Vannevar Bush, the creator of the Memex in 1939, was apparently a big proponent of personal computing (40 years before personal computers even existed). He wanted to build a tool that could put a whole library at the fingertips of any person. In his 1939 draft he talked about using to tool to associate two entries, so each would always link to the other. Sounds like a second brain! And later he even said as much: > The human mind... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain... The speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures \[are] awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. > Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945), in Nyce and Kahn, eds., _From Memex to Hypertext_, 101-2 --- Reading about Claude Shannon's fundamental theory of communication (p87) makes me want to do a similar thing with terraform orchestration. Holy shit, this immediately clicked with something I was telling Marc today. It was about how the bootstrap's "domain features" should be one layer of abstraction above the current set of roots and modules. What if we had a bootstrap _provider_ that gave us resource types like `org`, `globe`, `domain`, `environment`, and `region`? Creating such a resource would result in terraform code being added to the bootstrap repo, and the resource's id would be its location in the repo. The provider would release new versions whenever the bootstrap needed new roots. The one drawback so far is that applying the provider resource configuration would not create all the underlying resources. Oh, that and the fact that each bootstrap root already has an AWS provider and backend. Those would have to migrate up the stack and that get neat with combining state files into something huge. --- Another bit inspired me, in the context of [[Dynamicland]] (emphasis mine): > Just look at E-mail, the Arpanet mailing lists, and all the rest, \[Licklider] said. Just look at the on-line communities that seemed to come into being wherever there was a network. Users of a modern computing system weren't just passive consumers; **the medium itself drew them in. It gave them a forum, it made them active participants, it gave them a stake in deciding their own destiny.** So if you could somehow expose ordinary people to this medium—if you could somehow get the technology out of the laboratory and into the mass market so they could experience it firsthand—then the ordinary people might just create this embodiment of equality, community, and freedom on their own. (p 401)