The Unseen Cartographer: On Vannevar Bush and the Path Not Taken

In 1945, as the world was stitching itself back together from a global war, a man named Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think.” He was not a webmaster, nor could he have conceived of a URL. He was an engineer, a presidential advisor, and a director of the Manhattan Project. Yet, in his vision of a machine called the Memex, we find the ghost of a web we almost built—a web structured not by addresses, but by association.

Bush’s Memex was a desk of screens and reels of microfilm, a personal library of all one’s books, records, and communications. Its most revolutionary feature, however, was the ‘trail.’ A user could create a permanent link between two disparate items—say, a scientific paper on bird migration and a personal sketch of a sparrow seen in the garden. This trail was not merely a hyperlink; it was a curated path of thought, a sequence of connections that formed a narrative or an argument. It was a personal, associative site structure, etched not in server code, but in the user’s own curiosity.

We built a different web. Ours is a kingdom of the canonical, a world obsessed with the singular, authoritative address. We spend our days as gardeners and stonemasons, pruning URLs and laying perfect paths of internal links for others to follow. Our structure is one of hierarchy and taxonomy, a grand library where every book must have its designated shelf. Bush’s vision was the antithesis of this. His structure was entirely internal and deeply personal. The only ‘redirects’ were the jumps of one’s own mind, made tangible.

There is a profound melancholy in this comparison. Our modern architecture, for all its power, often feels like a map drawn by a central cartographer for all to use. It is brilliant, but it is also rigid. Bush imagined a web where every user was their own cartographer, drawing trails that meandered according to their unique logic. A link was not a tether between two fixed points, but a brushstroke in a larger painting of understanding. The ‘site’ was not a place you visited, but a path you walked, and you could blaze a new trail every time.

We chose the road of the universal address, and it has brought us a connected world. But sometimes, in the quiet work of structuring a site, I wonder about the path we did not take. I wonder about the weight of our collective decision to prioritize the canonical over the associative, the permanent URL over the ephemeral trail. We gained a global, navigable library. We may have lost, however, the intimate, personal footpath—the ability to structure not for everyone, but for oneself, creating a web not of locations, but of pure, unmediated thought.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: