The history of technology and globalization are the expansion and connection of knowledge. All written knowledge, from the Rosetta Stone, to the Talmud, to the modern academic paper, are graph structure. Yet, 21st century digital media still imitates the linear scroll.

Sasseen writes that “there is an immersive quality to the internet, the Wikipedia rabbit holes and the endless link trees, that the affectless writing that has become the house style of online life fails to capture... It’s in the sorting of the information, the understanding of how this information gets filtered into the very structures of our lang... See more

I propose The Liminal Web began to crystallise in the wake of a number of podcasts and youtube channels which emerged between 2015 and 2020. Each of these platforms explored a very similar array of topics and platformed a similar collection of guests and in doing so created a distinct network of thinkers and ideas.