed to go into the labyrinth to kill the fearsome Minotaur – and then, importantly, he needed to get out afterwards. To do that, he used a ball of thread, gifted to him by Ariadne. A bit of string is a trifling little thing, but for Theseus, it was the difference between hope and despair.
The word “sutra” – you’ve probably heard of the Kama Sutra – literally means thread. A Mangalsutra, for example, means auspicious thread, and is the name for the ceremonial necklace that is worn by hundreds of millions of Indian women.
Throughout this essay, I will be linking to lots and lots of my own Twitter threads, mostly for illustrative purposes. I don’t expect anybody to actually read all of them– although you could, if you really wanted to. The point is really to help you see how my own hyperthread-web works, and most importantly, to help you see the hyperthread-web that could be, and how we haven’t even scratched the surface of what hypertext and the world-wide-web allow us to do.
What is the one thing that I’m trying to do with this essay? I want to persuade them that hyperthreading is Good, and that maybe everyone should give it a try. Perhaps not everybody has the disposition to be a hyperthreading maniac like me, but I think everyone can benefit at least a little bit from it.
What are some clever and fun things I should definitely do in this essay?
✅ reference Bhagavad Gita “pearls strung on thread”
✅ reference joseph campbell and the labyrinth
✅ reference ancient palm leaf scrolls
✅ talk about spiders and how they use their webs to think
✅ reference bret victor’s and seeing spaces
✅ talk about assembling the mind-city
✅ Read a little bit about spinsters, loom weavers?
✅ Talk about Magic Junkyards – Roam is the exciting app of the moment, and I have certainly
I have a fantasy for a user interface. Maybe we’ll call it “Cards”.
I love language and I’d like to take a moment to think about the history of the words related to threads.
What is hyperthreading? Threading a needle.
Why is hyperthreading good? Just as Theseus used a ball of thread to help guide himself out of an impossible labyrinth, you can use a “ball of thread” to navigate the endless complexity and infinite, churning torment of information overload in the world today.
Done properly, a hyperthread web can function like a spider’s web. Spiders use their webs as a part of their extended cognition. The web is like a “Seeing Space” (*airhorns* yo whatup Bret Victor), the spider uses the vibrations on the web to know what is going on.
Hyperthreading can be social. It doesn’t necessarily have to be, you can be a relatively isolated hyperthreader. @ultimape is an example of someone whose thread-web is somewhat opaque, ie he’s using it for his own purposes.
Twitter user @MenanderSoter has been doing some interesting graphs of groups of people on Twitter
I would say that the ribbonfarm blogchain is an example of threading
If you get sufficiently loose with definitions, everything is threads. A sentence is a thread of words. Albums and playlists are both threads of songs. When you do a Google search, or any other kind of search (in your app notes, for example), the search results page offer you a thread of results. A thread is really any list.
Lists are a very fundamental form of information
Thinking is easy, information architecture is hard.
Aaron (who recently made his own Ribbonfarm debut) wrote an essay in May 2019 called The Spreading of Threading, which saves me a lot of effort here. He points out that Marc Andreessen was one of the early popularizers of the twitter thread format, back when they were called tweetstorms, and before Twitter allowed for threading functionality. I would say that Marc was a threader, but not a hyperthreader. (Not trying to be a terminology policing-killjoy, but I think it’s a helpful distinction.)
The cool thing about threaded cards of information – and this is true both for ancient palm leaf manuscripts and bible verses as it is for the latest twitter threads – is that…
There are many ways to think about threads, just there are many ways to think about frames (perhaps a story for another essay).
Is this an essay about note-taking and becoming a better note-taker? In one of my threads I hypothesize that “if you take a prolific amount of notes over a long period of time, you eventually develop a perspective that you cannot gain any other way.”
When did tabbed browsing become a thing? Is this relevant?
How do you become a hyperthreader? What does a hyperthreader even mean? Should you want to become a hyperthreader? Why not just “threader”?
Well, first of all, “hyper-” sounds cool. As a suffix, technically means “word-forming element meaning “over, above, beyond,” and often implying “exceedingly, to excess,” from Greek hyper (prep. and adv.) “over, beyond, overmuch, above measure”. In mythology, Hyperion was a Greek Titan…
Borges loved the labyrinth
One of my favorite Ribbonfarm essays, The Rhetoric of The Hyperlink, was written by @vgr over a decade ago in 2009. I suppose to write this article I now need to read and think about Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article, As We May Think. But maybe it would be best if I wrote as much as I could first before I read it. After all, I have a sort of casual, “natural” threader’s instinct, honed from lots of practice.
Quote tweets allow you to “do threads in reverse”
RoamResearch and bidirectional links
Assemble the mindcity
Conclusion
My favorite essay of all time is still The Information: How the Internet gets inside us, written by Adam Gopnik in 2011. When I first read it, I was struck by the point that technology has evolved faster than magic (since the wizards of Harry Potter still used spellbooks rather than tablet devices). It brilliantly points out that every generation complains that new information technology “produced a restless, fractured attention”. Now, when I re-read it, I find myself struck by how it pretty much anticipated the inevitability of the culture wars that we’re currently going through – because that’s what happens every time a new medium emerges.