(A song for the future of text)
[Verse 1]
First we learned to surf between the networks —
Signals riding open protocols,
Then TBL gave the world a web,
Linked us all with open thread.
The greatest gifts to human thought
Since the page, since the press, since the word was set.
Now we need to link what’s in them —
Connect the objects of what we know.
But even gifts this wide and deep
Have edges where the light falls short.
Knowledge trapped in frozen pages,
Bold text masquerading as a heading,
Citations dressed in formatting —
No machine can read the meaning.
HTML alive and breathing,
But it drifts and shifts and disappears,
Servers down, the stylesheet’s missing,
Your thinking — gone within the year.
[Pre-Chorus]
Neither one can carry
What you built while building what you wrote —
The map you made before the territory,
The structure underneath the notes.
[Chorus]
Fold it flat for transport,
Let it travel light,
Every layer still holds
When you unfold it right.
A zip file full of text files —
That’s the floor, not the ceiling.
Open standard, open future,
Origami feeling.
[Verse 2]
Not a revolution — a discipline,
Fewer elements, not more,
Semantic HTML inside a package,
EPUB with an open door.
Headings that know they’re headings,
Concepts marked as what they are,
BibTeX and CSL-JSON riding
Quietly beneath each star.
[Pre-Chorus]
The wing won’t lift you by itself —
It’s the speed of interaction.
Too slow and you’re a car on a runway,
Too rigid for the action.
[Chorus]
Fold it flat for transport,
Let it travel light,
Every layer still holds
When you unfold it right.
Apple Books, a text editor,
An AI, or XR —
Same file serves them all,
Near and far and far.
[Bridge]
Doug said think of skiing downhill —
The mountain doesn’t wait.
If you can’t interact fast enough
You’ll fall before you’re great.
So shape the document to interact,
Addressable and clean,
A single export carries
Every way it can be seen:
A colleague clicks, the citations import,
An AI reads the topology,
A student fifty years from now
Walks through your epistemology.
[Verse 3]
Vint called it self-contained self-awareness —
A document that knows its name,
No cloud, no database, no proprietary prayer,
It explains its own terrain.
Forty-seven million galaxies mapped
Across the universe we’ve charted —
Should we not map knowledge just as well
Here where thinking started?
[Verse 4]
The painter cares about the paint,
The sculptor feels the stone,
The photographer knows that print
Gives light a different tone.
The medium is not a minor thing —
Material has a material say
In the quality of what you make,
In what survives the day.
So why should knowledge workers settle
For formats blind to thought?
The medium we think in shapes
The thinking that gets caught.
[Final Chorus]
Fold it flat for transport,
Ready to unfold,
The thinking, not just text,
Is what the format holds.
Not to replace what exists —
But to let documents carry more
Of what their authors know,
Of what their authors know.
[Outro — spoken or sung softly]
A paper’s still a paper.
It still prints. It still reads.
But now it holds a knowledge space
Folded in its seams.
Revolutions seem impossible
Before they happen…
And inevitable
After they succeed.
[spoken]
The future of text lives in the future of the substrate…