on linkage and editorials

Interrupting my hiatus for a quick thought:

Return with me, children, to the days before the recent election. Jason Kottke and John Gruber really liked this brief NYT editorial. And “really liked” is an understatement. Kottke: “Each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! [Effing]! Receipts!”

Well … it depends on what you mean by “receipts.” The point of the links is not to say “Here’s proof that Trump lies” but rather “Here’s proof that we have been saying that Trump lies.” As Nick Heer rightly points out, each one of these links is to previous pieces, largely (in fact if not always in name) opinion pieces, in the Times itself — and the Times is notoriously reluctant to link outside its domain. I think of this particular editorial simply as a pushback to those critics on the left who think the Times hasn’t been tough enough on Trump. It’s not really an attack on Trump, it’s a self-defense move: Don’t blame us, we endorsed Kodos.

What Kottke and Gruber think a powerful piece of rhetoric I think of as a sign of exhaustion. When I was a teenager and my father got exasperated with me, which happened quite often, he would screw up his eyes and swing his head back and forth and chant “I have told you and told you and told you and told you…” That would go on for quite some time. I was afraid enough of his occasional violence that it usually took me a while to realize that he had gotten into told-you double digits — at which point it finally got funny, because he was working off steam and was therefore unlikely to hit me.

That’s what the Times editorial sounds like to me. “We have told you and told you and told you and told you….” I.e.: What good would it possibly do us for to say it all again? If you’re a person who takes your opinions from the Editorial Board of the Times, or finds your home-grown opinions faithfully mirrored there, you may well find that editorial powerful. I found it comical.

But something that Gruber says in his post about hypertext is great, and vividly expresses why I love the kind of writing I’m doing right now. That editorial, he says,

brought to mind how social media has largely kneecapped true hypertextual writing by not enabling it. You can, of course, add links to web pages in social media posts on any of the various basically-the-same-concept-as-Twitter platforms like X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon, but you do so by pasting raw URLs into posts. (Instagram, by far the world’s most popular such social network, doesn’t even let you paste hyperlinked URLs into the text of posts.) The only links that work like web links, where readers can just tap them and “go there” are @username mentions. On social media you write in plain un-styled text and just paste URLs after you describe them. It’s more like texting in public than writing for the real web. A few years ago these social networks (and private messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp) started turning URLs into “preview cards”, which is much nicer than looking at an ugly raw URLs. But it’s not the web. It’s not writing — or reading — with the power of hyperlinks as an information-density multiplier. If anything, turning links into preview cards significantly decreases information density. That feels like a regression, not progress.

This is exactly right. Hyperlinks are so great because they allow people who want simply to read a story or an argument to do so unhindered by apparatus — but they also allow people who want to fact-check, or seek further information, to do so. As Gruber says, they provide “information density,” but in the least obtrusive way. You get to experience someone’s writing and then return for a deeper dive. That’s brilliant, and that’s perhaps the chief reason why, if all things were equal, I’d write only for the web.

All things are not equal, however. Maybe a subject for a later post.