[georgia_peach]

Everyone does the color-rays thing first, because that's the easy part. At the heart of his vision are several non-trivial, unsolved problems. Most of these are still non-trivial & unsolved. Instead of clearly identifying & expanding upon these problems, one-by-one, & posting a bounty, he blames his programmers. The man does not like programmers.

It is ridiculous. Going by the "Computer Lib" book, and when it was published, it's obvious that Ted knows enough about how computers work, and has had more than enough time to write the thing all by himself--if his only problems were programming ones.

In a way, I am glad he failed. A Google-scale Google is bad enough. Adding a Google-scale Elsevier into the mix is not a plus.

[Xanni]

In all fairness, there's a reason why Ted had a grudge against programmers, and he spelled it out in Computer Lib/Dream Machines. When he grew up, programmers were still generally the High Priests of the Machine, dressed in their business suits and working for the Man.

Also, Xanadu was always intended to be a federated network of individually owned backend servers, not a centralised network. So neither the Google nor the Elsevier model. The idea behind including micropayments was to attempt to encourage existing rightsholders to participate in the pre-granted permission transcoopyright ecosystem so that people can easily make remixes using the majority of our culture that is currently locked up, not just the portion of it available under permissive licences.

[georgia_peach]

They're still high priests of the machine, but now dressed in free t-shirts & warby parkers. I also dislike programmers, but they are the least of his problems.

Going by his own writings, his zealous consistency on trademark/copyright/credit, the limits of the technology (until blockchain) at the time... any micro-payments system coming out of that was destined to be more Lexis-Nexis than anything resembling decentralization, regardless of whatever Ted's intentions are.

And most of that "locked up" culture is garbage in the first place--the 100th starwars novel, the 25th tom clancy book, the latest nutrition or psychology paper that has been p-hacked to hell and back for the benefit of some commercial interest. Money doesn't attract creativity. Money attracts whores. So in addition to "SEO Experts" optimizing PageRank, we'd have Xanadu Experts gaming that system as well, and it would be just as full of garbage as Google is. Money would surely change hands, but to the pewds & mr beasts of XanaduSpace.